No. 86

STATEMENT OF A REFUGEE FROM PRNJAVOR, ABOUT THE CRIMES OF THE INDEPENDENT STATE OF CROATIA AGAINST THE SERBS IN PRNJAVOR AND THE SURROUNDING VILLAGES, FORCED CONVERSION TO CATHOLICISM AND FLIGHT TO SERBIA ON JANUARY 21, 1942.^[1]

15/4 42^[2]

One refugee states:

I served in Prnjavor as a cadastral clerk until June 9, 1941, when the Croatian government fired me because I was a Serb.

Immediately after the founding of the Independent State of Croatia, terrible persecutions of Serbs took place in Prnjavor. Dr. GUTIĆ VIKTOR, Ustasha commander and Softa Ivan, farmer stood out in this.

On June 9, Gutić came from Banja Luka to Prnjavor and gave a speech to the gathered people in front of the district administration building, in which he pointed out: “I inform this Serbian nest, when I come to Prnjavor again, I will kill all Serbs with my own hands, and you will help me!”

On June 10, I traveled to Belgrade, and left my family in Prnjavor. I got a job in the cadastral administration in Kragujevac, where I served until the end of November 1941.

On October 15, 1941, I traveled to Prnjavor with a German pass with the intention of transferring my family to Serbia. I arrived in Prnjavor on October 17. Neither I nor my family received the necessary passes, which is why we could not travel to Serbia.

As long as the District Chief Paulić stayed in Prnjavor, the place was peaceful and quiet. At the end of November 1941, however, Paulić was transferred to Našice, and replaced by a Croat from Našice. From this time, a difficult time began for us Serbs.

At the beginning of September 1941, an Ustasha group of 300-400 people came to Prnjavor under the leadership of a major. The city commander in Prnjavor was the Ustasha lieutenant Naglić Ivan.

At the beginning of December 1941, the killings of Serbs began, and Serb villages were set on fire. The villages of Srpska Moravica, Kremna, Čorle and Vučijak^[3] were particularly affected. In the village of Kremna, 27 Serbs were killed, mostly from the Petrović family. 31 Serbs were taken from the village of Čorle to Prnjavor, they were killed and their bodies were buried next to the Radlovac stream.

All these villages were looted, 300 cattle were taken to Prnjavor, which were slaughtered, and a big drunken party was organized for Ustasha officers in the house of Judge Hušo.

From the villages of Lužani, Tabak-Ilova and Grabik-Ilova, 37 Serbs were taken to Prnjavor, where they were killed and all were thrown into a pit located on the property of Ziha Andrija. At the beginning of January 1942, Ignjatić Petar from Lužani and Kon, the manager of the Munčić Company from Prnjavor, were also thrown into this pit.

On January 17, 1942, at 3 o’clock in the morning, the following Serbs were arrested in Prnjavor: Jovanović Milan, Vrabac Stevan, municipal clerk, Mikić Živko, pensioner, Gavrić Milan, head of the tax administration, Kojić Obrad, innkeeper, Knežević Milan, innkeeper, Đukanović Sava, innkeeper, Adamović Dmitar, sales assistant, Spasojević Simo, landowner, Janić Nedo, pensioner, Neimarević Miko and Stanko, traders, Stojanović Đorđe, barber, Jovanović Milo, shoemaker, Savković Kosta, innkeeper, Dudić Rado and Dušan, shoemakers and many others whose names are not known to me. Lazić Jovan, an attendant in the district administration, was killed in front of the Serbian church. That night, the Ustashas came to my home, but I managed to escape in time. All these people were taken to Slavonski Brod, and their fate has remained unknown.

Then the action of conversion to the Catholic faith began here as well. In these atrocities and murders, the following stood out in particular:

District Chief in Prnjavor HORVAT, Korić Arif, the Mayor, Naglić Ivan, Ustasha First Lieutenant, Softa Ivan, Bandić Branko, Roman Catholic priest. Catholic peasants who had previously settled from Herzegovina also stood out in particular.

Because of these horrible atrocities, I had to leave Prnjavor again. On January 21, 1942, I set out; and I received a pass from the German Municipality of Glogova. I came to Zemun with this pass.

On January 22, I was transferred to Belgrade by a Croatian railwayman. My family has stayed in Prnjavor.

^[1] АВ, Ф. 562, 3.1.1.2, 301-302.

^[2] Handwritten date and initials.

^[3] Unidentified village.

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.