The dress notwithstanding, Judas’s story is hardly unique, explained Milan Radanovic, a historian working in the Serb community’s archives in Zagreb and author of three books on WWII in the former Yugoslavia.

Judas belonged to the group of so-called ‘Kozara children’, named after a mountainous region in today’s Bosnia and Herzegovina that was ‘cleansed’ of all inhabitants in the summer of 1942 by Nazi and Ustasa soldiers.

“Children were interned, usually with their mothers and siblings, originally in the Jasenovac camp complex and its secondary locations, where they remained for several weeks or months in the open, exposed to rain and sun, surrounded by wire and armed guards,” Radanovic told BIRN.

Interning children was part of a strategy to prevent resistance from the Communist Partisans, he said.

“Cleansing the region of the population was considered a part of the counter-Partisan strategy by both Nazis and Ustasa. They wanted to make sure that local peasants wouldn’t serve as support for the resistance movement,” he explained.

“The racist and chauvinist policies of the Ustasa regime played a key part in the levels of the brutality of this internment,” he added.

The reported high death toll of interned women and children, as well as news of the brutality that they endured, caused some stir in Zagreb.

One of the people moved to action was Diana Budisavljevic, an Austrian married to a Croatian doctor, who pleaded with the Church as well as with the German military authorities to spare the Kozara children.

In her diary, written during the war but not published until 2003, Budisavljevic chronicled her often unsuccessful attempts to provide humanitarian help to the children.

Through her connections to the remains of the Jewish and Serb communities in Zagreb, but also Nazi and Ustasa functionaries and Church dignitaries, she strived fearlessly to organise the distribution of food and clothes to the malnourished women and children in fascist camps. However, the aid was usually stolen by the authorities before any of the prisoners received it.

After many of the mothers captured in the Ustasa’s ‘pacification campaigns’ were transferred to Germany to work as slaves – including as sex slaves – their children were left alone in the camps.

“The poor little dead bodies were just left on the stairs, even their clothes were taken from them… Others were waiting to be transferred, constantly sitting on their chamber pots… their bowels hanging and full of flies…” Budisavljevic wrote in July 1942. This gruesome description of a combination of malnutrition, parasite infection and intestinal disease betrays sincere shock at the conditions in which the children were held.

The veracity of Budisavljevic’s story is generally not disputed, even if it clearly provides evidence against the Ustasa government and the claims that it was dedicated to saving the children.

One episode in her diary is particularly striking. When infamous Ustasa commander Max Luburic arrived at the camp in Stara Gradiska, he was so furious at people attempting to alleviate the suffering of the children that he threatened to make them “disappear”.

On the same day, children were brought out of the camp with the promise of food after days of starvation, then dressed in mock Ustasa uniforms, forced to do fascist salutes while being filmed, and finally left without any nourishment again.

The stories told in Budisavljevic’s diary form the basis of a documentary film called ‘Diana’s List’, made by young film-maker Dana Budisavljevic, a distant relation, which premiered in July and received multiple awards at the Pula Film Festival, the most prestigious festival of its kind in the country.

But Diana Budisavljevic is not primarily known for her attempts to provide food and clothes to internees, nor for the crimes that she witnessed. During the summer of 1942, she organised what she called an ‘action’ to save the children from the camps.

Using her status as the citizen of the Reich, she pleaded mercilessly with the Church and local authorities to take responsibility for the child internees. Grudgingly, they seemed to cave in, which led to further transfers from the camps and finally to a campaign of adoption.

Although Budisavljevic in her diary frequently despaired about the unwillingness of these institutions to help the children, the fact that control over the orphans formally passed from the military to the church and social authorities in August 1942 is often used as ‘proof’ of the benevolence of the church, and occasionally even the Ustasa regime itself.

Nikica Baric, a historian from the Croatian Institute of History in Zagreb, is particularly dissatisfied with the prominent role that has been given to Diana Budisavljevic lately. He has claimed, citing Ustasa documents, that it is quite clear that none on her work to save the children could have been done without the significant participation of the Ustasa themselves.

“If some journalists, commentators and politicians think that Diana Budisavljevic, secretly and against the will of the state, saved 12,000 Serb children, that makes no sense. It’s not 12 boxes of matches to be ‘hidden’ from the Ustasa,” Baric claimed in an interview with the far-right weekly Hrvatski tjednik in 2017.

“There are numerous documents that show how the Ustasa government participated [in the saving of children],” he added.

It could be argued, however, that it takes an amazing stretch of imagination to call the imprisonment of children after murdering their civilian parents because of their ethnicity an act of kindness. But that doesn’t seem to deter some people from doing so.

Changing children’s identities