No. 85

STATEMENT OF THE REFUGEE OLGA PRPIĆ FROM JASENOVAC, GIVEN AT THE COMMISSARIAT FOR REFUGEES ON MARCH 7, 1942, ABOUT THE CRIMES OF THE USTASHAS IN THE JASENOVAC CAMP AND CRIMES AGAINST THE SERBS IN THE SURROUNDING VILLAGES.^[1]

15/4^[2]

MINUTES

of March 7, 1942

made at the Commissariat for Refugees and Displaced Persons in Belgrade.

PRPIĆ OLGA, a housewife from Jasenovac, Jasenovac Municipality, Novska District, 38 years old, daughter of Matija and Katarina, now in Belgrade, Krunska ulica 20, identified through workbook no. 1512659 – List of names no. 353/41 of 26 February 1941, issued by the Municipality of Jasenovac, came uninvited and states:

Immediately after the founding of the Independent State of Croatia, a group of local Croats formed an armed Ustasha organization in Jasenovac. This group was formed and armed by VIDAKOVIĆ NIKOLA, a landowner from the village of Uštica near Jasenovac. He is the commander of the Ustasha camp. Furthermore, the Ustasha commanders are a former Catholic priest, named BRKLJAČIĆ, a native of Lika, and a certain LUBURIĆ, who came here from somewhere.

The Ustashas immediately gathered the Serbs and killed them. The Ustashas immediately gathered the following Serbs from Jasenovac: the landowner Grujičić,^[3] the forest ranger Djukavac^[4] Đurica; further Pekić Milan and Rašinac, both forest rangers, and many other Serbs from the area, whose names I no longer remember. All these Serbs were taken by the Ustashas to the bank of the Sava river near Jasenovac, where they were killed and their corpses were thrown into the water.

Immediately after the establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, 3 large concentration camps were established, as follows: one camp in Jasenovac, in the brickyard of Bačić Ozren; others in the fields called “Bročke Jesenice”, which are located halfway between Jasenovac and Novska. These grass fields are enclosed with a wire fence; and the third camp was established in the Croatian village of Plesmo, which is about 2 hours away from Jasenovac. This camp was also located in an open field, and was enclosed by a wire fence. Serbs from all sides were gathered in these camps, and this gathering continues to this day.

The Plesmo camp was abolished in November 1941, at the request of the Croatian inhabitants of Plesmo. These citizens energetically demanded the closure of this camp, because they could no longer watch the horrible atrocities and murders committed by the Ustashas.

After a short time, the “Bročke Jesenice” camp was closed, because these fields were flooded.

Currently, there is only the camp in Jasenovac, which is, as I have already mentioned, located in the brickyard Bačić Ozren. This brickyard is located on the outskirts of the city. In addition to the brickyard, several other barracks were erected by the Croatian authorities, surrounded by barbed wire. There are Serbs, Croats and Jews in this camp. All around this area, watchtowers were erected, from which the Ustashas with machine guns stand guard.

Feeding in the camp is extremely poor. Each of these unfortunates receive 3 pieces of boiled potatoes without bread a day, so these people are formally exposed to starvation. In the brickyard, these people sleep on the bare ground. Tortured by starving and abuse, they are forced to work every day. I saw with my own eyes how these internees marched through Jasenovac, and so hungry they fell on the road. These unfortunates were kicked in the head and all over the body by the Ustashas so that they were covered in blood, or they were beaten with rifle butts; many of them were jumped on their chests and then beaten mercilessly.

The residents of Jasenovac had to watch such scenes every day last summer and autumn. Many of the internees, who were taken to work, raised their hands and begged for a piece of bread. The inhabitants secretly gave them pieces of bread, so that the Ustashas would not notice this. Usually, pieces of bread were left on the road, from where the internees lifted them out of the dust. I saw for myself how the internees in the field, during the corn harvest, ate seeds from rotten pumpkins, and when they found corn cobs, they also ate them. An Ustasha beat a Jew to death because he found a corn cob with him. The internees were abused and tortured by the Ustashas in the most terrible way. Many of them died daily from terrible suffering and hunger. The corpses were either thrown into the Sava river or buried in the field called “Limani” – on the property of the Serb Trivunić^[5] Vasica. On that day, Trivunić and his wife were taken to the camp.

