Stara Gradiška concentration camp

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Stara Gradiška was the fifth subcamp of the Jasenovac concentration camp, established in 1941 to the east of the main camp near the village of Stara Gradiška. The camp was specially constructed for women and children of Jews, Gypsies, Serbs, and anti-fascist Croats.

Eventually more than 50,000 men, women and children were incarcerated and then massacred by the Ustaše in the medium camp and guarded by Germans and a few female Croatian Ustasha troops. All of the women guards were sisters or wives of the male guards and they were known throughout the camp for their cruelty. Nada Tanić Luburić, sister of the first commandant of Jasenovac Maks Luburić, and wife of the second was personally pointed out as one of the diabolical female Ustaše guards in Stara Gradiška.

Contents 1 The systematic destruction of inmates 2 Cruelty 3 The clearing of camp 4 The victims

[edit] The systematic destruction of inmates

The inmates of Stara Gradiska were liquidated by the Ustase in many ways: Firearms, mallets, knives, etc.

The most notorious ways of liquidation in camp, however, were those which were devised at the "K" unit or "Kula", where Jewish and Orthodox women, with weak or little children, were either starved and tortured at the "Gagro Hotel", a cellar which Ustase Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture. Other inmates in the Kula were poisoned in with gas:

The initial gas experiments were conducted at the veterinary stables near the so-called Economy, where horses and then humans were poisoned via sulphur dioxide and later with Zyklon B, which was also tested on children in the yard, where the commandant Vrban, who was in charge of the gassing, viewed its effect. The gassing mainly took place in the attics of "the infamous tower", where a large group composing of some several thousands of children from Kozara were killed in May 1942, and 2000 more in June. Shortly thereafter, smaller groups of 400-600 children, and a few men and women, were also gassed. Vrban stated in his trial:

"Q. And what did you do with the children

A. The weaker ones we poisoned

Q. How?

A. We led them into a yard... and into it we threw gas

Q. What gas?

A. Zyklon."

A witness confirms from her angle:

"During my captivity at camp, especially from May to the end of 1942, the Ustase brought large shipments of Serb women and children (from Kozara). They instantly split the children from their mothers,and sent the women to labor in Germany. If some women were not able to work, they were murdered, as well as did their children. The children were in the ages of two months to 10-12 years. Nutrition and care for the children were horrible. Newborn infants were not allowed to receive any food and died of starvation, other caught dysentery from the spoiled food...the children slept on the floor, half-naked. 30-40 children would die each day. In July, the Ustase picked 2000 of the children...concentrated them in one of the rooms and strangled them with poison gas...once the children were dead they tossed the bodies in the yard, in a pile...in many other cases, the bodies remained in the yard for several days"

(Qtd. "Zlocini Okupatora Nijhovih Pomagaca Harvatskoj Protiv Jevrija". Pages 144-145)

Witness Cijordana Friedlender testified:

"At that time fresh women and children came daily to the Camp at Stara Gradiska. About fourteen days later, Vrban [Commandant of the Camp] ordered all children to be separated from their mothers and put in one room. Ten of us were told to carry them there in blankets. The children crawled about the room, and one child put an arm and leg through the doorway, so that the door could not be closed. Vrban shouted: 'Push it!' When I did not do that, he banged the door and crushed the child's leg. Then he took the child by its whole-leg, and banged it on the wall till it was dead. After that we continued carrying the children in. When the room was full, Vrban brought poison gas and killed them all"

(Qtd. Shorthand notes of the Ljubo Milos case, p. 292-293)

According to eyewitness Milka Zabicic, the gassing stopped due to a red cross delegation in 1943, which did not come until June 1944.

Additionaly, gas-vans were constructed for the need of liquidating Jewish women and children which came to Stara Gradiska from camp Djakovo in June-July 1942. Witness Simo Klaic recalled it in the Dinko Sakic trial as "green Thomas", a police-van whose exhaust was linked to its trunk.

Witness Dr. Dragutin Skgratic confirmed:

"He (commandant Dinko Sakic) directed his guards to pack women and children into the vans, fitted a rubber hose from the exhaust to the interior and drove around and around the camp until the passengers were dead, 'They killed at least half the group like this as soon as they arrived"

(Qtd. statement to the press during the Dinko Sakic case, new-york times, May 2nd, 1998: "War crimes horrors revive as Croat faces a possible trial", by Chris Hedges)

[edit] Cruelty

Stara Gradiska was the most notorious camp in the Jasenovac complex besides the main camp (Ciglana), this was mainly due to the crimes which were committed against women and children, during which several criminals stood out: Antun Vrban, Nada Luburic, Maja Buzdon, Jozo Stojcic and especially, commandant and former-friar Miroslav Filipovic-Majstorovic, which was extremely notorious for his time in Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska, killing scores of inmates with his bare hands, women and children included.

