No. 117

STATEMENT OF PETAR MEKIĆ FROM THE VILLAGE OF RAJINCI, MUNICIPALITY OF KALESIJA, ON 14 APRIL 1942, WHO SURVIVED THE KILLING OF ALL THE INHABITANTS OF THE VILLAGE BY THE MUSLIM LEGION ON 14 APRIL 1942.^[1]

Petar Mekić from the village Report from Tuzla^[2]

Rajinci Municipality of Kalesija

III to translate 18. 6. 42.^[3]

Comes and declares the following:

On Tuesday on 14. IV. 42. at about 12 o’clock, the Legionnaires, Turks, came to my village armed, expelled all the people, women, children, men from their houses, and told us to leave, and that they would escort us to Tuzla.

When we all came out of the houses to the Međaši stream. Then they lined us up in rows and fired machine guns behind our backs. As they fired, rows of people fell on each other, whole heaps of men, women and children.

As soon as the firing started, I dropped to the ground, and so I was wounded only in the foot. Entire heaps of the dead fell over me. When they had killed everyone, they went to our village to plunder, and when the robbers left, I slowly and carefully got out from under the dead and began to look if there was anyone left alive. And I only found 3 small children. My 9-year-old child, male, severely wounded in the back, and 2 more children, a 14 years old, wounded in the foot (of Milorad Mijatović), and an 8 years old uninjured of Mitar Mijatović. I hid in the woods with the children all night in the snow and rain, and the next day on Wednesday, 15. IV. I came to Tuzla.

Only me and these 3 children are left of the whole village. The village has 30 houses, there were 10-15 family members in each house. That is, 300-400 people were killed.

There were Croat.[ian] soldiers in the village, but they did not resist these robbers. My child is with 1 other child in Hosp.[ital] in Tuzla.

My child is badly injured and I doubt he will stay alive. My wife and three children were killed, only the fourth one remained (Dušan) and I doubt that he will stay alive.

16. IV. 42.

Petar Mekić farm worker

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 408, original in Serbian, handwritten, in Latin alphabet; АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 407, copy translated into German. The statement was recorded by Obrad Mićić from Tuzla.

^[2] Handwritten: Bericht aus Tuzla.

^[3] Handwritten note of the person handling the case within the BdS institution: the processing department, K III, and the order to translate. In the German translation, the sign of the office, K III, and the date of the translation, 25. 4. 1942.

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.