Study visit to Rakov Potok Memorial with university students

Yesterday, together with a group of students from the Faculty of Political Science and the Department of History at the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences in Zagreb, we visited the Rakov Potok memorial site as well as the Dotrščina memorial park. A smaller group of students from Pristina also joined the students from the University of Zagreb.

This was the first time we organized a visit to Rakov Potok, the second largest mass execution site in Zagreb during the Second World War, which today is in very poor condition and almost inaccessible. Despite its current state, the visit was very important, as it marked the first in a series of activities we will carry out around this location within the ReMEMBER Europe project, with the goal of rescuing it from oblivion.

The students had the opportunity to hear a short presentation about the historical context of Croatia in the Second World War, as well as about the Rakov Potok site itself. After that, they visited the monument and the memorial ossuary at Rakov Potok, to gain their own impressions of the site’s significance but also of its present condition. They then took part in a guided tour through the Dotrščina memorial forest, the largest mass execution site in Zagreb during the Second World War. After both visits, we held a discussion about their impressions, about memorialization in Yugoslavia and in Croatia during the 1990s, and about the importance of remembrance and commemoration of the victims today.

Afterwards, the students worked in small groups on the biographies of four selected victims executed at Rakov Potok – Krešo Rakić, Dragica Hotko, Marija Habulin, and Rudolf Domany. Through guiding questions, they discussed the reasons why these individuals joined the resistance movement, why they were arrested and executed, as well as the dynamics of remembering or forgetting the victims in the past and today. Special emphasis was placed on the values citizens need in order to be active, and on the importance of remembrance and the impact of memorialization on societies and individuals today.

At the end of the program, the students shared their impressions, thoughts, and feelings with the organizers during the final evaluation round.

This activity was carried out within the framework of the “ReMEMBER Europe” project, financed by the European Union through the CERV program, European Remembrance.