No. 118

STATEMENT OF PETAR MEKIĆ FROM RAJINCI, GIVEN ON APRIL 16, 1942 IN TUZLA, WHO SURVIVED THE KILLING OF THE VILLAGERS BY THE MUSLIM LEGION TWO DAYS EARLIER.^[1]

III 16. IV. 42^[2]

TRANSCRIPT!

For

City Command

Tuzla.

Statement of Petar Mekić from Rajinci, Kalesija Municipality.

The above citizen came and told me the following:

On Tuesday, April 14, 1942, at around 12 o’clock, Turkish armed Legionnaires came to my municipality, drove all the people out of their houses, women, children and men alike, and told us that we had to follow them because they wanted to take us to Tuzla.

When we came out of the houses, they took us to the Medaši^[3] stream, where they lined us up and behind our backs they fired machine guns at the set lines. While they were shooting so, a large number of women, children and men fell. When the shooting started, I dropped to the ground, so I was wounded only in the foot. A pile of corpses fell on me. Since the Legionnaires thought we were all dead, they went to our village to plunder. When these bandits left, I lay on the ground for a while and then I slowly stood up and carefully walked between the corpses looking to see if anyone else was still alive. I found a total of three children, one of whom was mine, aged 9, who was severely wounded in the back and two other children. One of them aged 14 was wounded in the foot. It belongs to Milorad Mijatović. The second child was not injured and belongs to Mitar Mijatović. With these three children, I hid all night in the woods, in the snow and rain. The next day, Wednesday, 15./4. 42 I came to Tuzla.

I and these three children are the only survivors from the whole village. The village had 30 houses, about 10-15 people lived in each house. It can be assumed that 300-400 people were killed. There were also Croatian soldiers in the village, but they did not prevent the Legionnaires from killing.

I placed my severely wounded child, who will hardly survive this serious injury, as well as another lightly wounded child of Milorad Mijatović, in the military hospital in Tuzla.

My wife and three children were killed.

When I came to the military hospital with the three children yesterday, a wounded Turkish Legionnaire told me: “If you just stay alive, as soon as I recover, I will find you.” He also cursed my mother.

Tuzla, April 16, 1942 Petar Mekić,

peasant from Rajinci

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 353.

^[2] Handwritten note.

^[3] Međaši.

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.