No. 40

STATEMENT OF NADA TRNINIĆ FROM SARAJEVO AT THE COMMISSARIAT FOR REFUGEES ON JANUARY 22, 1942, ABOUT THE DETENTION IN THE USTASHA CAMPS IN GOSPIĆ, KRUŠČICA AND LOBORGRAD AND ABOUT THE SITUATION IN THESE CAMPS.^[1]

MINUTES

of January 22, 1942.

Compiled at the Commissariat for Resettlement and Protection of Refugees.

Without being summoned, TRNINIĆ NADA came, an agriculture student from Sarajevo, 20 years old, daughter of Slavko and Desanka, née Čaliđ,^[2] of the Orthodox faith, now in Belgrade – Jovana Petkovića ulica no. 4, and declared:

I lived with my parents in Sarajevo. On July 23, 1941, I was arrested by the police and taken to the police prison. I stayed there until July 26, without being questioned at all. The prison cells were full of Serbs from Sarajevo and the surrounding area.

On July 26, 1941 – at midnight, 126 Serbs and 6 of us Serb women were taken to the train station and transported to Gospić to a concentration camp. With me were: Jakšić Bojna, agricultural engineer, Čović Ankica, housewife, Vujović Mara, tailor – all from Sarajevo. The names of the other two Serb women are unknown to me. I remember that, of the Serbs, the following were also transported to Gospić: Slobodan Begović, a high school graduate, and Mučibabić, a carpenter, both from Sarajevo. The names of other Serbs are unknown to me.

We arrived in Gospić on the morning of July 28. From the train station, they took us to the District Court prison, where we stayed in the prison yard, because all the prison cells were full of Serbs. The warden of the prison told us that we women would stay here, while the men were taken to a concentration camp near Gospić.

In the meantime, a message came from the camp warden that the camp could no longer accommodate anyone due to overcrowding, so there was no more room for newcomers. In the prison yard, we found a large crowd of people, including several Serbian priests. We spent 2 full days in the yard, where we slept on the cold stone. One day it was raining hard. Our request to come under the roof to protect ourselves from the pouring rain was not granted by the prison warden. We were soaked to the skin.

I remained in prison until August 20, 1941. In the meantime, Ustashas appeared in the prison yard every day, counting out 200 Serbs whom they tied in pairs, and then tied them all together with one chain and took them toward Mt. Velebit. The Serbs who were taken away, were replaced by the same number of new ones. They all came from quite different parts. Among them were peasants who were only poorly dressed, that is, they wore trousers and were barefoot. All the Serbs who had arrived by my transport were immediately taken to Mt. Velebit the next day, nothing was ever heard of them again. In general, the fate of those who were taken to Mt. Velebit was never made known.

Two days after we had arrived, we, the women, were taken away or divided into prison cells. The men remained in the prison yard. They were not allowed to move around the yard, they just had to lie down or sit. If someone wanted to defecate, they had to call the guard. Ten days after our arrival, a man called a guard to defecate. This happened at night. The Ustashas jumped up and shot the man because he was allegedly inciting the people. Then they went from cell to cell and told everyone that they would shoot dead anyone who just tried to move. In general, only the word “shoot” could be heard at every step.

The next day, around 3 o’clock in the afternoon, the Ustashas shot another man in the prison yard, only because he stood up from his sitting place. The name of the shot person is unknown to me.

There are several dark cells on the second floor of the prison. Serbs were taken to these cells, where they were first horribly abused and then killed. Several times the Ustashas came to our cells and threatened us by death.

In Gospić, we were given food only once a day. We got a piece of black bread and a little pea soup. We were all mostly hungry.

On August 20, the prison in Gospić was evacuated, and we were taken to Jastrebarsko. Here we were placed in a grain warehouse. Serbs, Croats and Jews from all over were here. The guard was kept by the Ustashas, while Serbian and Jewish women had to cook. This warehouse was surrounded by a barbed wire fence and we were allowed to move inside this area. A stricter regime was introduced for the Serbs (men only). They were locked in the basement of this warehouse, while Jews and Catholics were allowed to move freely. The food was better than in Gospić. We got black coffee in the morning, potato soup at noon and boiled potatoes in the evening. We didn’t get any bread at all. There were about 2,000 people here together.

