- Vladimir Cvija from Zagreb, a survivor of a World War II concentration camp in Yugoslavia.
...Fifty years ago, the Croats took Branko Jungic from his Bosnian village and forced him to kneel on the bare earth at place called Jasenovac. Then they cut off the Serb's head with a saw. They did it quite openly. They even took photographs, one showing Jungic on his knees, his left arm extended to keep balance in the initial moments of agony, mouth open in horror as his uniformed tormentors posed proudly around him, the great saw already cutting into his flesh. Another snapshot shows the young man's severed head, a cloth cap perched above his eyes, a cigarette crudely pushed into his still open mouth. In the neighboring town of Banja Luka, they still keep the saw.
They display other implements on the site of the Jasenovac concentration camp; axes that were used to slice off the heads of women and children, a mass gallows, arm sheaths with knives attached - a German-made contraption - that allowed the Croatian Ustasha militia to cut the throats of their captives with the least physical effort...
Shortly before Yugoslavia fell apart once more, Ljubomir Ivanic, director of the Bosanske-Krajine archives in Banja Luka, let me read through some of the 50,000 German and Ustasha files abandoned by the retreating Wehrmacht in 1945.
Among those archives - housed in a former Austro-Hungarian army barracks that served as a Wehrmacht intelligence office in 1942 - I found hundreds of Croatian military orders appropriating the homes and property of Serbs. On those pages, Ustasha officers recorded with Teutonic thoroughness the gift to their loyal followers of farms and smallholdings from which the original Serbian and Muslim owners had been driven. "Cleansing" was the word used in the files, the documents written by the men who invented that dreadful expression.
