The Serbian New Martyrs of the Second World War
The bishops, priests and lay faithful of the Serbian Church killed in the persecution of 1941–45 in the Independent State of Croatia, among them the martyrs of the Jasenovac camp, whose collective commemoration is kept on August 31.
Between 1941 and 1945 the Serbian Church in the Independent State of Croatia lost bishops, hundreds of priests and a great number of lay faithful to a persecution aimed at the Orthodox population as such. Bishop Platon of Banja Luka was seized in May 1941, tortured and thrown into the Vrbas; Bishop Savva Trlajić of Gornji Karlovac was taken with priests of his diocese; Metropolitan Peter of Dabar-Bosnia was tortured and killed; the priest Branko Dobrosavljević was made to read the funeral service over his own son before he was killed with him.
Among the laity the Church remembers Vukašin of Klepci, an old man of Herzegovina brought to the Jasenovac camp, of whom the account preserved by a surviving physician relates that under torture he said nothing but "Just do your job, my child." The martyrs of that camp are commemorated together on August 31; Metropolitan Joanikije of Montenegro, killed in 1945, is numbered with the witnesses of the same years.
Their glorifications came late — most of them in 1998 and after — because the state that followed the war had no interest in the counting. The synaxis gathers a persecution that is still being documented, and its roster will grow as the Church names more of the dead.