Family Monument - Victims of the Novi Sad Raid
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The Family monument commemorates victims of the January 1942 Novi Sad Raid.
For three days, Hungarian occupation forces searched homes, arrested civilians and carried out killings. Many victims were taken to the frozen Danube, shot and thrown into the water or through holes in the ice.
The city memorial ceremonies explicitly name the murdered as including Serbs, Jews and Roma, with women, children and elderly people among the victims.
Numbers vary across institutions and according to geographic scope. Some figures refer to Novi Sad alone; others include the wider southern Bačka raids. NarRoam therefore avoids giving one apparently precise total without definition.
The memorial's family grouping is effective because it rejects the occupation authorities' claim that this was a narrow operation against armed enemies. Families were targeted.
The event also belongs to the Holocaust history of Hungarian-occupied Yugoslavia, especially through the murder of Jewish civilians.
Later Hungarian judicial proceedings investigated and prosecuted some perpetrators, while several escaped and political circumstances complicated accountability.
Commemoration today involves Serbian, Jewish and Hungarian representatives, which matters. Historical responsibility is not inherited biologically by present-day citizens; public memory can acknowledge crime without turning it into permanent ethnic accusation.
Stand facing the Danube.
This river will carry us to Petrovaradin next. The crossing moves from a site where state violence used geography for murder to a fortress where earlier empires used the same geography for defence.
No transition in Novi Sad is innocent.