Domovina Urednistvo
If for a moment I ignore the obviously nasty intentions in the groundless runaway rant against the integrity of an honourable human being and a world-renowned scientist dr. Esther Gitman, who, with her scientific research and books opened a worldwide window to the good works of Croatia’s Blessed Alojzije Stepinac (and hundreds of other Croats) during the Second World War and restored significantly to the rightful place the severely and unfairly damaged name of the Independent State of Croatia/NDH and the Croatian people, the interview conducted by journalist and chief editor Mr. Ivica Marijacic with dr. Blanka Matkovic, published in “Hrvatski tjednik” (Croatian Weekly) on October 24, 2024, in my opinion, knowingly or unknowingly misleads the public in some matters that I intend to refer to here. It is to the credit of dr. Esther Gitman’s historical research into the rescue of Jews in the World War Two Independent State of Croatia that Croatia and all Croats could no longer be labelled under one and the same stereotype and I talk about this further on here.
(I am grateful to Mr Ivica Marijacic for publishing this reaction of mine to that 24 October interview in the 7 November 2024 issue of Croatian Weekly (Hrvatski Tjednik) and will, therefore, translate it here into English.)
This interview reminds me of a scenario where two grown people are sitting in a giant crib rattling their keyboards against the railing of that crib – demanding attention. Given that, most likely without their knowledge, Mr. Marijacic and dr. Matkovic, I found myself personally affected by this interview, it is my duty to correct the deception and the extremely unfair labelling of dr. Gitman in public and react to the same. (Politics behind anyone’s similar rants against another person are not interesting for me but truth is and all deserve to have the benefit of it.)
In a salad of terms, false labels and unfounded statements against dr. Gitman, all seasoned with obvious personal bitterness and childish callousness, dr. Blanka Matkovic tells the Croatian public (and supposedly all who will listen) in this interview that dr. Gitman did not deserve the honorary doctorate awarded to her by the University of Split (2019). It was clear to me at least from the published text that neither she nor Mr. Ivica Marijacic most likely do not know the details of why the University of Split, i.e. its competent scientific bodies, made the decision to award that honorary doctorate to dr. Esther GItman! Then, dr. Matkovic asks, I guess to herself, something like a childish question as to why she (Matkovic) is not a recipient of any honorary doctorate, and she claims that, in connection with the work on the history of Stepinac, Ivan Gabelica is much more deserving than Gitman! The only comment on this could be that I guess there have not been people who had evaluated the work of dr. Blanka Matkovic or Ivana Gabelica as deserving of such high honour to embark upon sending to the university a request or application for this, because the university itself, that is, the Rector, does not initiate or justify requests to their university for the award of an honorary doctorate. The scientific councils of the university decide and recommend the award of an honorary doctorate to the university if, in their opinion, the explanation for it found in the Application deserves such a high recognition. By checking the university’s rules, which are public, it is easy to come to such a conclusion, which dr. Matkovic could have done before spilling vitriol against dr. Gitman.
Regarding the honorary doctorate awarded to dr. Gitman, dr. Matkovic, and Mr. Marijacic, through the subtitles and designed questions in the text of the interview, impute that communist forces, forces close to the ruling Croatian Democratic Union/HDZ, i.e. non-Croatian dark forces, initiated and awarded this honorary doctorate for the purpose of realising some ostensibly Yugoslav Intelligence Services’/ UDBa’s plans to separate Blessed Stepinac from the Croatian state and thus denigrate the Croatian people!
With the reality and fact being completely different in psychology such a plot would normally be called a symptom of a pathological delusion. I am a psychologist and very experienced in clinical psychology, so I have the necessary professional credibility to be able to draw such parallels.