On September 2, 1941, we the Serb women, as well as the Jewish ones, were taken to the concentration camp in Kruščica near Travnik. The Serbs and Jews came to the camp in Jasenovac, while Catholic Croats remained in Jastrebarsko.

In Kruščica, we were accommodated in 2 houses and 4 barracks. The Ustashas supervised us here as well. The regime in Kruščica was the worst, the food here was very bad and insufficient. The warden of the camp was a certain Mandušić, about 30 years old, the Ustashas who were guards, they were all very young, young men aged 16-18. They came from the surrounding villages and treated us very brutally. They slapped us for no reason and very often. Our families sent us packages with clothes and food. These packages were never handed over to us, but the Ustashas kept them for their own purposes. They would eat the food, and they would either burn the clothes or keep them to themselves. My aunt sent me a package worth 700 dinars. The package contained food and clothes. I never got this package. We did not dare to complain to anyone about this behavior of the Ustashas. Once a day we were given potato soup without bread. There was very little food, so we were literally starving. Twice a week we were given bread from the Jewish community in Sarajevo. Like I said, we didn’t dare complain to anyone about the bad treatment or bad food, let alone of being hungry.

Several rapes by Ustashas in the camp are noteworthy. One day, the Ustashas ordered the girls to wait at 8 o’clock in the evening in front of the barracks to do some work. Considering, however, that no one was allowed to leave the barracks at 8 o’clock in the evening, it was immediately clear to us what the Ustashas were up to. Several elderly women immediately went to the camp warden and complained about the behavior of the Ustashas, and he immediately stopped their order.

On October 5, 1941, we were all transferred from the Kruščica camp to the Loborgrad camp near Zlatar. Here we were placed in an old castle. In this camp, the control was taken over by the Germans, and the treatment was very good in every respect. Some improvement was felt. They treated us politely. The food was pretty good. We were allowed to contact our relatives. We received all the packages that were sent to us in full order. I would like to emphasize that the detainees lost a lot of weight physically due to hunger, which is why their mortality, especially among older women, greatly increased. I do not know the name of the camp warden, or of the Ustashas who guarded us. There had been a certain Ustasha officer in the camp in Jastrebarsko, Pudić, who behaved very brutally. I do not know the names of other Ustashas.

There was a certain Ustasha Mandić in the camp in Kruščica. And he treated us extremely brutally and inhumanely. I also don’t know the names of the other Ustashas, I only know that they were from the surrounding villages, aged 16-18. They were all very brutal and cruel. I emphasize that about 30 women from Loborgrad were taken to Gornja Reka^[3] near Koprivnica.

On December 31, 1941, I was released from the camp at the intervention of the German authorities. I was taken from Lobor to Zagreb, where I was placed in a police prison. I stayed there until January 7th. After that, the police took me to Zemun.

I was picked up in Zemun by the German military police, who brought me to Belgrade on January 9. In Loborgrad, Jakšić Vojna, Vujović Mira and Čović Ankica remained in the camp. There were also many other Serb women with small children, born in Herzegovina, whose houses had been burned by the Ustashas. The list of these women and children was submitted by the German authorities to this Commissariat. My parents are in Belgrade. My father is employed here as a religious teacher at the Public School^[4] in Marulićeva Street and lives in Jovana Petkovića Street no. 4. Now I will stay with my parents permanently.

I have nothing further to say, and I can take an oath on what I have said and read.

Certified by: Trninić Nada,

place for the stamp

Interviewed and authenticated by

Đuro Rodić,

place for the stamp

Minute taker:

Katanić Milena,

place for the stamp

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 84-86.

^[2] Čavić. See: N. Trninić-Šević, U ustaškim logorima, Novi Sad, Petrovaradin: Alfagraf, 2004. A copy of her statement is published herein, together with other statements.

^[3] Gornja Rijeka.

^[4] Narodna škola. – Subeditor’s note.

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.