No. 37

STATEMENT OF A CROAT WOMAN, GIVEN IN BELGRADE ON JANUARY 1, 1941, WHO LEARNED FROM HER RELATIVE, A CROATIAN COLONEL, THAT THE DETAINEES IN THE JASENOVAC CAMP WERE MASSIVELY SUFFERING FROM HUNGER, DISEASE AND THAT THEY WERE BEING KILLED.^[1]

On December 31, 1941, after a short stay in Croatia, Mrs. N.N., a Croat by birth, came to Belgrade, she is married to a Serb in Belgrade and lives here permanently. Her wish is that her name is not mentioned because she has a mother and a child in Croatia. She declares:

On December 26, 1941, terrible persecution of Serbs in Slavonska Požega, Pakrac, Nova Gradiška and the surrounding area began again. At night, the Ustashas gathered the Serbs and drove them to a camp in Jasenovac, while the women and children were carted away in an unknown direction. Even those Serbs who converted to the Catholic faith were taken away. One of her relatives, a colonel in the Croatian Armed Forces, told this woman about the conditions in the Jasenovac concentration camp; it was his duty to set up a concentration camp and to inspect it.

He recounts: In the concentration camp in Jasenovac, Serbs are housed in wooden barracks, which are located on wet and damp terrain, so that water is up to their knees. If they lie down, they cannot stay in the water, but stand on their feet all night, and the water reaches their knees. Early at dawn, the Ustashas wake them up with rifle shots, that is, they shoot at them. The one who is hit by a bullet falls dead, and the others drag themselves miserably through the mud, the one who falls into the water is beaten dead by the Ustashas. As long as people can walk, they work on the dam on the Sava and at the same time serve as a bridge for the Ustashas over the mud, in such a way that two pairs of people stand to their chests a few meters away; they have to hold planks on their shoulders, and the Ustashas walk on them like on a bridge. These tortures last all day long, as soon as someone falls as a result of these torments, they are immediately beaten dead or buried alive.

They get only two potatoes a day, and lately only 1 piece. As for the potatoes, everyone gets them as long as the stock of boiled potatoes lasts, as soon as this stock is eaten, no one cares about how many people got nothing. No one outside the camp is allowed to approach these detainees, let alone the one who would like to deliver something to them. People are in torn clothes and barefoot; if someone wore better clothes, everything was taken away from him, even before he came to the camp. In addition, there was an epidemic of typhus. Patients with typhus are thrown into a special barrack, where they are left to their fate without food and without medicines until death occurs.

According to this colonel, even the strongest and healthiest people in this camp cannot endure longer than 14 days. After the liquidation of the camp in Gospić (2 months ago), there were 18,000 people in Jasenovac, and now there are 3,000 of them, although no one has been released from the camp, and new ones keep arriving. Everyone else has died of cold and starvation or was killed. Now, allegedly, this camp should be filled with Serbs and Jews lately.

In Belgrade, January 1, 1942.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 81.

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.