It is obvious to me that for Ivica Marijacic, i.e. according to Croatian Weekly and dr. Blanka Matkovic, this honorary doctorate serves as solid proof that dr. Esther Gitman is a personification some kind of an evil plan or project of black forces! And the subtitle in that interview reads; “The goal of the Gitman project is the same as the UDBa plan.” “The Gitman project has a clear goal: to separate Stepinac, that is, the man who declared before the communist court that he would be nothing if he did not feel for the Croatian people who voted for the Croatian state in a plebiscite, from the idea of the Croatian state…” claimed in the interview Mr. Marijacic and Dr. Matkovic! And, to make matters even more preposterous, they accuse dr. Esther Gitman of undefined UDBa, anti-Croatian leanings because she said in her speech at the awarding of an honorary doctorate that “Stepinac loved his people!” According to their calculation, it turns out that she deliberately did not say that Stepinac loved his country NDH (instead of his people)! From this comes the conclusion that they (Marijacic and Matkovic) may also want to push the thesis that different people, with different activities, urges and hopes, did not live in the NDH; that within the NDH, individuals from all the forces involved (both Ustashi and Communist) in the war did not engage in activities that should be condemned according to today’s values of civilisation. Every child probably knows that by definition a state is a concept of a political community in itself, and the state is not a nation or a people, although it may contain one nation, parts of different nations or several entire nations.
The following is inserted in large and bold letters among the text of that interview: “The goal of the project of the fake scientist Esther Gitman is the same as the plan of UDBa: to separate Stepinac from the idea of the Croatian state! It is a real shame to say that she is a scientist because she, like Dara from Jasenovac, preaches Great Serbian myths and communist propaganda, moreover, she invents and deceives, but the fake right-wingers in Croatia welcomed her as a queen. The statements of the Rector in Split, dr. Dragan Ljutic and Msgr. Marin Barisic”.
But nothing could be further from the truth. And the question arises why!? Why produce such misconceptions about people and, at the end of the day, about people who only produced high-quality work for the Croatian truth!?
“With her statement, she (Gitman) directly separates the people from the state and, moreover, accuses the collective of stigma, that is, not the communist regime but the collective, i.e. the Croatian people, along the way channelling Stepinac’s emotions in the afterlife like a psychic, and all this in the premises of the Split-Makarska archdiocese,” Matkovic obviously convinces herself that she is right when she says that the honorary doctorate for Gitman was set up, initiated by people who are not faviourably inclined towards a Croatian mood, communists and those close to HDZ. In that interview, she talks about some photos from the event of awarding of Esther Gitman’s honorary doctorate, and although she does not mention the names of the people in the photo it is not difficult to conclude from her loud rant and evident bitter jealousy are most likely talking about the Rector of the University of Split, dr. Dragan Ljutic and Archbishop Msgr. Marin Barisic, and maybe dr. Zeljko Tanjic, Rector of the Croatian Catholic University, as the dishonourable, politically motivated initiators of that honorary doctorate. It seems that dr. Matkovic has lost the compass of truth and humanity here, because asserting such serious things that bring honourable people down and discredit experts and academic colleagues is vitriol that we rarely come across.
I remember about a year ago in the Roman Bolkovic TV show “One on one” that Bishop Jovan Ćulibrk from the Serbian Orthodox Church attached the label “Gitman plan” to dr Esther GItman, which, according to his twisted mind, was thought up by politically powerful people – to make Stepinac look good, better from the Croatian people! In this interview that is the subject of this article dr. Matkovic and Mr. Marijacic only replaced the word “plan” with the word “project”, completely ignoring the fact that dr. Gitman was an independent researcher who started researching the rescue of Jews in the Independent State of Croatia/NDH during the Second World War because she herself was saved from certain death (a Holocaust survivor) as a child and she wanted to know who those people were that saved the Jews and why some Jews were saved and others were not. In her research, she accidentally came across documents related to Blessed Alojzije Stepinac and continued this line of research as well. Her research reveals hundreds of other people who rescued or participated in the rescue of Jews within the NDH during World War Two.
