“Diana’s children”

Australian Serbian Cultural Foundation will organise its annual commemoration and education event in honour and remembrance of WWII Holocaust and genocide victims in former Yugoslavia. This year’s commemoration is dedicated to the children victims of Ustasha (Fascist Croatian Government and Army) terror and the ones who sacrificed their lives to save them. As part of the program will be screened a documentary “Diana’s children”, produced by Slađana Zarić who will be joining the spectators on the evening via digital media as a special guest speaker.

Дијанина деца-Dijana's Children Source: Poster

 

When: Sunday, June 9, 2019 at 2 PM – 5 PM

Where: Serbian Community Hall, Crn Nicholson St & Glenlyon Rd, Brunswick East VIC

Documentary film titled “Diana’s Children” is a story of a woman who saved more than 7,500 Serbian children from the Ustashi concentration camp Jasenovac in the Independent State of Croatia. Diana Obexer Budisavljević, an Austrian woman marred to a Serb, organised the largest relief operation for saving children in World War II.

Diana Obekser Budisavljević was an Austrian lady married in Zagreb to a Serbian surgeon Julijo Budisavljević. After the war Zagreb communist regime saw that the large portion of Diana’s files disappear. Slađana Zarić’s recent exhibition and film “Diana’s children”, presented what was saved out of the records which were kept to preserve the identities of the children Diana saved.

A German Oskar Schindler saved the lives of more than 1,000 Polish Jews. Irena Sendler organised a campaign to rescue approximately 2,500 Jewish children from the Warsaw ghetto, and Diana Budisavljević saved more than 7,500 Serbian children from certain death. On the grounds of Jasenovac Camp Complex, the largest of its kind in the Balkans, 19,433 Serbian, Jewish and Roma children were killed.

“Diana’s Children” is a story of compassionate people in the hardest of times.

The documentary film “Diana’s Children” was filmed in Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Austria and Serbia. It features former inmates of Jasenovac and eminent historians and scholars of the World War II period. Every one of Diana’s children was found in the available documents and files of Diana Budisavljević, which made it possible to tell the story of this relief campaign through very different fates of these former little inmates.