 Born to Jewish parents at a concentration camp in Italy in 1944 and later orphaned, Mandić was adopted in Belgrade by a Serb family in 1945.The society has been criticised in some quarters for allegedly promoting a revisionist view of the roles of Jews and Serbs as equal victims and sufferers of persecution.In 1992, Mandić gave the American Jewish press a controversial account of Croatian forces killing a sixty-seven-year-old Jewish woman named Ankica Konjuh.