A memorial museum devoted to Macedonian Jews who were victims of the Holocaust during World War II has been opened in the capital Skopje.

The inauguration ceremony was marked by the symbolical placing of three urns with ashes of Macedonian Jews killed in the Treblinka concentration camp in Poland, where 7,148 lost their lives after being deported there in 1943.

The urns were carried by Macedonian soldiers who marched through the centre of Skopje followed by several hundred people. “The lessons of the Holocaust in your country must serve as an early warning system to those of your neighbours where anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial are resurgent,” Shimon Samuel of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre said at the ceremony.

The memorial centre, built in an area once populated by the Jewish community, was inaugurated in the presence of Macedonian President George Ivanov, Israeli Deputy Prime Minister Moshe Ya’Alon and officials and diplomats from neighbouring countries.

“The only surviving member of the 81-strong Misrahi family was my father,” Viktor Misrahi, one of the rare survivors, said.

“Today, the ashes of our people were brought back here from Treblinka and they will remain here, at their home,” he added.

Only some 200 Jews live in Macedonia today, most of them in Skopje.

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In 1941, some 78,000 Jews lived in Yugoslavia, including about 4,000 foreign or stateless Jews who had found refuge in the country during the 1930s. Although Yugoslavia had reluctantly joined the Axis alliance with Germany, the Yugoslav government was toppled by an anti-German military coup on March 27, 1941. Nazi Germany invaded the Balkan nations of Yugoslavia and Greece in early April 1941. Supported militarily by her Axis allies (Italy, Bulgaria, Hungary and Romania), Germany quickly subdued the Balkans. Yugoslavia was partitioned among the Axis allies. Bulgaria annexed Yugoslav Macedonia (the area including the cities of Skopje and Bitola in southern Yugoslavia).

On October 4, 1941, the Bulgarians enforced an extraordinary measure that prohibited the Jews of Macedonia from engaging in any type of industry or commerce.

All existing Jewish businesses had three months to transfer ownership to non-Jews or sell their assets and close down. In addition, a law that barred Jews from certain areas of town was enforced in Monastir in late 1941. Jews who lived in the more prosperous part of Monastir, located on the east side of the Dragor River, were forced to move to a poorer part of town located near the traditional Jewish quarter on the west side, and this area became the ghetto.