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BISHOP ATANASIJE JEVTIĆ
JASENOVAC — A MARTYRED TOWN
1990
Foreword
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Camp VIII in Donja Gradina on the Bosnian side of the river Sava, opposite Jasenovac, just behind the place where the river Una joins the river Sava . When one crosses the bridge on the Sava and the Una from Jasenovac, the district of Bosanska Gradina begins just left towards southeast, which occupies over 125 hectares, that is, the whole area of a big bend of the Sava (opposite the village of Košutarice, beneath Jasenovac). Gradina was not really a “concentration camp” but only a mass execution place near Jasenovac, i.e. “reception camp” for Serbian slaves brought from Bosnia and „NDH“ (abbreviation for “Nezavisna država Hrvatska”, Independent State of Croatia), which were to be killed by Ustashas. This was a place, in a big forest, for a direct liquidation of prisoners, who were transported from Camp III in Jasenovac, or after being captured in the country side, were lead in columns to the execution place in Gradina. This was done because there were so many newly arrived prisoners that the Ustasha executioners had to send them direct to the execution and burial. At first, it was the prisoners from across the river Sava that were brought to Gradina, and later on the Bosnian Serbs from the slopes of mount Kozara and Bosanska Krajina, where as a result of Ustasha's terror, 140 Serbian villages on the slopes of mount Kozara were deserted and devastated, whose population was clapped in the Jasenovac concentration camps as well as in other camps (Cerovljane near Bosanska Dubica, Mlaka and Jablanac, Stara Gradiška, Novska, Prijedor). 65,000 people from mount Kozara were imprisoned in Jasenovac and other nearby camps, amongst which there were 23,850 children from cradle age to the age of 15.
In the forests of Donja Gradina, on the Bosnian bank of the river Sava, Ustashas carried out the largest mass executions of the Serbs, so that Gradina is the largest mass grave, or more precisely, it is a set of 50 mass graves. Here we shall quote a typical description of a mass execution place in Gradina, given by Dr. Nikola Nikolić (in the already mentioned book The Jasenovac Death Camp ): “Ustashas have chosen Gradina for mass slaughter for many reasons, the most important being its isolated position, good natural seclusion, and inaccessibility to unwanted persons. There were no settlements nearby, the fields were surrounded by willow shrubs and trees, and Gradina was totally inaccessible from three sides: towards Jasenovac (to the north) there was the Sava, towards Uštica there was the Una and towards Košutarice there was again the river Sava, which here made a sharp turning from north to southeast. Gradina appeared as if it were a peninsula. Towards villages Draksenići and Međeđe, Ustashas secured themselves against the partisans with the rows of trenches, wolf dens and bunkers. It was easy to cross from Jasenovac camp to Gradina by a ferry (across the river Sava ). It was easy to kill undisturbed in this wasteland, using the cold steel, without anyone having a slightest idea of what was going on there, and what is more, even when a victim screamed as loudly as possible, no one could hear it. This was the secret of the terrible Gradina. The killings were done with the cold steel so that the shots would not be heard... Only on occasion some were shot with a revolver on the embankments of the river Sava ...
People chosen for slaughter, came by foot or by train to “Gaj” (Grove) which was located just in front of the camp. The prisoners would calmly wait for the ferry. A narrow path (“death path”) led to the Sava , to a ferry. The ferry was an ordinary wooden raft, about 6 meters wide and 16 meters long, and was driven by a thick steel rope from one strong concrete base to another one on the opposite river bank. Ferry would transport 150 – 200 people, who were collected by the Ustasha patrols and were led along the “path of moans” towards a place between the Una and the Sava's bend, opposite Košutarice, to so-called “friar Satan's poplar”. The first slaughters were done there. One can still find (today) 115 mass graves. Ustashas ploughed over those necropolises with a tractor in 1945 in order to hide the evidence of mass crimes.
