Jasenovac is a town, but it also is a former concentration camp on the Drava near Bosnia that is now a memorial to the tens of thousands of people who were put to death there during World War II. As you approach Jasenovac's outskirts, you'll see a tall, concrete sculpture that looks like an open tulip rising up from a huge empty field. Go past that and turn left at an unmarked road leading to a low, flat building 180m (600 ft.) ahead. That is the Jasenovac museum and visitor center and well worth a stop.

Jasenovac was the largest concentration camp in the Balkans and many of the more than 70,000 known victims are buried in mass graves on the premises and at the camp's other four "work sites." The museum and visitor center originally were built in the 1960s, but the facility was occupied by the Serbs during the Homeland War, and it took until November 2006 to recover the items that were stolen during the conflict and to install a permanent exhibit inside.

The current multimedia installation is quite moving, with numerous screens lighting up the dark corners of the black painted space. A continuous slide show of period photos from the camps, footage and audio of survivors talking about their experiences at Jasenovac, and news footage from the 1940s that covers the camps' story are the bulk of the presentation. Three computers are hooked up to the memorial's database and visitors can use them to search family names, events -- anything associated with Jasenovac. All captions are in Croatian and English and even the footage of survivor testimony is captioned in English. The ceiling is hung with clear acrylic panels engraved with the names of known Jasenovac victims, and artifacts belonging to them are displayed in glass cases throughout the memorial.

Outside, there is a path that leads to a huge stone memorial sculpture about .5km (1/4 mile) from the visitor center. The path meanders past several train cars that were used to transport detainees to the camp. The cars were a gift from Slovenia's railway. Along the way you will see models of what the camp looked like when it was operating between 1941 and 1955. The museum has five curators, including Ms. Ines Sogonic, who speaks English and who will be happy to answer your questions.

Tip: Take a penlight to aid in reading some of the captions. The memorial's database is now online and searchable. More than 75,000 victims have been identified by name.

For more information on the memorial, go to www.jusp-jasenovac.hr. For historical information, on Jasenovac, go to www.ushmm.org/jasenovac, a very impressive website authored and maintained by the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum.