44 Months in Jasenovac

Egon Berger

• Publisher: Sentia Publishing
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9780998694825
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Historia de la educación

An eyewitness account of a prisoner in Jasenovac, a concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia during WW II. T his book is an authorized translation of the original book that was written in Croatian in 1966. What follows was written by the original publisher.

There is no stronger or more reliable material than the one that is born from one's own experience.

Eyewitnesses and direct participants provide us with not only the facts, but also that sublimely human spirit common to all happenings in which people participate. It doesn't matter that this account is about the fear that the people of Jasenovac experienced, or about the deeds of their torturers.

For every one hundred thousand people in the Jasenovac camp during its horrifying four-year existence, there was only one—literally one—who survived. Those were the odds in the balance of life and death: one hundred thousand dead and one alive.

And there is a witness, right in front of us, who found the strength to reminisce, to go back to the place of his torture, to break the psychological barriers, and to lead us step by step through his nightmare, through waves of terror that exceed every notion of horror. From the beginning of his time at Jasenovac to the end, Egon Berger was witness—and victim—to a rampage without limit. Of those who survived, he is the only one who told the story.

Berger does not bring us a literary masterpiece—he brings us only the experience, a story about forty-four months of his life in a camp, told simply. A story is enough—a story that calls images to mind and makes us tremble with the thought, "Are such things possible?" For myself and every person who had been to Jasenovac and lived, it is a miracle that we survived.

Yes, it is possible, it is real, and it is true.

A terror arose in front of us from the oblivion. It should not be forgotten. Share this record with future generations who will hopefully not know such terror.

Ivo Frol, 1966

I ARREST

The tramcar from Kustošije, where I had spent the night, stopped on the corner of Draškovićeve and Radićeve Street. The factory where I worked was at number 3 Radišinoj Street. In front of the workshop I noticed a suspicious man who looked like an agent, who were, at that time, chasing Jews and Serbians in the streets and deporting them to camps.

As soon as I entered the workshop, he came up to me and asked if I was the Egon Berger who worked there. I had to say yes. He told me to follow him to the police station, but when I started asking him questions, he revealed that he was taking me to a camp and that I should gather the things I might need there.

I gathered them as fast as I could, and he took me to Nova Ves, the jail where they held people before sending them to be captives of Jasenovac. We spent three days there, and on the fourth morning they took us to Zavrtnica Street, to the factory named Kristalum. There were sixty-three of us. None of us knew what awaited us. We thought that we would be forced to work for a time, which is not that bad. But then the guards handed us over to the Ustaše, who cussed and yelled at us, so we knew that it was going to be bad.

The floor was concrete, and only some of us had a blanket on which we could lie. We had to use the bathroom inside. The second morning, the doors opened and a new group of Jews came in. Jews were being rounded up everywhere, and they weren’t hard to find—they had to wear on their chest and back yellow rags with a big black letter Ž, which stands for Židov, or Jew in Croatian.

After eleven days, on September 10, we were loaded onto wagons and traveled through the night into the unknown.

II JASENOVAC

On September 11, 1941, forty of us arrived at Jasenovac. There were around two hundred well-armed Ustaše at the station. They sent us walking down a long road toward the woods. It was a hot day in autumn. We could not stop, even though the road was two miles long. It was really tiring, so we started throwing away our luggage, piece by piece.

We finally arrived. Just one look was enough to realize what it meant to be in a camp in the “new Europe” under German occupation. It was 1500 square feet surrounded by barbed wire. There were three shacks made of old wooden planks, and between every plank there was a gap one to two inches wide. It was obvious that the shacks were letting snow, wind, and rain inside.

In the first two shacks were around seven hundred Jews. They had come three days before us. They were the remaining captives from the island of Pag, where they had already suffered a great deal. They were afflicted with terrible hunger.

There were around six hundred Serbs in the third shack. Every shack could hold three hundred fifty people, so they were already above capacity. Our arrival doubled the number of occupants, so every captive had about fiften inches of room to lie. On shoulders, coat lapels, and clothes were sluggish lice, now moving from old to new captives.

The Ustaše had not yet totally robbed us, so we still had some food. One of my friends whom I had known since childhood came to me with tears in his eyes and begged me for some bread. I did not have any, so I gave him a piece of walnut cake. He greedily stuffed the big piece of cake in his mouth and ate as if nobody else in the world existed. Another man started collecting cake crumbles that had fallen onto the ground.

