By unveiling this monument, the work of sculptor Dalibor Stošić and architect Krešimir Rogina, the city of Zagreb commemorates the victims of the Holocaust.
From the end of the Second World War until the idea of erecting this monument, several monuments dedicated only to the victims of the Holocaust were discovered in public space, but as “victims of fascism” or “fighters against fascism and victims of fascism” and often without any indication that they were Jews. In Croatia, even today, in public discussion, and sometimes not even in historiography, the Ustasha terror is not distinguished from the Holocaust, as a global historical event that affected almost all European and North African Jews and that in the end almost destroyed European Jewish civilization, and the perpetrators of which were the Nazis and their allies and collaborators, including Ustashas.
The monument is certainly the first step towards a central place in Croatia where the victims of the Holocaust would be commemorated, both on the territory of the NDH, as well as Croatian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust, in Croatian areas that were not under the rule of the NDH, but also those Croatian Jews who were killed elsewhere.
The inscription on the monument reads: “In memory of the victims of the Holocaust and the Ustasha regime” and “around 800 Zagreb Jews were deported from this place in August 1942 to the Nazi camp Auschwitz in Croatian, Hebrew and English.
Despite the inscription that mentions the victims of only one of the numerous deportations of Jews from the NDH territory to Auschwitz-Birkenau, one in August 1942, because it started from that very place (as opposed to the more inclusive "In memory of Croatian Jews and those who during the Second World War were under the rule of the NDH, victims of the Holocaust"), this monument represents a potential central place of remembrance of the wider society of its former neighbors along with the Day of Remembrance of the Victims of the Holocaust, which is memorialized on 27 January, the day of the liberation of the concentration and death camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.