No. 112

STATEMENT OF ILIJA LEKIĆ FROM POŽARNICA, GIVEN IN TUZLA ON APRIL 10, 1942, ABOUT THE MASS KILLINGS AND LOOTING OF THREE SERB VILLAGES BY THE MUSLIM LEGION.^[1]

Ilija Lekić, worker

The village of Požarnica

Municipality of Gor.[nja] Tuzla

IV. 942 ^[2] Tuzla
4. 42

– States –

On 1. IV.^[3] Muslim legionaries (Legion of the Peop.[le’s] Uprising!) came, whose General K-t^[4] Muhamed Hadžiefendić is a merchant and a reserve Yugoslav.[ian] and now a Cr.[oat] major – to the villages of Cviljevina, Kolimer and Potraš (7 km from Tuzla) and drove the people out of their houses and killed whoever they reached along the way. – They killed my sister-in-law (wife’s sister) and her 13-year-old female child, as well as her 12-year-old female grandchild.

Another woman – wife of Spasoje Stojanović – he has been in prison for a long time through no fault of his own – was killed in her house, as well as the child of his brother Milan, a 10-year-old girl. –

Then they killed Marko Mrkonjić’s daughter Vida. –

There are many more killed and wounded that I do not know, not even the number. –

The woman whose name is Sava, Paja Stojanović’s wife, was wounded in the arm and is now in hospital in Tuzla.

Then they severely wounded Luka Pajić’s wife from Kolimer, and she is now in the hospital in Tuzla. –

They also killed Drago Simić, a 40 years old invalid without an arm, because he refused to hand over the horse to the robbers from the Legion; he left two orphaned children behind. –

They killed 60-year-old Lako Janić, as well as a 14-year-old male child of Gajo Janić from Kolimer.

Apart from the massacre carried out by the robbers and murderers of the Muslim legionaries of Muhamed Hadžiefendić from Tuzla, they completely robbed these 3 villages.

– There is nothing left in the houses of the Serb peasants. –

And household items, bedding, clothes, underwear, kitchen dishes, cattle, agricultural tools – they took everything. – Even chicken eggs, which the peasants prepared for Easter, they took these, too. – They even tore down the stoves, smashed the windows and left the houses completely empty without furniture. – Most of the houses were set on fire. –

The leader – the Commander of the Legion (of the so-called People’s Uprising against the Communists) in these villages, Salko Sokolović, came to my house and grabbed the breasts and other parts of a woman’s body of my daughter-in-law – that is, the wife of my son who is held captive in Germany. – I had to watch it to my shame, helpless, because if I had killed him, the robbers (fighters against Communism!) would have killed – innocent children and women, and God knows how many other innocents.

Then the same Salko Sokolović went to the house of my relative Srećko Lekić with 2 other robbers of the Muslim legionnaires and they tried to rape his two daughters-in-law. –

Since the farm laborer Pero Todorović came at that moment, they gave up their intention. –

1 Muslim legionnaire tried to rape Jerko Tešić’s daughter-in-law from the village of Cviljevina, but she managed to free herself and escape. –

In the village of Požarnica 7 km away from Tuzla, the same legionnaires captured Mitar Brkić and after terrible torture – his eyes were plucked out, his body was cut, etc. – they killed him in the end.

Ilija Lekić, farm laborer

The village of Požarnica near Tuzla.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 345-346, original in Serbian, handwritten in Latin alphabet; АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 343-344, copy translated to German. The German translation provides the designation of the office and the officer who processed the case (III A-Hz.), as well as the date of the translation, 15. 4. 1942.

^[2] An illegible abbreviation of the German working on the case.

^[3] April 1, written in the locally adopted German-style manner. – Subeditor’s note.

^[4] Kommandant, Commander.

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.