At the end of May 1941, the first mass arrests took place in Zagreb. From June 1941, the NDH authorities established a network of almost thirty different concentration camps, some of which were transit and some death camps. From the middle of June, the camp system Gospić – Velebit – the island of Pag was established. After the numerous camps established in the first days of the NDH, from the fall of 1941, the newly founded Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška became the main camps, which operated until the end of the war. Most of the Jews from the NDH were killed there.
After the Wannsee conference in 1942, the Nazis began implementing the “Final Solution of the Jewish Question” (Endlösung der Judenfrage). Deportations to six camps in occupied Poland began: Belzec, Chełmno, Treblinka, Sobibor, Majdanek-Lublin and Auschwitz-Birkenau. Mass killings were carried out in these camps. The summer of 1942 was marked by ghetto evacuations and deportations from many countries under the occupation or control of the German Reich. The last big wave of deportation took place in May 1943. It included 1,200 Jews from Zagreb and the entire NDH area.
Dragica Vajnberger describes the first deportations from Zagreb, how she coped with it and what happened to her family and friends.