– Radovan Jović –
The following remarks were excerpted from a report entitled “Suffering of Children in Jasenovac and Other Concentration Camps in NDH” by Radovan Jović delivered to the Sixth International Conference of Crimes of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), held in Banja Luka on May 19-20, 2014.
Besides the cruel crimes against children that a normal human mind cannot grasp, the same author recalls that, researching the genocide in the NDH, he stumbled upon a shocking story from Livno, when a Croatian Ustasha, a butcher, hung in his shop-window a newborn cut in half and on the halves wrote: “A Serbian nursling!”
As regards the Ustasha slaughters against Serbs in the area of the former Livno county, numerous pieces of evidence were collected that the State Commission to Investigate Crimes Committed by Nazis and their Allies got hold of during an investigation. According to authentic documents and witness statements, which authors Joža Horvat and Zdenko Štambuk collected in the book Dokumenti o protivnarodnom radu i zločinima jednog dijela katoličkog reda, and published in Zagreb in 1944, six Catholic friars, namely: Borivoje Mač from Vidoš, Božo Simleša from Lištane, Bono Greberarović from Podhum, Viktor Baltić from Ljubunčić, Srećko Perić from Livno and Vlado Đurić from Bila, sent a letter on 10 May 1942 to Ante Pavelić in Zagreb, asking for a more forceful intervention of the Italian army to “cleanse the surrounding mountains of communist gangs.” Even though the communist authorities after the liberation tried to ascribe all the blame for war crimes on the occupying forces, it has to be said that in their occupation zone, Italian soldiers did not commit a single crime against the civilian population in the county of Livno. What is more, many witnesses from the Dinara Mountain villages in the Lower Livno Field even today recall the kindness of Italian soldiers who not only never persecuted or maltreated the Serbs, but used all possible ways to help the civilians and often gave chocolate and sweets to children.
Marija Bogunović from Livno and Ljubo Crnogorac, an innkeeper from Čelebić, in their statements dated 24 June 1942 testified to the Commissioner for Refugees about the ghastly deeds of Ustasha slaughterers in the Livno area, and commended the Italian occupying troops who protected the civilian population as much as they could.
Ustashas’ spiritual leader in that part of the NDH was friar Srećko Perić in the monastery of Gorica near Livno. Before the slaughter in the Livno area, standing at the altar of the Gorica church, he ordered the gathered Croats to start the slaughter of the Serbs, saying: “My Croat brothers, go out and slaughter all the Serbs. Slaughter first my sister, who married a Serb, and then all other Serbs without exception. When you finish that work, come see me in the church, where you will confess to me and then all your sins will be forgiven.”
By 20 August 1941, in the area of the former Livno county (Livno, Duvno, Grahovo, Glamoč and Kupres), according to the exact data collected, 5,600 Serbs, men, women and children were killed or slaughtered. In those crimes, friar Srećko Perić took a prominent placed as an Ustasha. Prior to the occupation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, he spent some time in Niš as a Roman Catholic priest – reads a witness statement, which was published in the aforementioned book Dokumenti o protivnarodnom radu i zločinima jednog dijela katoličkog reda.
As for the territory of the Municipality of Livno, 1,533 Serbs were killed in Ustasha slaughters. On the Day of Margaret the Virgin-Martyr (30 July 1941), at the beginning of August and on St. Elijah’s Day in 1941, Ustashas committed mass slaughters of Serbs in the villages of Čelebić, Donji Rujani, Čaprazlije, Golinjevo, Livno and Prolog. In those slaughters, 613 children were killed, 374 of them under the age of 10, and 249 under the age of five. The list of the children killed includes the victims’ personal data, such as name, surname, father’s name, year and place of birth and execution sites where they were murdered. It was thus established that 20 one-year olds, 13 newborn babies, one just a day old, were murdered.
Ustashas would cut off the little children’s heads and throw them into their mothers’ laps. Dobrila Bajilo from Livno, wife of the murdered Uglješa, a salesman, was pregnant. An Ustasha approached her, put her arms on her chest and told her to hold them like that, because he was intending to “nail” her arms to her chest. When the Ustasha was about to commit this brutal crime, Dobrila started defending herself. The Ustasha called another Ustasha to help him and they ripped Dobrila’s stomach with a knife. The Ustashas took out an unborn baby from the ripped pregnant woman. This crime was described in the book Ognjena Marija Livanjska by Budo Simonović.