When a commission recently inspected the camp in Jasenovac, it was shown only those internees who arrived to the camp only a few days ago; those internees who had been tortured by hunger and abuse were not shown because they were physically completely ruined.

Serbs were beaten dead and killed every day. They are killed in the camp itself, and their corpses, as already mentioned, are thrown into the Sava river or buried on the Trivunić estate. I do not know by name those internees who were beaten by the Ustashas. 20-200 internees arrive every day, and so many of them are beaten in order to make room for newcomers.

After the Christmas holidays, the Ustashas brought over 200 women and children from Kordun to Jasenovac. There were several elderly women in this group, all the others were young women and small children. This group of women and children was led by the Ustashas through Jasenovac, and across the frozen river Sava to the village of Čuklinac, where they were all locked up in one barn, and it was then set on fire so that these unfortunates were all burned. The screams and wails of these unfortunate women and children were heard across the Sava river in the village of Uštica.

After the Serbian Christmas, the Ustashas poured into the Serbian villages that lied on the other bank of the Sava, namely: Gradin,^[6] Čukljinac,^[7] Dreksenić,^[8] Demerovac^[9] and Međeđa. In these villages, the Ustashas killed all the Serbs in a row, completely looted their homes and then set these on fire. The young girls had to lift their skirts, whereafter they were stabbed between the legs with bayonets. I personally saw how these Ustashas, when they returned to Jasenovac from those villages, brought with them looted food, such as bacon, meat, lard, flour, cloth, bedding, etc. Better things were divided among the Ustasha officers and the worse among the Ustasha staff.

Lately, the Ustashas in Jasenovac and the surrounding area have been gathering Serbs, taking the men to the camp itself, and taking the women to Stara Gradiška or Zlatar.^[10]

The commanders of the camp in Jasenovac, as I have already said, are BRKLJAČIĆ and LUBURIĆ. Then there are the main commanders VIDAKOVIĆ and LJUBA (I don’t know the last name!), then JOŠIĆ MUJO, an Ustasha second class lieutenant – a Muslim, a native of Bosnia. The BRNIĆ brothers – ČAPUN JOZO and MIJO, the peasants RAKARIĆ KARLO and MATIJA and DRAGIĆ LJUKA, called “Šljuka”^[11], stand out among the local Ustashas. The latter three are guards. The names of other Ustashas are unknown to me.

I was also supposed to be taken to the camp, because someone reported that I work for Belgrade, which is why I decided to run away. I set off on March 2, of this year with a forged pass, which I received from the district-seat municipality in Novska. This one was for Vinkovci. I came from Vinkovci to Zemun without a pass. I came from Zemun on March 5, of this year to Belgrade with the help of an acquaintance of mine. Here in Belgrade, I will live my life by earning my own money.

I don’t know anything further, I can swear on this statement and read.

Interviewed and certified by: Minute taker: OLGA PRPIĆ,

place for the stamp

Đuro J. Rodić, D. Vujačić,

place for the stamp place for the stamp

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 299-300. The statement was published in: A. Miletić, Koncentracioni logor Jasenovac 1941-1945. Dokumenta, Vol. III, Beograd: Narodna knjiga; Jasenovac: Spomen-područje Jasenovac, 1987, 101-103.

^[2] Handwritten date and initials.

^[3] Grujčić.

^[4] Ćukalac.

^[5] Trivunčić.

^[6] Gradina.

^[7] Čuklinac.

^[8] Draksenić.

^[9] Demirovac.

^[10] Loborgrad by Zlatar (today: Zlatar Bistrica).

^[11] The nickname means ’woodcock’. – 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.