New groups were constantly coming through, and life became harder and harder.

III THE BIG DAM

At the end of September, the construction of the big dam started. It was also the start of the daily destruction of hundreds of lives.

We would wake up at two thirty in the morning. We would get some warm water in which we would put crumbs of tea, until we ran out. That only happened in the beginning. Later on they wouldn’t even give us any warm water. At around five we would start walking. They would beat us with gun stocks and scream at us as we walked the hour to the dam. The work would start at six and stop at ten, and then we would have a ten-minute break. After the break we would go back to work until twelve. Then we would walk back to the camp. We would have a couple of minutes to eat lunch and then we would go back to work. Our lunch consisted of two or three cooked potatoes. Some of them would be rotten, but we still ate them greedily as if they were not. That was how, with all that hard work, our resistance started breaking down.

The base of the dam had a surface about eighty feet wide. One prisoner would dig the dirt and throw it in a wheelbarrow, the second would drive it away, while the third would take a wooden bat and beat the dirt.

From time to time, we would find cabbage roots, carrots, or beets. It was such a delicacy for us. The grass and leaves that we ate much of the time to satiate the hunger was processed poorly by our bodies and made us sick. The Ustaše, even though they knew that they did not feed us anything, let rain fall on us and the lice crawl on us and and leave purulent wounds. They beat us and yelled at us, saying we were lazy and that we did not want to work.

New people arrived everyday. They came from a variety of religious and professional backgrounds. There were some prisoners from the jail in Koprivnica, masses of Serbian peasants, Croatian workers and intellectuals, and some others. There was no more space in the shacks to sleep. We would have to sit with our feet pressed together. The rain poured constantly, so there was no dry place in the shack. There was already over a foot of water flooding the cabin. Death was becoming more and more frequent. The dead people soon began to float around the shack. This was painful for us to see. Later on we did not feel that sad about the deaths because they occurred more and more frequently with each day. We were all aware that no one would make it out alive. We would not survive even a month if the human organism wasn’t strong, and there were cases in which people would shut down after five or six days. I did not fear that I would be floating any time soon.

Hunger came first. I was no longer a man who needed a warm room and a set table to enjoy lunch. All of us who were starving had only one aspiration in life: to eat. Our biggest wish was for bread. In all four years, among all the captives I encountered, that was our only thought. In the beginning I craved something sweet, but then I had only one wish—to fill my belly. Sometimes we would have bean soup for lunch. Even though we were insanely hungry, we still would try to stand at the end of the line, because at the bottom of the cauldron there were more beans.

At the beginning of our time at the camp, there were some individuals who had pride. They wanted to show that they did not care if they were first or last in line at the cauldron. This showed some human character. However, later, when the hunger became worse, we stopped being humans. To be apathetic meant to finish food fast, and to finish life fast.

I had a friend, Vilko, with whom I often hung out. He was one of my distant cousins, and we knew each other from our past lives. He had left his wife and child in Zagreb. He was exhausted from hunger, exertion, and the rain. He wished for death.

It was halfway through October, and we were both working on the dam. He dug the soil and I carried it away. There was a road on the other side of the dam where peasants drove by on their carts. One of them had just run over a dog. The dog was lying down, covered in blood. While I was coming back to the dam with the wheelbarrow, I remembered a book that I had read as a child written by Jack London. I remembered reading about how people, desperate with hunger, would slaughter their favorite dog and eat it. When I read the book, I did not think about the people who were hungry; I only felt sad for the dog. But when I saw that dog lying in front of me, I only felt one thing—my hunger.

I discreetly put the dog in the wheelbarrow so none of the Ustaše would see it. If they had seen it, I probably would have paid with my life. We could not even eat the roots that we found in the soil if they saw us.

I drove the dog in the wheelbarrow to Vilko, and we hid it under a bush. I told him to eat first, while I dug the soil to cover for him. I loaded the wheelbarrow with the soil and drove it away. When I came back I saw Vilko totally transformed. The food made him full, giving him hope and zest, and restored his will to live. We then traded places.

Three more friends ate with us. One of them was a lawyer from Zagreb, one was a manager, and the third was a man whom I did not know very well. He was very religious and had never tasted meat before. He ate with us, and he was happy because he had filled his belly.

Since the dog was young, he was little, so we could not invite anyone else. We did not feel disgusted, and the thought that the dog could be sick had not crossed anyone’s mind. I can still see in front of my eyes that disgusting red flesh, but at the time it was so delicious.

