CONCENTRATION CAMP

The camp in Niš is one of the few remaining Nazi concentration camps. It bears witness to the suffering of the citizens of Niš and all of southern Serbia during the Second World War. Although at first glance the large building, located not far from the town's railway station, looks more like an old factory or warehouse of some kind, it is not. Everything here has remained unchanged, as if time had stood still in 1944: the gray, rectangular buildings where civilians were crammed together, the watchtowers and guardhouses, the intact barbed wire... During the war, more than 30,000 people passed through the camp, 10,000 of whom were shot on Bubanj Hill. At the beginning, the camp was intended to lock up, interrogate and torture the enemies of the regime: Serbian communists, hostages, gypsies and Jews. On February 12, 1942, a revolt broke out and more than a hundred prisoners managed to escape. The repression was ferocious: the remaining forty prisoners were butchered with a bestiality rarely seen until then, and the camp, called the Red Cross, became the death camp. A visit to the Skulls Tower and the Mediana is worthwhile, as is a visit to Niš.

On the hill of Bubanj, a monumental sculpture represents three huge closed fists. It honors the memory of the 15,000 prisoners shot by the Nazis on this hill, after having been in the jails of the Red Cross.