A Researcher in the Role of a Journalist Who Spent Two Years in the Shoes of Anti-Semites, Neo-Ustashas, and Neo-Nazis

Ilija Calina
8 hours ago
5 min read

Ilija Ćalina conducted 501 interviews across 43 locations. Not a single one disavowed the Ustasha salute. His findings are now out in English.

ZAGREB — On a Saturday evening, in July 2025, half a million people gathered at a Marko Perković Thompson concert and chanted "Za dom spremni" — a rallying cry historically inseparable from the Ustasha regime that ran a Nazi puppet state from 1941 to 1945. Families came. Children came. Grandfathers were bused in from across the country. Austrian authorities would later prosecute their own citizens who crossed the border to attend the concert.

Inside Croatia, the salute remains legal. Outside Croatia, it is treated as a Nazi gesture. The difference between Berlin and Zagreb is the subject of the book 501 — Interviews with Anti-Semites, Ustashe, and Neo-Nazis, a 291-page field investigation that the Serbian-Croatian researcher Ilija Ćalina — Doctor of Economic Sciences and theologian with a degree from the Institute for Orthodox Christian Studies in Cambridge — published this June on Amazon.

For two years, between 2023 and 2025, Ćalina sat across from 501 self-proclaimed defenders of the Ustasha legacy — not in militant cells, but in cafés, at memorial liturgies, in veterans' associations, at public gatherings where, as he says, "people were not hiding. They felt at home. The state had given them the space to feel that way."

The findings are stark. Of the 501 respondents, each individual one defended the Ustasha salute "Za dom spremni." 97.2 percent denied or minimized Jasenovac, the death camp in which between 1941 and 1945 tens of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Roma were killed. Sixty-three percent carry Serbian origin on at least one side of the family tree.

That last figure is what Ćalina calls the "mechanism" of contemporary denial. "Those who most loudly hate the Serbs — in most cases hate their own grandfathers," he writes in the foreword. "That is not a paradox. That is a mechanism."

The project of one returnee

Ćalina (41) is not a Croatian outsider. He was born in 1985 to a family with deep roots in the Lika region of central Croatia. He spent thirty years in exile in Novi Sad and London before returning, several years ago, to restore his grandfather's homestead in the Serbian village of Blata, municipality of Saborsko, near the Plitvice Lakes. The book is, in part, a returnee's reckoning with what his ancestral land has become.

The project began almost by chance. After his return, Ćalina founded Manjina Media, a small Zagreb media company, and quickly placed himself outside the Zagreb-oriented political establishment. "I am not a leftist," he says. "I openly criticized the work of Novosti, the only Serbian weekly in Croatia, for what I saw as deliberate provocation of Croatian war veterans and the right wing."

During a protest in front of the editorial office of Novosti, he met the president of an association of Croatian war veterans of the Orthodox faith — Croats of Serbian origin who fought for Croatia in the war of 1991–1995. The friendship that followed, says Ćalina, was an attempt to understand a question that had been haunting him: why does hatred toward Serbs in Croatia today seem more dangerous than at the end of the war itself?

By the end of the investigation, he had documented 89 public events — concerts, religious gatherings, memorial ceremonies, association meetings — at 43 locations in 20 Croatian counties. He attended each one openly, never in disguise. He simply listened, asked neutral questions, and recorded what people say when they assume he is one of them.

The salute, the death camp, and Praška 7

Three threads run through the book.

The first is the salute. "Za dom spremni" is no longer, in Ćalina's documentation, the rhetorical remnant of a defeated regime. It is a legal greeting in Croatia, chanted by hundreds of thousands at sold-out concerts, worn as a tattoo, used as a closing line in speeches at veterans' gatherings. Austria has prosecuted the same gesture as a Nazi crime. Germany would too. Croatia has not.

The second is Jasenovac. Of Ćalina's 501 interlocutors, not one accepts the documented number of victims of the Ustasha camp. The denial takes various forms — from complete rejection ("it never existed") to the language of comparative belittlement ("a hotel with three stars," as one interlocutor called it). The book includes concrete case studies: the massacre at the Glina church in August 1941, when 1,764 Serbs were killed inside an Orthodox church into which the Ustashas had lured them under the pretext of mass conversion. The building today is called Croatian Home. It is used as a community center.

The third thread is one Zagreb address: Praška 7. The location of the main city synagogue, demolished in 1941. For eighty-five years the parcel has remained untouched. On May 27, 2026 — only a few weeks before the publication of the book — the Zagreb City Assembly finally voted on its fate. Ćalina's book, which had documented the long silence, found itself published in the middle of a moment of movement.

"The path can be changed," he says. "That, too, is the subject of this book — not only the diagnosis of the problem, but the document of a moment when things can be broken."

What the conversations revealed

The book is structured as 25 chapters, five academic case studies, and a complete list of all 501 respondents, identified only by sex, age, and county. Each interview header marks a place — Imotski, Šibenik, Knin, Osijek, the islands of Pag and Hvar, the Slavonian plains rich in diaspora. Geography is the point: denial is not isolated to one region. It is distributed across the country, in all Croatian counties.

Some chapters read like firsthand scenes. In Chapter 25, Krivi Put: Prayer in a Cursed Place, Ćalina visits the birthplace of the parents of Ante Pavelić and conducts his 501st interview at that location. In Chapter 19, he travels to the island of Pag, where the Ustashas ran the Slana concentration camp twenty kilometers from beaches that today host European tourists. "Seven young people," he writes, "had never heard of the camp."

In Chapter 15, a survivor from the Ovčara massacre of 1991 explains why he forgives Franjo Tuđman for sacrificing Vukovar in order to gain American support. "I understand," he says to Ćalina. "And that frightens me."

In Chapter 18, Ćalina documents the rise of antisemitic protests in Zagreb after Hamas's attack on Israel of October 7, 2023 — including a banner with the inscription "Hitler did not finish his job."

The cost

The research had personal consequences. During the project, Ćalina lost his deacon's rank in the Serbian Orthodox Church — a sanction for an incident in Knin, on the anniversary of Operation Storm, where he was photographed in clerical attire while lighting a candle for civilian victims of the war. He accepted the church's decision, withdrew from clerical duties, and remained, as he himself says, "a faithful child of the Serbian Orthodox Church."

Why now

501 comes out in English exactly when the geography it documents is beginning to change. The Zagreb vote on Praška 7 of May 27. The Austrian indictments. A new generation of Croatian eighteen-year-olds who, as Ćalina discovered, "automatically respond Spremni! when prompted, without fully knowing what they are responding to."

The book is a field record, not a polemic. "This is not an indictment, however much some have read it that way," Ćalina writes. "This is what one researcher could do, alone, with a notebook, and with the will to sit across from those whose names history has not yet learned to call by their proper word."

501 — Interviews with Anti-Semites, Ustashe, and Neo-Nazis by Ilija Ćalina is available in paperback and Kindle eBook on Amazon.