Ognjen Kraus

* 1945

  • "I don't know if I can say it, but I think the basic problem is in education because we have lost generations, and that is today's middle generation. These are people between the ages of 25 and 45 who know absolutely nothing about history because they were taught a false history of the events of the Second World War, and that is the main problem. We also talked about that yesterday. Mrs. Lustig rightly said that the problem is not the education of children and young people, but that there is no one to teach the young generation because they were taught false history."

  • "As for the commemoration itself, maybe it was my initiative, but let's not go into details... I can't go to the commemorations if we don't solve some issues, which is the issue of relativizing the Ustastvo and equating the partisan movement and the Ustastvo without legal provisions, which regarding signs and all other Ustasha symbols. Until then, I cannot agree to participate in commemorations when the state, i.e. the authorities, are not able to resolve it legally. Together with others, I tried to do something to put a new law on criminal procedure or punishment of such actions into the parliamentary procedure. Unfortunately, I have not succeeded so far. What particularly disappointed me was that even from the representatives of the victims of the racial laws, and we are talking about Roma and Serbs, I did not receive the satisfactory support in which this should have been done."

  • "What bothered me the most about this change was what we talked about a little while ago, which is the falsification of the past. I will never forget the first commission in the Parliament, which was established in 1992 or 1993 and was headed by Mr. Vice Vukojević, who later, needless to say, was a judge of the Constitutional Court and which came with the result that about 300 Jews perished in Jasenovac. When I started hearing such things, I asked myself where I was living. Denial of what happened... The worst thing is that what happened between 1941 and 1945 was thrown out of the schoolbooks. The equating of Ustasha and anti-fascism and the complete rewriting of history began. It is sad that today out of the fifty concentration camps that were established during the Independent State of Croatia, only a couple of them have been marked. These are Jasenovac, Jadovno, Stara Gradiška and two or three others. The Đakovo cemetery and the camp, which was of course in Đakovo itself... Today, a gas station was built where the plaque was, and the plaque was moved somewhere to the side. So everything is devalued and put in the back burner so that it is not discussed."

  • Celé nahrávky
Celé nahrávky jsou k dispozici pouze pro přihlášené uživatele.

... because we lost a generation, which is today‘s middle generation. These are people between 25 and 45 years old, who know absolutely nothing about history

Witness Ognjen Kraus in 2022
Witness Ognjen Kraus in 2022
zdroj: Photo by Dominik Janovský

Ognjen Kraus was born on October 4, 1945 in Zagreb in a Jewish family. His father escaped from Zagreb in the summer of 1941 and stayed in a labor camp in northwestern Italy until the capitulation of Italy. His mother was born in Slovenia, where she was arrested in 1941 as a left-leaning medical student and was also imprisoned in Italy until 1943. Then, they both go to Switzerland, where they meet and get married. After the end of the war, they start life in Zagreb. Ognjen Kraus graduated from the Classical High School and studied medicine and specialized in urology. He is the president of the Jewish Municipality of Zagreb and the Coordination of Jewish Municipalities in Croatia. He is the initiator of many important initiatives, the most important of which are those for the banning of the Ustasha greeting „Za dom spremni“ and the Ustasha insignia. Together with other important actors, he advocates an inclusive culture of memory, changing the exhibition in Jasenovac museum, opening an exhibition in the Yugoslav pavilion in the Auschwitz camp, and numerous other important topics, with the aim of more inclusive memory of the victims, presentation of historical facts, but also creating a better climate in society.