‘MOTHER, PLEASE DON’T LET US GO!’ Heartbreaking confession of granny Danica (92) who survived the horror of Jasenovac and Stara Gradiška (VIDEO)

Foto: Printskrin

 

She managed to survive both notorious camps, Gradiška and Jasenovac, but 79 years later she still has hard traumas. Her parents and her sister were brutally murdered there.

With trembling voice and tears in her eyes, holding her handkerchief, granny Danica started telling the story for Blic Žena.

Soon after that, there came the most fatal day of her life. She left her family home and slowly said goodbye to the family she would never see again.

The sinister announcement of everything was the morning when her brother Dimitrije left, as usual, to their garden to work, but he could not step further from the gate. Everything was occupied by the members of NDH. He came back home and Danica’s mother foresaw what destiny was waiting for them.

The mother told to the father:  ‘Kosta, they will take us all to the camps.’ And he replied: ‘And who can take me away from my house?’

Tomorrow morning there was a drummer walking through the village noticing the villagers to pack everything they owned, get the cattle and gather around near the church.

- There were so many people gathered around that morning, they made a line with around 500 households only from our village. And there were also Paučje, Čenkovo and Borovik. So we started our journey to Ljevanska varoš along with our cattle, down the road through the forest followed by only two members of NDH. So many people and cattle and only two of them, and we were going where we were being told’ Danica remembers that fear and obedience in the people who far larger in number did not try to oppose to only two aggressors who were taking most of them to their final eternal rest, because all that started the trip had to come back. Or so they thought.

Foto: Printskrin

 

Jela, take care of my childen

 And when they arrived in the late afternoon to Ljevanska varoš, the cattle wagons were waiting for them.

- Come on, come on, get in, we were being yelled at when we go there. Men were on one side, women and children on the other side. There were bars in the wagons and through them was the last time we saw our dad.   My brother, Dimitrije, went to the same wagon with him and that was when we set apart forever. ‘Take care of my Dimitrije’, cried my mother. ‘And you take care of my kids, Jela’, replied my father. Those were the last words they said before setting off to their eternal fatal destination, for most of us.

The trip to Jasenovac took three days and three nights. In the cattle wagons with no water and no food, in which people had to take care of their physiological needs, where women gave birth, some of them dying, it took strength to stand everything only to arrive to the hands of the aggressors who were preparing to torture you to death.

The first stop was Mlaka where all the girls with no children had to step out.

‘Mom, mom… there were cries, and sobs, and sorrow. Their mothers were left in the wagons and they had to be separated in order to go to work camps in Germany- Granny Danica continues in tears and trembling, but with great courage and wish to share her burden with us.

After that they continued their trip to Jasenovac, and when they finally reached this sinister place, they slept on the ground and the day after started their journey to Stara Gradiška. It was their final destination, where they awaited their destiny.

- Every day we were watching children being carried out dead on stretchers. They did not eat enough and we had diarrhoea, dysentery. It was pure Evil - Danica remembers the site she used to watch as a child and which she knew will be awaiting for her and her younger brother Boško and her older sister Zora, who were also in the camp with her mother, Jela and her grandmother, who unfortunately passed away very soon.

Mom, don’t let us go

The innocent children who survived the terrors and tortures and starvation were soon separated from their mothers and taken to camps to Zagreb and Sisak.

- My younger brother, Boško, and me held to my mother’s skirt and cried: Mom, don’t let us go, mum, don’t let us go! We are crying with her and she was crying with us and she didn’t want to let us go. And the man who came started kicking my mother and separating us from them. We stopped knowing anything, Danica says. She was crying now as she was crying then and I believe her daughter, Jaminka, was also crying, but also now late younger Danica’s brother, Bosko’s daughter, Jelena.  Everybody was clearly shaken while listening to the story of those two innocent children who were being taken away by force from their mother who was to be murdered eventually.

She and her younger brother, Boško, were taken to Zagreb then, where they were supposed to wait to be adopted by people who were not able to have children, so war orphans whose parents died by martyr’s death were well suited for adoption. However, they were saved from that by their eldest brother, Vojin, who was recruited to NHD as work force, but having escaped, took along his brother and sister and took them home, or to what was left of it. The empty house with no windows or doors completely ravaged but filled with painful memories for two young unprotected children. With only one straw mattress carried in so they would not sleep on the cold ground.

Our brother took us to a Grandma very soon. Her name was Roya Horvat and he asked her if she would accept us to be her servants. Our brother would take care of the pigs and I would milk the cows and carry milk. She accepted. We spend a very long period of time there- Danica Petrović continued her moving confession about fighting for life and then mentioned facing her biggest fear at the moment, the possibility of losing her younger brother, Boško, the only one who stayed with her through the life Golgotha, when there was a moment when he said while taking care of the pigs: ‘Keka, I will not be coming back.’

- I kept crying and crying and I didn’t want to lose him, lose him, too - Granny Danica was crying now as well as in that moment in the past while she was thinking that she was saying goodbye to her little brother.

-The pigs came back and he wasn’t there. I ran to the old well where he was looking after them and I saw him coming towards me and nothing mattered to me any more- she emphasized her love and attachment she had to her little brother. They left Roza together for a short period of time but still they came back to her and waited for the liberation.