No. 105

STATEMENT OF THE REFUGEE BRANKO PAJIĆ FROM CETINGRAD ABOUT THE KILLING OF SERBS FROM CETINGRAD BY THE USTASHAS AT THE END OF JULY AND IN AUGUST 1941.^[1]

15/4^[2]

MINUTES

of September 19, 1941

taken at the Commissariat for Refugees in Belgrade.

PAJIĆ BRANKO, a merchant from Cetinjgrad,^[3] Municipality of Cetinjgrad,^[4] Slunj District, 20 years old, son of late Ranko, unmarried, arrived unsummoned and stated:

On July 29 of this year, at 10.30 in the evening, the following Serbs from Cetinjgrad^[5] were arrested by the Ustashas in their homes, and those were: Krmar Luka, shoemaker, Žegarac Miloš, merchant, Mandić Vladimir, teacher, Basara Đuro, my father-in-law, otherwise a merchant, Kangrga Bogdan, merchant, Pjevac Petar, shoemaker, Kuruzović Stevan, baker, Brković Dragan, baker, Pjevac Đuro, innkeeper, Brković Miloš, tailor, Brković Radan, tailor, Brković Pero, road worker, Ivošević Milenko, teacher, Vujić Miloš, priest. All of the above were imprisoned in the basement of the gendarmerie station in Cetinjgrad.

The next day, on July 30 of this year, at 9 o’clock in the morning, the Ustashas came to Cetinjgrad from Zagreb and Slunj in 7 trucks and 4 luxury cars. There were 120 of them. They immediately went to the gendarmerie station where they mistreated the Serbs by hitting them with rifle butts. Then they went to the neighboring Serbian villages: Maljevac, Buhači, Pašin Potok, Selište, Ruševica and Radovica, where they gathered all Serbs above the age of 16. There were 150 of them. As soon as on the same day at 5 o’clock in the afternoon, they were all taken to Cetinjgrad, imprisoned in the gendarmerie station and terribly abused there.

At 6 o’clock in the evening, all the arrested Serbs were taken to Velika Kladuša, to “Mehino Stanje”^[6], where all their belongings were robbed, and then they were killed and buried there. The Ustashas took the items confiscated from them.

At this time, I happened to be in Karlovac, so I escaped unharmed.

Of the Ustashas in Slunj, who took part in this massacre and robbery, I recognized Skukan Ivan, a miller from Slunj, 35 years old. He was the camp warden.

The following Ustashas were present from Cetinjgrad: Mravunac Ante, carpenter, Brajcić Šecko, peasant, Štefanac Nikola, farmer, Paulić Mile, peasant, Jurkovič^[7] Petar, a Gypsy, Medved Božo, miller from Maljevac near Cetinjgrad. Many others, whom I did not know, were also present.

On August 5 of this year, the Ustashas gathered the remaining Serbs and children, took them to the gendarmerie station with the remark that they would all be sent to a concentration camp. On the same day, the following persons were taken from Cetinjgrad: Basara Ranko, my mother and my brother Vojislav, 2 1/2 years old, Žegarac Dragica, wife of Žegarac Miloš, merchant and their son Milenko, 17 years old, Mandić Zorka, wife of Mandić Vladimir, teacher and their two children, son Ljubomir, 10 years old and Boro, 2 years old, Kangrga Olga, wife of Kangrga Miloš, merchant, Pjevac Ljuba, wife of Pjevac Pero, shoemaker and their six children aged 1-12. The names of their children are unknown to me. Next, Pjevac Sofija, wife of Pjevac Đuro, farmer and their daughter Nada, 16 years old, Krmar Milica, wife of Krmar Luka, shoemaker and their daughter Mira, 8 years old, Kuruzović Mara, wife of Kuruzović Stevan, baker and their two children aged 1-2 years, the names of the children are unknown to me, Vujić Danica, wife of Bujić^[8] Miloš, priest and their two children aged 1-3, the names of the children are unknown to me.

All the money was taken from them at the gendarmerie station.

These victims were taken to the mountain called “Glavica” at 10 a.m. on the same day, which is located near Krstinja, 2 km away from Cetinjgrad, where they were all killed and buried. Their homes were completely looted by the Ustashas, and the Orthodox church in the village of Radovica was burned.

The taking away of Serbian families on August 5 of this year was committed by the local Ustashas from Cetinjgrad. Unfortunately, I cannot give their names, because on August 2, I had fled from Cetinjgrad to Karlovac, where I stayed until September 4 of this year, and from where I then traveled to Belgrade, where I arrived on September 5 of this year.

The Ustashas moved into the homes of the killed Serbian families and appropriated all their real estate.

RAJIĆ BRANKA^[9], place for the stamp

Interviewed and certified by:

Đuro J. Rodić, place for the stamp

Minute taker:

Petar M. Eremić, place for the stamp

Clerk

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 338-339.

^[2] Handwritten date and initials.

^[3] Cetingrad.

^[4] Same as previous.

^[5] Same as previous, and refers to the repetitions of the village name which follow below.

^[6] The site at the tripoint of the present-day municipalities of Velika Kladuša, Slunj and Vojnić. – Subeditor’s note.

^[7] Jurković.

^[8] Vujić.

^[9] Pajić Branko.

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.