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Memorial event in Sisak. Photo: Tamara Opacic.

The remembrance event was held on Saturday at the children’s graveyard in Sisak, the burial place for many of at least 1,600 young victims who died at the detention camp, mostly from illness, exhaustion and malnutrition.

“Entering the camp was like a death club in which anarchy and madness ruled, where you could hear only screams, crying and pain,” Dobrila Kukolj, who was imprisoned in Sisak after she was captured by the Ustasa and the Nazis in July 1942 at the age of 11, told the ceremony.

Branko Lustig, an Auschwitz survivor who became a Hollywood producer and won an Oscar for ‘Schindler’s List’, also attended the ceremony.

“We had a similar treatment [in Auschwitz] as children in the Ustasa-German camp in Sisak,” said the Croatian-born Lustig.

“They had doctor [Antun] Najzer [the camp’s commander], we had the infamous doctor Mengele,” he said.

A total of 6,693 Serb, Jewish and Roma children, some only a few months old, were held at the camp from August 1942 until January 1943.

The commemoration was organised by the Serbian National Council, an NGO dealing with Serb minority rights in Croatia.

The council’s president, Milorad Pupovac condemned the Nazi-allied Ustasa regime for imprisoning innocent children.

“There was a state which was based on the idea that children were separated from their parents, tortured with starvation and diseases and finally killed,” Pupovac said.