No. 101

STATEMENT OF THE REFUGEE JEKIĆ STEVAN FROM BANSKI GRABOVAC, GLINA DISTRICT, ABOUT THE MASS KILLING OF SERB MEN BY THE USTASHAS AND THE CROATIAN ARMY, AFTER AN ATTACK BY UNKNOWN PERSONS ON JULY 24, 1941.^[1]

15/4 42^[2]

JEKIĆ STEVAN, refugee, farmer from Banski Grabovac, house No. 97, municipality of the same name, Glina District, 38 years old, married, father of two children, states:

On the night between July 23 and 24 of this year unknown persons took: Šiprak Dragutin, a municipal clerk in Banski Grabovac, Cimbaro Jakob, and the head of the railway station in Grabovac, his name and first name are unknown to me. There is no information about the fate of these 3 unfortunates. Cimbaro Domenik, Jakob’s father, was killed in his own house.^[3]

The next day, July 24 of this year, Croatian armed forces and Ustashas came to Banski Grabovac. There were 150 of them. On the way, they shot at shepherds and herds on the pasture. When I came home, I did not find my wife and children, they were all looking for shelter in the fields, roads and ditches next to the fields. An Ustasha came to the house of the village headman and ordered him to gather all the villagers in front of the municipal building, from where they would be sent back home after interrogation.

My wife and children came immediately. I came later. About 100 men, women and children gathered in front of the municipal office. The men were lined up, and the women and children were gathered inside the municipal building. The Ustashas were gathering newly arriving people from neighboring houses. In one group was the butcher Nevajda Vasilj from Vlahovići, who immediately fled. The Ustashas opened fierce fire at him, but he managed to escape, whereafter he is still hiding in the “Šamarica” forest. The Ustasha Zadrović Stevo, put a revolver in front of our noses, with the remark that he would level to the ground anyone who just moved. Thus, Jekić Ljuban, a farmer, house number 112 from Banski Grabovac, was immediately shot just because he nodded. After that, Zadrović lay down behind the machine gun and demanded that each of us must tell everything he knows within 3 minutes. An Ustasha who was standing next to him with a rifle shouted at him not to aim at people’s heads but at their stomachs. At that moment, a group of 50 people from the village of Luščane was taken out. Zadrović jumped in front of this group when his colleague shouted at him: “Mr. Stevo, this one tried to escape!”, and pointed to Miljević Stevan from Luščane. Zadrović singled out Miljević from the group and ordered him to stand in front of the body of the shot Jekić Ljubomir. He did not answer the man’s plea to keep him alive because of his six children, he cursed him, his six children and King Peter, and then shot him with a revolver.

He then ordered one of his colleagues to take 2 villagers with him and to take spades and shovels. We had to dig a pit 6 m long, 6 m wide and 75 cm deep.

At 11 o’clock in the morning, a 40-year-old Ustasha came to us and asked Zadrović why this pit was being dug. Zadrović replied: “I will kill this garbage and throw it in the pit!”, And he pointed his finger at us. This fellow-Ustasha told Zadrović that this should not happen here, but somewhere else. Zadrović ordered us to bury the pit again. The Ustashas took us in front of the municipal office and allowed us to sit down. There were 3 machine guns placed everywhere in front of us. Zadrović had the bodies of the shot Jekić and Miljević buried in the cemetery.

Women and children were allowed to go home, and we were taken to the field right next to the train station. There were already 450 of us, and we were all strictly guarded. They brought us drinking water and we were allowed to smoke. On the same day, at 4 o’clock in the afternoon, we were brought to an unfenced place right next to the train station. Earlier, this place had been used for poultry. A message was sent to the women in the village to bring food to their husbands, because all of us were to be taken to the concentration camp in Petrinja. Then each of us was asked for his name and place of birth, as well as if we could say something about the incident from the previous night. Nobody could say anything.

With the first twilight, two Ustashas came to us with sticks, and they demanded that we stretch out our hands, and they beat us on the fingers with these sticks. Twenty of us were taken to the Kraljevčani gendarmerie station. Five people were singled out from this group, who were taken by a gendarmerie sergeant to a blacksmith, a Russian, in Grabovac, where we were interrogated. After the interrogation, Grčević pushed the door open with the words: “Guys, get out of my sight, wherever you know.” All the others, except for the five of us, were killed that night by the Ustashas in the forest near Grabovac. From all Serb villages, Ustashas came during the night of July 24, 25 and 26 of this year, brought their innocent victims to this forest, where over 1,020 Serbs were killed. Their corpses are buried in 4 large pits. Among the killed there were 3 of my brothers Vasilj, Adam and Đuro.

I fled to the Šamarica forest, where I stayed until October 17, and on October 18 I came to Belgrade.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 331-332.

^[2] Handwritten date and initials.

^[3] See: Đ. Zatezalo, Narodna vlast na Kordunu, Baniji i Lici, 35-36.

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.