Hey everyone. If you're watching this on the day that it comes out, it's holocaust memorial
day and in honour of the victims of that most horrible crime I'd like to read an extract from
44 months in Jasenovac by Egon Berger.
Jasenovac is not that famous I think outside of the former Yugoslavia. It was an
extermination camp and concentration camp run by the fascist Ustaša regime who were
trying to create an independent Croatia out of the rubble of Yugoslavia,
and for a while, there's no doubt about it, it was one of the most horrible places you
could possibly be. Serbs, Roma, Bosnians, Croatian opponents of fascism and of course
Jews, like Egon, were put to death in their thousands, thousands upon thousands. As you
can tell from the title of the book, through the twists and turns of fate, poor Egon managed
to be there for 44 months, eventually surviving and escaping as the camp was being liberated by
Yugoslavian partisans and it's on the night of his escape that i'd like to pick up poor Egon's tale.
"When you wander like this in the moonlight, every tree looks like a man, and every bush looks like
someone squatting in the grass waiting to catch you. I snuck and crawled for over an hour, holding
a small knife at the ready. All of a sudden I saw a human figure hunched on the ground. I came
closer and shook him with the knife in my hand. The stooped man didn't move. I thought that he
could be one of the prisoners. Perhaps he had been wounded managed to crawl here, and died. I thought
about taking his suit, because mine was completely soaked. Then I noticed that he was breathing.
I held his head and said, 'If you are a prisoner, don't be afraid. I ran from Kožara as well'.
When he lifted his head we recognised each other immediately. It was Stojan, who had been at Kožara
with me for three years. His neck and chest were all covered in blood. He told me that he'd seen
the Ustaša all around, but he did not know how to swim, so he had lost all hope of salvation.
He drank all the poison, which he had with him, but it did not work because he had
eaten a lot the night before and had vomited everything up. Then he'd taken a piece of wood,
because he did not have anything else, and started to cut his throat. That's when I'd found him".
What a harrowing uh tale, what a horrible story. When I read that,
it it totally took my breath away. First because, if your preferred option is to slit your throat,
alone, cold, wet in the in the forest at night,
just with a stick that you found on the ground, if that's your preferred option, then it it says
everything you need to know about the horrors of Jasenovac and being a prisoner there.
Secondly, because my grandad was called Stojan and he was also a prisoner of war during world war
2. Now not at Jesenovac, we believe he was a german prisoner not an Ustaša prisoner,
but I couldn't help but wonder because we know so little of my grandad's time in prison,
I just couldn't help but wonder, was that my grandad Stojan? Was that him? I finished the book
right there and then. It's not a huge book but I had to finish the uh the whole thing. As it would
turn out it wasn't my grandad. There's a picture of Egon and Stojan with some partisans as they've
been liberated from the camp, and it's just not my grandad Stojan, and it's a different one.
But it made me think of him though and just the absolutely horrible time he must have had.
Indescribably horrible really, and just how lucky I am to live in the peaceful time that I live
in. You know, my life is is just full of so much amazing things that when my grandad was young...
well he was just having a different time wasn't he? It's impossible to describe.
I don't know what happened to Stojan in this book. He did survive the war and I hope that
he regained a little bit of love for life, you know. I hope he got married,
raised a family, maybe had some grandkids, like my grandad Stojan. Who knows, but that's what i hope.