The most severe crime that Ustashas committed was on the Day of Margaret the Virgin-Martyr in 1941 in a classroom of an elementary school in the village of Čelebić near Livno, where women and children were incarcerated and from where men were taken away and thrown in the Bikuša pit. In the Čelebić slaughter, 403 victims from this and the neighbouring village of Bojmunte were killed. In Livno itself, 137 Serbs were killed: the men were killed in the Prolog pit and women and children were slaughtered in the Koprivnica Forest outside Bugojno. In the village of Golinjevo near Livno, where the great Serbian poet Jovan Sundečić was born, in just one day Ustashas seized all the Serbs who happened to be in the village and murdered 231 residents; men were thrown into the Prolog pit, and the women and children into the Kamešnica abyss alive. In Donji Rujani, 204 Serbs were killed, most of whom were thrown in the Ravni Dolac pit on Mount Dinara, and in the neighbouring Gornji Rujani 143 Serbs were killed and thrown intwo the pits Razvala and Provalija on Mount Dinara.
All other victims were identified, most of whom came from Veliki Guber (116), followed by Lištani (55), Čaprazlije (28), Potok (26), Smrčani (24), Bojmunte (24), Potočani (22), Glavica (23), Žabljak (19), Zastinje (15), Priluka (13), Radanovci (10), Sajkovići (10), Komoran (8), Rapovina (8), Odžak (7), Mali Guber (6), Bila (6) and Podgreda (4). During the NDH rule, in the area of the Municipality of Livno, Ustashas slaughtered 219 children in the village of Čelebić, 183 in Donji Rujani and 118 in Golinjevo.
A dreadful destiny of teacher Angela Lalić from Livno was described by Muslim Ismet Duran, a post-war witness, who was a driver of a bus by which Ustashas transported mothers and children to slaughter in the Koprivnica Forest near Bugojno. Her two-and-a-half-year-old son Zdravko suddenly started crying on the bus, which angered Ustasha Smajo Čakar so he cut the child’s head off and threw it in his mother’s lap. In shock and great pain, the mother mourned her child and would not let the head of her first-born out of her hands until the same Ustasha slaughtered her too on the bus. Even though the post-war authorities in Livno were aware of this most cruel crime of slaughter of a and child and his mother, the first one to speak out about it was Ismet Duran, an Ustasha driver who had been employed in the Municipality of Livno for years also as a driver. A harrowing testimony of Ismet Duran to this brutal crime was published by the Belgrade-based “Intervju” weekly in 1990.
There is almost no place in the Ustasha genocidal state NDH inhabited by the Serbs where there was no site of execution of a small or a great number of people. Numerous witness statements and notes speak of the methods of crimes and torturing of people. By monstrosity, manner and brutality, by the number and scope, the crimes in camp Jasenovac surpass any human fantasy.
As a foreign correspondent Swiss writer Jacques Isar published in his book Viđeno u Jugoslaviji [Seen in Yugoslavia] harrowing testimonies and evidence of Ustasha crimes during the Second World War.
“What the surviving witnesses told us about the torture and murders in camps, the human mind cannot understand, it cannot believe it. The Spanish Inquisition, the German atrocities against the Jews in Poland, and even the Chinese torture seem like child’s play in comparison to what the Ustasha bestiality did against the Serbian, Jewish and Romani population.”
One of the countless crimes occurred in Glamoč, where the women and children were allegedly spared and received an approval to leave town. Having gone one kilometer away, all those women and all the children who believed they were free from horror, were shot dead.
“A new wave of savagery is splashing against Croatia. Serb refugees who came to Split are giving horrifying testimonies. Isolated cases aside, for instance, that of the Serbian physician Dušan Mitrović, who had practiced medicine for 25 years in Livno and treated so many Croats. He was murdered after being forced to help kill his two children and wife, on 25 May 1942.”
(Jasenovac – The Sixth International Conference: Genocide and Crimes of the NDH Against Serbs, Jews and Roma in World War II: The Proceedings, pp. 349-353.)