No. 100

STATEMENT OF A REFUGEE FROM BLATUŠA ABOUT THE MASS KILLINGS OF THE SERBS FROM BLATUŠA, ČEMERNICA, VRGINMOST, PERNA AND OTHER VILLAGES BY THE USTASHAS AND THE CROATIAN ARMY IN JULY AND AUGUST 1941.^[1]

15/4 42^[2]

One refugee, a farmer from the village of Blatuša, No. 40, Municipality of Čemernica, Vrginmost District, 43 years old, widower, father of one child, states:

Vrginmost was under Italian occupation until July 28 of this year. During this period, complete order and peace reigned in this district, and the people engaged in their daily work.

On the same day, July 28 – after the departure of the Italian armed forces, an Ustasha group of 25 men came to the Serbian village of Poljani,^[3] all of them armed to the teeth. The Ustashas immediately set out to work and killed Serb men and women, regardless of age. In the home of an old man Nikola, 3 women and 3 girls were killed, while he saved himself by running away. A total of 20 people were killed in this village, while the survivors fled.

On July 30, too, Ustashas came to Vrginmost, arrested 25 people and took them in an unknown direction. The following were arrested: Miloš Čiča, barber, Balbaša^[4] Stevo, innkeeper, Vrga Jovan, farmer, Vrga Pero, farmer, Barbir Dragan, farmer, all from Vrginmost. I can’t remember the names of others.

On August 2 of this year, the Municipalities of Vrginmost and Čemernica ordered that all Serbs who live there, and who want to live in peace, appear on August 3 at 8 a.m. in Vrginmost, where, with the assistance of two Catholic priests, they would convert to the Catholic Church. 2000 people gathered in Vrginmost. I came, too. To our greatest surprise, there was no sign of the Catholic priests; we were surrounded by 300 men, Ustashas. They set up machine guns and forced us to surrender. Some of us managed to escape, and all the others, 1714 of them, were taken to the district court prisons and the Sokoli Hall, where they were well guarded over night. On August 4, they were all taken by truck to Glina and shortly afterwards killed in the Serbian cathedral church there.

The day before, the Serbs from the Municipality and the village of Topusko were gathered in the same way. 500 people came to Topusko, and they were all killed and buried in a pit near Topusko. Serb girls were raped and then killed in the local church. It was there that the daughter of the previously killed Dr. Vurdelja was raped.

When I returned to my village of Blatuša on August 3, I found the Croatian army there, which looted and set fires to the surrounding villages. In my village, 20 women and children were killed on the same day, and 14 houses were burned. On August 5, 10 women and children were killed in my village, and 27 people were arrested and taken away. They took us to Vrginmost and locked us up in the prisons of the district administration. There were 110 people in these prisons. During the night we were beaten and abused. We remained in prison until August 18, whereafter we were released, but we had to report to the Ustasha Command in Vrginmost twice a week, Mondays and Thursdays.

After these murders and atrocities, until September 17 of this year, complete peace reigned. On September 17, 50 Ustashas came to the village of Perna, and killed whoever they could get their hands on, looted all the homes and then burned them. The Ustashas took all the cattle, all movable property and other valuables with them, and burned the houses. Thus, in this large and rich village, only the school building and one foresters’ apartment remained, which were spared from the fire. The inhabitants of this village, who managed to save their lives only by fleeing, sought refuge in Mt. Petrova Gora, where they are still hiding. The village of Perna no longer exists.

On September 19, 50 Ustashas came to my village of Blatuša again. As in the previous villages, they killed all the Serbs here, stole their entire property and then burned all the houses. In my house, my wife Evica and my three children Petra, Ružica and Milorad, aged 9-12, were beaten to death. They took all my movable property and then burned my house. I saved my life by fleeing as well as the life of my 15-year-old son Dragutin who was in the field. There were cases where houses were burned together with their occupants. Thus, in their own house – that of my neighbor Trkulja, who had been killed earlier in Glina, his wife and their three small children were burned alive. They threw children and women into the burning houses, who met such a brutal death. That day, 150 people were killed in my village, and only a small part managed to save their lives by fleeing. 100 houses were burned. Other villages in the Vrginmost District suffered the same fate. 7,000 people were killed in the entire district.

These atrocities were committed by the Ustashas under the command of the Ustasha Lieutenant Čeliković. The Ustashas from the neighboring village of Topusko rushed to his aid. The baker Briješki Ilija and Malinac, dyer, stood out for their atrocities.

In the villages of Čemernica, Topusko, Stipan, Kirin, Bović, Slavsko Polje and Perna, the Ustashas demolished all Serbian churches. The church in Blatuša remained rather undamaged but was completely looted.

I hid in the woods. On September 20, I received a pass for Zemun from the municipal official Josip Živkić, a Croat, for which I paid 2,000 dinars. I set off on September 21 and arrived in Belgrade on September 22.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 329-330.

^[2] Handwritten date and initials.

^[3] Poljana.

^[4] Malbaša.

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.