So, I thought that I would never need to reveal to the public that my organisation, the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Arts in the Diaspora and the Homeland (HAZUDD), was the body that initiated and composed the application to the University of Split to award dr. Esther Gitman an honorary doctorate. I personally, as the vice-president of HAZUDD, was the person who drew up that application in March 2019 and presented the reasons why dr. Gitman deserves such a high recognition in Croatia. dr. Josip Stjepandic, as the president of HAZUDD, reviewed my text and commented where it was necessary. When I completed that application, I contacted dr. Matko Marusic, a well-known university professor of medicine, scientist and author of several books and numerous scientific papers and asked him to send me the email addresses and contacts of the Scientific Committee or Council to which I should send the Application, and he obliged. He expressed great support and joy towards that initiative. This request or application for the award of an honorary doctorate was supported by the Croatian Catholic University in Zagreb and others. A special reception and press conference on the day of the awarding of the honorary doctorate to dr. Esther Gitman was organised with great pride by the then incoming Archbishop of the Split-Makarska archdiocese, Msgr. Marin Barisic! All these people can be seen in the photos that dr. Blanka Matkovic writes about in the interview in a light in which one can only see a kind of ad hominem attack on people who, during the awarding of the honorary doctorate to dr. Gitman with a lot of pride performed their duty of workplace and support for this initiative, which shows dr. Gitman’s brilliant work achievement at the world level and her commitment to spreading the goodness of hundreds and hundreds of Croatian men and women in saving Jews and others at the time when such undertakings meant danger and peril to those who embarked upon saving Jews.
The truth itself absolutely refutes this thesis of some kind of “Gitman project” that Matkovic and Marijacic tried to promote. That is, the truth is in the fact that one of the reasons why dr. Esther Gitman received an honorary doctorate lies in her research that produced the opposite effects of what they promote and concoct, and in the fact that HAZUDD’s Application for the award of that honorary doctorate explained and elaborated on her enormous merit:
“…Given that research of the Holocaust developed around the world after World War II as one of the most important areas of research for the past and future of humanity, the scientific work by dr. Esther Gitman is raised to a particularly high level precisely because it was innovative. Innovative in that she researched the rescue of Jews, not the extermination, as is the case with the topic of the Holocaust most of the researchers of the history of the Second World War worked and are working on. Putting the rescue of Jews, not extermination, as her central theme, dr. Gitman, at the same time, restores the damaged name of NDH and Croatian people to the right light through her work. That is, that name can no longer be stereotypical, and which stereotype had no place for saving lives and human rights within the NDH.” ( Ina Vukić, quote from the Application for the Award of an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Split to dr. Esther Gitman, March 2019) (see the attached photo of the first page of the Application for an Honorary Doctorate)
Furthermore, dr. Matkovic and Mr. Marijacic label in the interview dr. Esther Gitman a “fake scientist”, and this would seem to have arisen out of pure malice or some unclear political urges because dr. Gitman is no fake. On the contrary, dr Gitman is as a genuine scientist and reputable historian as one can come across. She holds a scientific doctorate (PhD) in addition to the honorary one. It seems that to dr. Matkovic it is strange and suspicious, to say the least, that Esther Gitman studied and defended her scientific doctorate at a later age in her life (60)! I have always thought that this is something to be commended, and I know a lady from Zagreb who recently defended her doctorate at the age of 74, and I think that is very honourable. In that interview, there are numerous other statements and comments by dr. Blanka Matkovic and I would not like to talk about that here, except that, summa summarum, they are making an obviously unbridled and orchestrated attempt to destroy a historian who has certainly achieved more in spreading the Croatian truth on a global scale than she (Matkovic) herself, or many others for that matter. If dr. Blanka Matkovic really believes that the contribution of dr. Esther Gitman is not that good and that she is a “fake scientist”, let her (Matkovic) write her own 300-page study on how the rescue of Jews in the NDH actually went. If such a study were to pass domestic and foreign peer review, HAZUDD would be happy to cover the printing costs for the first 500 copies and write a proposal for an honorary doctorate. Ina Vukic