When a smaller group, of about 200 – 400 people, would arrive to Jasenovac camp – men, women and children, or when the slaughter had to be postponed for one day because there was not enough cutthroats or graves, then the victims would be locked up in the house of Pero Vukić, whose yard, with 5-6 plum trees, was surrounded with barbed wire and protected by the Ustasha guards. Very often, the prisoners could see the groups of small children and women in that horrible yard, standing numb with fear while awaiting the death, which they could only feel the premonition of... At first, people were led at night from that ghastly house, which faced the river Sava, that is, the camp, to the “poplar”, in the middle of the “field” where they were slaughtered and buried, expanding this graveyard deeper and deeper in Gradina.
The unfortunate owner of the house had been taken to Zemun earlier on, with his wife and three children, where his wife and children were killed, and he was transported back to Jasenovac by the “horror train” and then to Gradina, exactly to the place where he was taken away. He was slaughtered in “Čalinka”, which was a large terrain, called “Čalinka”, towards Košutarice, in Gradina, on the right bank of the river Sava, which was picked as an ideal place for “silent” mass executions.”
This is what Dr. Nikolić wrote about Gradina camp , who himself was detained in the Jasenovac concentration camp. Here is what he wrote about he same Gradina, in the first years after the war, after he had visited the Jasenovac concentration camp.
“When I visited Gradina after the liberation (on 20 April 1947), with my son Sergej, who took the photos of the camp (i.e. Jasenovac), Gradina and Uštice, I found four large fields with gigantic necropolises, “the people's graveyard” which were dug up transversally. The vegetation on those necropolies was totally different and lower than the surrounding one. The villagers showed me the places at the top of each gigantic necropolis which had no grass on them, although it was already three years since the last slaughter. I looked carefully at the places at the top of each gigantic grave, and the villagers were right when they had said that that mass slaughters had been carried out there. We explained to the astonished villagers, who due to the horror had already started to devise some mystical fantasies, that slaughters could have happened there, and that iron from the human blood, which has accumulated there, is hindering the grass from growing, and besides, the soil mixed with blood becomes as hard as cement.
Those gigantic necropolis appear horrifying, sank into the soil, with extraordinary low vegetation, far from the settlements. An indescribable feeling overcomes a person, and a thought of the great suffering which numerous victims took on at these places of crime, offers itself. In the first “Čalinka”, i.e. in the “people's grave”, I counted 14 gigantic graves 60 – 80 meters long, 6 meters wide and 4 meters deep. In the second “Čalinka” there were gigantic necropolises, “the brotherly necropolises” of Serbs and Croats and a human slaughterhouse called “the Bloody pear”. The large field called “Liman” bordered with “Čalinka”, and with the Sava to the east. This filed had about 200 gigantic necropolises. On one river bank “Čalinka”, the “necropolis of the communists”, 14 chains were taken off from the willow trees, which had been there until 20 June 1947. Those chains were carried by the imprisoned communists, who were later slaughtered, and some of them were buried with chains.
From a “Čalinka” to the east, just on the bend of the river Sava, whence looking diagonally from across the Sava, a church in Košutarice can be seen, there is the deepest part of river, called “Liman”. The riverbank is very steep there, overgrown with trees and bushes, intertwined with blackberries and weeds. It is interesting that the wild grapevine was found there, too. This was the place that Ustashas chose to throw live people into the river Sava . Most of the victims were the communists, whereby 10 of them would be tied to a metal rail, 5 – 7 meters long (the railway rails), and were thrown into the depths of the river Sava – “the Communist bank.” Of course, they never came to surface again. This was an Ustasha's new, original, bestial way of drowning live people. The long rails that were found with the chains tied to them are indisputable evidence of Ustashas' crimes which are beyond description.
A little farther down, we found a place from which the Ustashas were throwing the ashes of the burnt up people into the river Sava . Before their escape from there in 1945, in an attempt to hide the evidence of their crimes, Ustashas were burning the corpses and throwing the ashes into the river Sava . About two carloads of these ashes remained on the riverbank to the present day. One could still find half-burnt skulls and vertebrae. Many children, who were murdered by Ustashas on the “Liman”, and whose bones were found on the bank of the river, were buried, later on, in a common grave.
