No. 124

STATEMENT OF SREĆKO ŽIVANOVIĆ FROM REPOVAC, BRATUNAC MUNICIPALITY, GIVEN ON APRIL 11, 1942, ON THE USTASHA MASS KILLINGS OF SERBS ON THE DRINA RIVER.^[1]

1 . [ource] Kostić, 25 April 42^[2]

STATEMENT

Srećko Živanović, a peasant from Repovac, Bratunac Municipality, Srebrenica District, Bosnia, 39 years old, a Serb, who in the village of Bačevci, on 11 April 1942, stated:

On April 8, rumors spread about the Ustasha incursion, which were reinforced by shooting and fire in which the village of Kravice^[3] vanished.

Panic-stricken, our villagers fled to the bank of the Drina. Women and children and cattle were to be transferred first, and we, the men, in the end.

On the 9th of this month, at around 2 p.m., a truck with about 30 armed men dressed in black appeared at the crossing point. At that moment, there were about 80 women, children and the elderly on the bank, completely unarmed, who were shot at by people from the vehicle, regardless of the fact that these were women and children and regardless of the fact that we raised our hands in surrender. In the meantime, two more trucks came with men dressed in black, who joined the shooting. When I saw the killing of women and children, I hid in the thicket on the bank. After the shooting stopped, the Ustashas began searching the area. When I saw that they would find me, I got up and shouted to them with raised hands: “I surrender”. Despite all that, an Ustasha shot at me and a woman standing next to me.

There was a boat full of children and women on the bank. The Ustashas overturned it, so that everyone who was in it drowned. The children and women, who were still holding on to the overturned boat, were shot by the Ustashas from the bank, so that they sank, too.

As the Ustashas took me to the bank, they beat me fiercely with rifle butts. I and an old man Vladimir Đukanović, the Mayor of Bjelovac, Vojin Grujić and his son Vojislav, together with his wife, were driven from the river to the village of Bjelovac. We were further beaten there. With the fiercest curses to the Serbian king, his mother, Gypsies, Nedić, Dangić and Račić, we were beaten. “You want to escape across the Drina to Nedić, do you think that we cannot get to you in Serbia?” one of them asked me.

Another one asked me if I was a Communist and when I answered that I was not, he hit me with the handle of his pistol, cursed fiercely and said: “So you are a Chetnik, do you see the one in the corner, he is also a Serb, but he is a better Serb than you. He is a Communist and he is fighting against you Chetniks together with us.” I really saw an armed civilian in the corner. “Do you want to cross, to go to Nedić?”, said a third man, “we will cross over to Serbia soon, and remember, not even a single child in the cradle will stay alive there.”

I was released upon the intervention of Hasan Fendić, the new Mayor of Bratunac, but when I realized that they were persecuting me and that they were looking for me at home, I fled to Serbia to save my life. My children and my three children, who remained in the village, have most likely been killed.

I can swear on this statement. Srećko Živanović

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 412-413.

^[2] Handwritten note.

^[3] Kravica. See: P. Đukanović, Ustanak na Drini, 172-180.

Subeditor’s Note

This – English – edition of the book is a translation of the one in the Serbian language, published in 2022 under the title Ustaška zverstva: Zbornik dokumenata (1941–1942). As far as the corpus of the Dossier from the personal fonds of Slavko Odić is concerned – and it makes the essential body of this book – the translation team worked from its Serbian version given in the said book and not from the German original.

The Serbian edition, with the documents translated from German, was printed in the Cyrillic alphabet, which necessitated some explanations provided by the Editor, Dr. Milan Koljanin, with regard to the linguistic traits, orthography and punctuation resorted to by the translators from German into Serbian (Tatjana Janićijević, Akademija Oxford) and the Editor. Naturally enough, numerous clarifications referring to the Serbian edition do not apply on the English one in most of the aspects of translation work. Hence the need to write this Note.

To begin with, the translators basically opted for the varieties of the American English rather than British English.

Personal names in the officially processed documents are most often written in what is today considered inverse order: family name/surname first, followed by one’s first/Christian name, without a comma in between.

Originally, the documents (letters, reports, statements etc.) were written (typed) in bureaucratic style and with a page layout practised by German offices, so these traits have been retained herein, and so have the obvious spelling and/or typing errors (personal names, toponyms); the latter have been corrected in the footnotes. The parts of text/sentences which are underlined or written with spaces between letters as means of emphasis correspond to the German original and its Serbian/Croat counterpart. The same applies to whole words or lines written in capital letters.

Punctuation has been kept almost completely, except when the meaning demanded comma (usually related to the rules of word order in an English sentence). Some marks, such as hyphens, dashes or slashes may impress the Reader as outdated or misplaced. Earlier typewriters did not have buttons with parentheses, and the slash was used instead of them.

Dates are written with differing uses or omissions of period (full stop), whereby month is written in three ways: fully in letters (20 January), in Arabic numerals (e.g. 20.1.) or Roman numerals (e.g. 20.I.). In rare cases, the slash can be found in dates (e.g. 12./X. 1941), but not as a regular separator between their constituents. Years are occasionaly written without the first digit, e.g. 942 instead of 1942, which is a frequent occurrence in oral communication.

Abbreviations, other than official identification means for offices, titles or codenames (VB, MA, RSHA etc.), have been translated (e.g. ’etc.’). The translators chose to retain the Croat/Serbian abbreviation for the name of the wartime ’state’, that is, ’NDH’ is standing for Nezavisna Država Hrvatska (Independent State of Croatia) instead of the less known English name (ISC). Some words were written in a shortened form for the reason of economy of expression, and the habit has been transferred to the translation, including the Editor’s intervention in the Serbian edition: Reg.[ister], Gend.[armerie], Gor[nja] Tuzla.

Footnotes in the English edition partially differ from those in the Serbian version. Some proved to be unnecessary (those that provided original names which were transliterated into the phonetical Cyrillic alphabet). New footnotes have been added by the Subeditor in order to explain/clarify the specific, locally used, words or phrases with which the Reader may not be familiar (such as slava, din, sokolski dom), or to indicate some nuances in the meaning (student, profesor). Here and there, the Reader will find notes in brackets inserted into the main body of the text by translators or the Editor where immediate understanding was needed.

Finally, it is noteworthy that the above-mentioned bureaucratic style of the presented documents mirrors the established conventions of communication in Central Europe and the Balkans of the first half of the 20th century, particularly in state and military affairs, yet also illustrates the specific ’hierarchy’ of various authorities on the occupied territories during World War Two, accentuating the relations between the German organs/institutions in power and the various offices subordinated to the administrative and military system of the Third Reich. As to the information, facts and accounts of events recorded in these documents, they are the subject of the history science and studies related thereto.

A. Č. P.