Žarko Puhovski

"It's like when a war starts, you know the first dead and the second dead, the 155th dead is just a number. When so many of them died, Grandma Sreli would say here and there, she would say, "We have 14, you have 12, you have 16.". They have already been translated into numbers, because it simply cannot… we do not have the capacity to mourn for fifteen people. It's all luck, probably, but simply that fine scale "for number 3 I mourn a little more than for number 5, and for number 7...". No one has that, and an ordinary person would remember the first one or someone who was the closest in family and so on. But... that was too much. And that is what happened in a large number of those families. When my aunt Tanja came in 1959, she just asked "Do we have someone left?", and grandma said "No." Second name - no, third name... We were just crossing it out, so to speak. No, no, no. And she nodded her head, because it was expected that there was no one left simply because they are ours and, as is known, they liquidated ours."

"And let's say one of those truly tragic stories about how at one point they found out... because the camp was divided into different parts. There were these Croats who were mostly communists, suspected communists and so on, Serbs, Jews and so on, the Roma part was separated. And at one point, for the purposes of discussion, they shared a common kitchen, so it was known... it turned out that Serbs and Jews were getting more food than Croats. And then one of them said, "For God's sake, now we have in our country... again, the Croats have it the worst." So that after a while they realizes that those they couldn't see through the wire were always different, that is, that they kept the Croats in prison and for the most part they were not killed except on special occasions when they were... undisciplined or when there was information that someone... that someone's family was involved in actions against the Ustaše and the Germans. While the people on this other side... the population was changing, so to say demographically, so apparently they fed them a little better to keep them calm until they could do with them what they wanted to do with them. And of course he realized this after a while... they sad and uncomfortable. But this is is one such story that points to the, how can I say, dehumanization, systematic dehumanization that took place in the camp."