The local villagers showed us a pear tree, under which the Ustashas demonstrated their slaughtering skills. The tree had been cut, and the sprouts came out of the tree stump, which are several meters long today. A vast graveyard spread around it. A place called “Šib” (bush) spread out from there, which consisted of several parcels called by the same name. The first parcel in Šib had 14 gigantic graves, and a second one had 20. Typical parallelograms could be seen all over the place: 70 x 80 x 6 meters, and besides them a barren slaughter place – “heminic fires” (bloody fires). And so on and on as long as one's eyes can reach; one can see only the monuments of Ustashas' crimes, suffered by our people.
In front of us lay the carbonized trees and low grown vegetation, typical of the burnt ground. Here, there, everywhere one can see only burial mounds, the settled ground under which numerous bones of the victims lie, and again “the heminic fires”. There is a rusty cauldron, in which the human flesh was boiled into soap. We can see the old tractor and a steamroller, used by Ustashas to plough and roll over the graves before they escaped, in order to hide somehow the evidence of their unprecedented crimes. We also saw a tall willow tree, from whose thick branches stuck out the big nails and chains by which they used to hang the live people, leaving them to die slowly from hunger, while they barbecued the lambs below the victims, made orgies and told cannibalistic jokes. We also saw a bloody “children's willow tree”, now dried and covered with mushrooms.
All this was shown to us by the local villagers, who have returned to their homes after the Ustashas run-off (after 1945). They found puddles of blood and still warm, massacred bodies of the martyrs.” (pp. 419-421, published in Sarajevo , 1975).
This is how the martyr Bosanska Gradina (Bosnian Gradina) looked like as an Ustasha's genocide “death camp” for all the Serbs and other patriots. Today, it is a national park, surrounded by woods, with forty visible arranged very big mass necropolises , although the whole of terrain in Donja Gradina is one big, maybe the biggest Serbian mass Necropolis. According to the data collected by the Serbian veterans from Bosnia, 360,000 (three hundred and sixty thousand) human beings were killed and buried in Gradina., which can be also determined by the number of mass graves and the proportional number of skeletons in each of them.. Namely, it was established that the Ustashas often buried still alive and half-dead people in very deep graves, so that they placed 12 to 15 people, in a vertical position, on 1 square meter, which were then killed off from above with mallets. Ustashas also boiled the corpses in cauldrons, making them into soap, and the bones were driven away in small carts and then thrown into the river Sava . Thus, a few years ago, when the water level dropped drastically during the summer draughts, several places were found downstream with layers of human bones in the river mud and sand. By making aerial photographs of the terrain, it was established that there are more undiscovered mass graves on the territory of Bosanska Gradina . Tito's government prohibited more detailed investigation on the territory of Bosanska Gradina in 1960.
Everything mentioned above, this short description of the Jasenovac concentration camp clearly shows what kind of horrible “death factories” were founded by demonic Ustashas in their bloody „Independent State of Croatia“, mainly for the extermination of the Serbian orthodox people, and along with them, for the liquidation of the Jews, Gypsies, as well as Croats or any other Yugoslavs, who opposed the Ustashas in any way.
Jasenovac death camp, although accidentally, was built and set out in the shape of a huge Cross : from the village of Krapje in the west, across Jasenovac in the middle, to the village of Mlaka and Gradiška in the east; and from the Camp I in Bročice in the north, again across Jasenovac and the river Sava to Bosanska Gradina in the south. In that Cross , under the ground lies our largest City.
For us, the orthodox Christians, this is not the “city of the dead”, but the City of the Living , because for God, all the martyr victims from Jasenovac are alive. The innocent victims in the Great Martyred Jasenovac live in our hearts and souls, in the prayer remembrance and mentioning. All of them, together with us, are looking for the resurrection of dead and the life of the age to come.