The cruelty was increased, however, during torture that took place in cellar 3, the Gagro Hotel, where starved inmates were tortured and then strangled to death by a wire. In the Dinko Sakic trial, witness Ivo Senjanovic recalled how people were locked there without food or water: "The people were gradually dying. It was horrible to hear them cry for help."

As for the conditions, witness Cadik Dannon, in his book "smell of human flesh" said that

At once we spread our blankets and lay down to recover our strength. Around noon they drove us out into the yard and distributed the portion of cattle turnip with water without salt or grease; everything was the same as in Jasenovac. Immediately after the lunch, they thrust us into the dungeon and locked us

[edit] The clearing of camp

In early April 1945, the partisans were fighting nearby Stara Gradiska, and thus the Ustase began clearing the camp, killing some of the inmates and transporting others to Lepoglava and from there to Jasenovac, where they were to be killed, several survivors, alike Simo Klaic, who stressed in Sakic's trial that Lepoglava "was evil, as if all evil from Jasenovac and Stara Gradiska concentrated there", fled out of the train cart in which he was to be transported towards Jasenovac, he later learned, as he testified in the court, that the other two carts in the transport were torched in Jasenovac. The camp was liberated in April 1945 by the Red Army.

It is not to be confused with the prison in Stara Gradiška that existed after 1945.

[edit] The victims

In Stara-Gradiska, multiple women, children, and men too, were exterminated. Their number at about 50,000. As part of the Jasenovac complex, Stara Gradiska is crucial to the determination of the Jasenovac victim count.

According to the Yugoslav state-commission, it has been established that 500,000 victims parished in the Jasenovac camps. Menachem Shelach found the numbers reliable and citated them in the "encyclopedia of the holocaust" and in his book "History of the holocaust: Yugoslavia". Those numbers are mentioned in several other essays from Vad Va-Shem and the Simon-Weisentall center. In further inquisition, it has been revealed that 300,000 corpses were identified across the camp, especially such who surfaced from the Sava. A member of this new commission, which also exhumed the bodies in Aushcwitz, said that the number 600,000 offered by the State-commission in reliable and that the number 700,000 can be considered realistic, he further spoke of the figures of 800,000, which are citated by Jasa Romano in "the Jews og Yugoslavia: freedom fighters and victims of Genocide 1941-1945". The latter calculation is presented as an attempt to inflate the figures due to nationalism. In anyhow, the number of Jews who perished has been determined by the committee of Yugoslavia's Jewish communities and by Yad-VaShem as 20,000-25,000. The number of Roma victims remains debated, but many witnesses and documents relate to almost all of the gypsies present in the NDH, numbering at 40,000. The number of Croats is between 8000 to 15,000.

Several other sources blame these figures in being nationalism-motivated. Josip Pecaric made a list counting 18,000 victims, but the list relates to Croats whose names start from the letter P only. Other lists, all around 70,000 to 80,000, exist nowadays in the Jasenovac memorial, the belgrade museum of holocaust and others. Franjo Tudjman had the much lower number of 40,000, but his figures are rejected by the name-lists and of his groundless holocaust revisionism. Statistic calculations were made by Vladimir Zerjavic and Boglijub Kovacevic, who estimated that the number of Yugoslav victims in Yugoslavia is only one million. Zerjavic went further to calculating the number of victims of Jasenovac as 70,000 an than as 80,000 (in the claim that the increase is more "humane"). Kovacevic criticizes those figures as he did not try to calculate the number of victims in Jasenovac, and thus accuses Zerjavic of nationalism. Zerjavic uses Tudjman's books as a source of historical background. Additionaly, Zerjavic and Kocevic could easily manipulate the number of victims, since every slight mistake boarders in substantial gap in the figures. One such a mistake is calculating the gap between the different censuses by applying identical growth rates over different populations, that breed in a different rate. Serbian sources hold different figures. This mistake led to several errors: the number of Roma listed in Bosnia before the war is one, and the number of Jewish victims in Jasenovac is 18,000, in contrast to the aforementioned calculation made by the council of Yugoslav Jewish-communities.

If so, than the number of Jasenovac victims could never be determined, and te figures move between few tens of thousnads to over a Million. Yet it appears that the realistic numbers are between 85,000 and 500,000. At large, Croatian and Us-oriented information speak of the lower-figures, while Serbian and Jewish sources tend to put the higher figures. Anyway, 80,000 deaths were determined and documented, and it is fairly possible that there are many more.