| Stara Gradiška | |
|---|---|
View of the Stara Gradiska concentration camp which was formerly an Austro-Hungarian fortress. |
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| Location | Stara Gradiška, Independent State of Croatia |
| Established | 1941 |
Stara Gradiška was the most notorious concentration and extermination camp in Croatia during World War II, mainly due to the crimes which were committed against women and children.[1] The camp was specially constructed for women and children[2] of Serb, Jew, and Romani ethnicity. It was established by the Ustaše (Ustasha) regime of the Independent State of Croatia ("NDH") in 1941 near the village of Stara Gradiška.[3] as the fifth subcamp of the Jasenovac concentration camp
According to the list of victims by name of KCL Jasenovac, the Jasenovac memorial site, which includes research until 2007, the names and data for 12.790 victims of the camp have been established.[4]
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The camp was guarded by the Germans' allies, the Ustasha and a few female Croatian troops. Inmates were killed using different means, including firearms, mallets and knives. At the "K" unit or "Kula", Jewish and Orthodox women, with weak or little children, were either starved and tortured at the "Gagro Hotel", a cellar which Ustaše Nikola Gagro used as a place of torture.[5] Other inmates in the Kula were poisoned with gas.
Gas experiments were conducted initially at veterinary stables near the "Economy", where horses and then humans were poisoned using sulphur dioxide and later Zyklon B[6]. Gassing was also tested on children in the yard, where the camp commandant, Ustaše sergeant Ante Vrban, viewed its effects[7]. Most gassing deaths occurred in the attics of "the infamous tower", where several thousand children from the Kozara region were killed in May, and 2000 more in June 1942[8][9][10]. Subsequently, smaller groups of 400-600 children, and a few men and women, were gassed[11][12][13]. At this trial, Vrban stated:
Witness Cijordana Friedlender[15] 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.
According to witness Milka Zabičić, the gassing stopped due to a scheduled visit by a Red Cross delegation in 1943, which did not arrive until June 1944[16].
Gas-vans were constructed to kill Jewish women and children who came to Stara Gradiška from camp Djakovo in June-July 1942. During Dinko Šakić's trial, witness Šimo Klaić[17] recalled a "green Thomas", a police-van whose exhaust was linked to its trunk.[18]
Witness Dr. Dragutin Skgratić[19] confirmed:
He (Šakić) 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'.
Stara Gradiška became notorious for the crimes committed against women and children. Examples included the torture that took place in cellar 3, the "Gagro Hotel", where inmates were starved, tortured and then strangled to death by a wire. In Šakić's trial, witness Ivo Senjanović 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 Danon[20] said:
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.
Several criminals stood out, including Antun Vrban, Nada Luburić, Maja Buzdon, Jozo Stojčić and especially, commandant and former-friar Miroslav Filipović-Majstorović, who killed scores of inmates with his bare hands, women and children included.
The treatment of inmates was so horrific that on the night of August 29, 1942, bets were made among the prison guards as to who could liquidate the largest number of inmates. Petar Brzica, one of the guards reportedly cut the throats of 1,360 prisoners with a butcher knife. A gold watch, a silver service, a roasted suckling pig, and wine were among his rewards.[21]
The women guards were sisters or wives of the male guards and were known for their cruelty, including Nada Tanić Luburić, sister of the first commandant of Jasenovac guard Maks Luburić, and wife of the second.
In early April 1945, when the partisans were fighting nearby Stara Gradiška, the Ustaše 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, like Šimo Klaić, who stressed in Šakić's trial that Lepoglava "was horrible, as if all evil from Stara Gradiska and Jasenovac had concentrated there", fled from the train cart in which they were to be transported to Jasenovac. Klaić later learned, as he testified in the court, that the other two carts in the transport were torched in Jasenovac [1].
The camp was liberated in April 1945 by the Red Army.
The detention facility was shut down in 1990. However, from October 1991 until July 1993, the Stara Gradiška prison was again re-opened by the Krajina Serbs, who captured and detained numerous Croats in the facility during the Croatian War of Independence.[22]