No. 44

STATEMENT OF DRAGICA SAVANOVIĆ FROM KLJUČ, GIVEN AT THE COMMISSARIAT FOR REFUGEES ON JANUARY 30, 1942, ABOUT THE MASSACRE OF SERBS AND THE FORCED CONVERSION OF SURVIVORS TO CATHOLICISM.^[1]

MINUTES

^[2]

15/4^[3]

of January 30, 1942

taken in the Extraordinary Commissariat for Refugee Protection.

SAVANOVIĆ DRAGICA, a housewife from Ključ, Ključ District, 35 years old, daughter of late Nikola and late Stanica, unmarried, in Belgrade now, 44 Lomina Street, registered with the railway ID no. 30209 of 5 April 1937, issued by the Zagreb State Railway Directorate, came and stated:

In Ključ, as well as in the Ključ District, everything was in order until July 27, 1941.

On July 27, 1941, the local Ustashas, together with the municipal police, arrested Serbs in Ključ and the surrounding area. The arrests continued on July 28, 1941. The following were arrested from Ključ: Vojislav Savanović, my brother, who worked at the post office; Malić Dragutin, postmaster, Mrkobrad Pavle, head of the tax administration, Živković Milorad, shoemaker, Mandić Savo, merchant, Mladenović Đorđe, merchant and his son Dušan, Biljčarević Bogdan, hairdresser, Kozomara Savo, sales assistant, Travar Red.,^[4] shoemaker, Savić Savo, butcher, Čekrlija Milivoj, teacher, Drobac Jovo, district clerk, Samardžić Cvetko, butcher, Janković Nikola, merchant, Janković Jovo, innkeeper, Pavlović Branko, mechanic, Bovan Simo, tinsmith, Lazić Stojan, tinsmith, Dunović Perica, worker, Stojčić Savo and Đorđe, workers, Racić Đorđe, tinsmith and his son Dušan, Zelenović Ilija, merchant, Stojisavljević Ilija, shoemaker, Krajcar Trifun, merchant, and many others whose names I no longer know. They were arrested and imprisoned in the prisons of the district administration and the district court, and further in the buildings of the primary school, the municipality, the Sokoli^[5] Hall and in other buildings, wherever they could find places. They were kept in custody until July 31, 1941. Some of them were killed in the prisons on the evening of July 31, while others were taken to a nearby forest called “Palež” and beaten dead there, while others were taken outside the city to a Muslim neighborhood called “Hanlovsko Vrelo” and beaten dead there. The rest of the Serbs, about 60 of them, were taken to the Sana River in the early morning of August 1 and killed there. Some Serbs were first abused, and then their lives were cut short by machine guns or they were killed with knives.

At the same time, the Ustashas killed all Serbs in the Serb villages of the Ključ district. Women and children were locked up in houses and then set on fire. At this time, 6,000 Serbs were killed in the Ključ District.

At the same time, Ustashas robbed Serbs, too. From Serbian houses in Ključ, they robbed everything they could get their hands on, such as typewriters and sewing machines, coats, food, cash, etc. I know that they took a winter coat from Perać Sava, a merchant from Ključ. They took everything they needed from Serbian shops, but they did not pay a single penny for that. They also looted Serb villages. They drove the cattle to their own homes and slaughtered them, selling the rest.

The Serbian priest, Mačkić Đorđe from Ključ, had already been expelled with his entire family, and his apartment had been looted.

The next day, after this horrible murder, they drove the Serbs, who were still there, to the District Office building and threatened them that they all had to convert to the Catholic faith, and if they did not do that, they would kill them all. Of course, all Serbs converted to the Roman Catholic faith out of fear. They did this to save their bare lives.

I add that the Ustashas arrested and abused Serb wives and children together with the men. After they had killed Serb men, women and children were still kept in prisons.

The leader of the local Ustashas, who committed these murders with the help of Ustashas from other parts, was a certain Cerić Culejman,^[6] a surveyor from Ključ. As Ustashas, the following stood out: Dizdarević Ahmed, clerk in Ključ; Filipović Mile, day laborer and the Mayor of Ključ; Filipović Josica, Mile’s brother, Kulenović, district chief in Ključ; Filipović Omer, municipal clerk in Ključ.

I own a house in Ključ where I live. After the death of my late father, I was granted a pension of 1,100 dinars, because I was an orphan. In Croatia, my pension was cancelled, and some Muslims moved into my house, so I was forced to flee to Serbia.

I set off at the end of October 1941. I received a pass from a Croatian woman from Prijedor, so I came to Zemun, where I stayed until January 25, 1942 with a relative of mine, and then I came to Belgrade.

I will receive my pension income from the Patriarchate Office here and thus struggle for my life.

I have nothing further to say, I can swear on what I have said and read.

DRAGICA SAVANOVIĆ, place for the stamp

Interviewed and certified by: Minute taker:

Đuro Rodić, Vujačic,

place for the stamp place for the stamp

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 293-294.

^[2] Initials.

^[3] Handwritten date.

^[4] Unclear.

^[5] Sokoli (‘Falcons’) were athletes, members of the pan-Slavic Soko(l) Movement (founded in Prague, in 1862) as an all-age gymnastics organization, following the principle of “a strong mind in a sound body”; their sports halls (sokolski domovi) were built in numerous towns, especially in the Slav-settled lands of Austro-Hungary. – Subeditor’s note.

^[6] Sulejman.

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.