Anna Lašová

“In the Jelisavec village, there were many Ustashi fighters. The Ustashi tortured my cousin. He was a remote cousin, but a cousin nevertheless. There was a feast, a nice karmaš, marry-go-round and all sorts of things. The Ustashi went rambling among the people and they would occasionally shoot their guns into the air. That cousin of mine approached them and told them: ‘my brother is also an Ustashi but you shouldn’t do things like that’. They took him away, tortured him, burned him and drove nails into his body. He was badly battered. Although he recovered from it, he was suffered a nervous breakdown and hanged himself.”

“Our neighbor was in the German army. He was a Croat but his mother was a Slovak originating directly in the village where my parents came from as well. His father was a Croat. Slovaks normally didn’t have to enlist for the two-year military service, but as he was of Croatian nationality, he had to enlist; he had to join the German army. He just went to the training. He had never really been in the war. He hadn’t even seen any dead. And then he just got home and was supposed to later go to war. He came home, but it was already at the time when if you met someone, you didn’t know whether he was a German or a partisan, because they went around in disguise. He slept at his aunt’s place because he was too afraid to sleep at home. And the next day he had to leave for the war. Behind our garden, there was a train station and a river right behind it. And he went along the tracks to his aunt’s place. On the tracks, he met a bunch of partisans disguised as Germans. As he was in the German army and because he thought that they were Germans, he joined them for a chat. They asked him about how many partisans he had killed or seen being killed. He told them that he had killed many partisans because he thought they were German soldiers. But they were partisans disguised as Germans. They let him go, but our village had been already occupied by the guerrillas, so they came for him later, took him on the outskirts of the village and shot him.”

“Behind our garden there was a Serbian village and the Germans moved all of its inhabitants out, they drove them away. I was just a kid then but I remember that one of the Serbian women had just given birth to a baby and that she was wearing it in her apron. She had just given birth and she immediately had to go on the road. They were not allowed to take anything with them. The villagers were driven out and some zágorci – zagorji were installed there instead – the Germans let them take the houses of the Serbs. As far as I know, none of the Serbs have ever returned. They were definitely sent to the gas chambers.”