We kept our secret, thinking that there was no one else in the camp who ate dead animals. A couple of days later, I was walking next to an acquaintance from Nova Gradiška. He invited me to come with him. A couple of people were standing around a bush. I looked. It was a pig. I did not ask where it came from; I just ripped off a piece and ate it.

The number of people in the camp was growing, and the work on the dam was getting harder and harder due to the rain. The shacks were flooded, so we could not lie down. They were also full, so we could not sit in them anymore. We had to squat next to one another.

The mass murders and harrassment started in the beginning of October 1941. One rainy night, the Ustaše decided to send me and fifty other men to a place called Sic as punishment. Sic was a place out in the open contained by barbed wire. The enclosure was only twenty-four inches tall, so if somebody stood up, the wire would sting him in the back. We had to lie down for the two nights we were there.

At around eleven o’clock at night, the Ustaše brought another older man. They threw him in while laughing and making fun of him. Around three o’clock in the morning, Sergeant Prpic and his commander came to address us. We all had to stand, while a table and two chairs were set in front of us. There was a lamp on the table. The Ustaše were standing behind us with guns pointed at our backs. We tensely awaited what would happen.

Sergeant Prpic politely asked the old man to step up and sit in one of the chairs. Then he turned toward us and loudly said, “Gentlemen, I have the honor to present to you a great man! It is the man in front of you. I present Mr. Gavrančić, the head of the Hawk. I thought it would be nice to greet our noble guest, and you should feel honored to participate in the ceremony.” The old man had to participate in the ceremony, including kneeling, even though he was sixty-five.

One of the Ustaše brought two black coffees. We were waiting in anticipation for the events to follow. All of a sudden, the old man unbuttoned his shirt, stood in front of the Ustaše, and said, “Here, shoot me! I do not expect you to be merciful toward me! You can kill me, but you cannot kill what is inside me!”

The sergeant laughed cynically and said, “The Ustaše are not rude, and we do not kill! We give our enemies the opportunity to live, but they do have to be punished!” Then he brought the lamp toward the old man’s face and started pulling hairs one by one from his beard. For every hair that was pulled, the old man was forced to say, “Long live the Poglavnik! Long live Croatia!”

After the ceremony, the old man said to the sergeant, “Who did you think you were insulting when I had to yell ‘long live’ during my torture?” The sergeant was distracted and did not answer.

I worked twenty more days with the old man on the dam. He was tortured daily, and he had to work barefoot. He would spend his nights in the wire enclosure. He kept calm and proud and withstood the torture for twenty days.

It is amazing how a man gets used to a new way of living! There were people of different classes in the camp. For some time, I slept next to my old boss, Samuel Han. In our past lives, we did not hate nor overly sympathize with each other—we had a normal boss-employee relationship. But at the camp we were no longer a boss and his employee. We were friends. People who used to be treated with great respect forgot about it as soon as they came here.

Samuel was lying next to me, and he did not have anything to smoke. His first couple of days there, he was without cigars, but one day I saw him rubbing something between his fingers. We had nicknames for each other, and I asked him, “Šnule, what are you doing?” He showed me that he was rolling leaves because he could not survive without smoking. I felt sorry for him and decided to find something better for him to smoke. I picked up the butts of cigars from in front of the office of the Ustaše. Those were like delicacies.

Eventually, Samuel made a wooden pipe with which he would smoke leaves. He did not have anything to eat, because the Ustaše had taken everything from him. So he made an improvised coffin from the soil. Next he carved his monogram into it. It is strange how we had patience for these things, even though we expected death with our every step. Life no longer mattered to us, but some things were still interesting.

IV LUBURIĆ’S SPEECH

The river Strug was right next to the dam, and it had a lot of shells. We would eat them from time to time. It was a sort of flat shell, which tasted very good. When we could not find shells, we would fry snails on the grill.

The work became harder and harder every day. We did not have as much strength as we used to. Just walking the road to the dam, which was two miles away, was a real struggle. From the camp to the dam we had to cross the water and over several gullies. The Ustaše had fun by hitting us with their gun stocks. Those who fell under those hits did not get up. Soon, the way was filled with corpses that we would have to walk over, as if we were walking over a bridge. There were corpses around the shacks as well. The dead bodies of our fathers and brothers were helping us, so that we would not have to walk with the water at our hips, but only to our knees.

The situation was so hopeless that people stopped caring about food. This was the first time that I had seen people dying from hunger. Humans who used to look extremely skinny started to look better. Their cheeks became rounded, with their cheekbones sticking out. At first we did not know why this happened, but soon we found out. Every man who looked like that would be found three or four days later dead in a bush somewhere.

One October day, we received a command to come back to the camp because someone was giving a speech. On our way to the camp, the Ustaše were unexpectedly nice to us. When we arrived, we stayed lined up. We were anxiously asking ourselves what was about to happen. Would it be good or bad?

The doors opened, and Vjekoslav “Maks” Luburić, who we did not yet realize was the camp commander, appeared. Our first impression of the man-beast was that he would be our savior, our father. He stepped on the table and looked at us as if we were the living dead. Then he started his speech: “Humans as you are, you should rest, and be nurtured. If we were in peaceful times, we would be able to provide that, but right now we need you to work. I have taken over the administration of the camp; I will take over care for you as well. We, the independent state of Croatia, will make this camp better than any other country’s. You will get bathrooms, a library, a movie theater, and everything that is needed for you to enjoy your time here. We will create a new camp, a working camp. I know that you have been treated poorly, but we will fix that.”

A lot of things were promised at the time. We were filled with joy, and felt pity for our friends who had died, who did not live to see the changes.

The next day, we got cards on which to write. We had to write our first and last names and what we wanted sent from our houses or from our friends. Happy in the thought that we would be able to eat and dress, we ordered a lot of things.

On the third day they chose experts from different professions to help build the new winter camp. It would be built on the property of a brickyard that was owned by Ozren Bačić, the previous commander of the camp. We were so overwhelmed, we moved there immediately.

V THE SMALL DAM

First the experts left, followed by their assistants. Nobody did anything at the camp, and we could not go to the big dam because it was flooded. Then the older and sicker people were moved to a new camp in the complex called Krapje. There were also some groups of prisoners who had come from the camp in Gospic. My two brothers, who were taken before me, were also there, after having gone through the camps in Slano, Gospić, and Jastrebarsko.

They took all the older and weaker prisoners. There were around 1,600 of them. A lot of them had feigned illness in order to go with the truly sick and old, even though they were not sick. Our barracks looked as if they were floating—they sat halfway in water.

A group of people, each lacking the vitality of life, went to the new camp with the hope of rehabilitation. I said good-bye to a lot of my friends, wishing them a quick recovery and telling them I hoped they would return home soon. At the time, we still harbored a foolish hope that we might be set free.

Something unusual happened when the gates of the camp opened. The Ustaše went around the group of poor and suffering people and started hitting them with gun stocks and yelling at them as if they were animals. A lot of them tried to come back into the camp, but they were prevented from doing so. The Ustaše tried to prevent everyone in the procession from escaping. The gun stocks did their work. Soon, the water became bloody and dark red. We could see brain matter floating on the surface.

I was horrified. I was watching through the window of the barracks. I saw two brothers, who were brought from Zenica, with their father. The old man was very weak, so he went with the group to Krapje. The sons, not knowing what awaited them, joined him so they could stay together. One of the Ustaše came up to one of the brothers and broke his head with the gun stock. He fell in the water and stayed floating on the surface. His father and brother tried to pull the corpse from the water. Another of the Ustaše saw them. He threw both of them down and drowned them until they sank. The rest of the procession went to Krapje. Later we found out only a hundred arrived of the 1,600 who left.

The rest of us who stayed in the camp started working on a new dam called “the small dam,” which protected the new winter camp at the brickyard from the Sava River. An Ustaše engineer, Beretino, was in charge of building the small dam. He was the same guy who was in charge of building the big dam. We’d had tools for building the big dam, but the flood had taken them, so we were left with nothing to work with. Even though Beretino knew that we had no tools, he said that the dam would be completed in eight days.

There were 1,900 of us in the new camp, Jasenovac II. The road that we had to walk every day was torture. The dam was two and a half miles away from the camp. We would go in long rows, mostly barefoot. We started at the end of October, and the building of the dam lasted three weeks. We had to walk through flooded meadows with water to our chests. We got hit by gun stocks so many times, it started to become normal to us; and at the end of the day we would talk to each other about how many times we’d gotten hit: “I got hit only twice in my head,” or “I got hit only once in my back.”

We would come to the small dam all beaten up. Many stayed at the d...