Letter from Jasenovac
Communist activist Ivica Sabljak was detained in the Stara Gradiška detention camp in order to find out about this terrifying information, who smuggled a message that reached his family, and later to the partisans, at the double bottom of the jam jar. The packages were banned in the concentration camp, the bread would be sliced, and jars with marmalade were opened. Maja Kacan, the curator of the Spomen-Jasenovac area and the author of the exhibition emphasized that this testimony, this letter belongs to the rarely preserved documentation of Ustasha death camps because most of them were destroyed by administrations during a panic escape from the same ends of the Second World War.
The prisoner of Stara Gradiška camp was Ivica Sabljak, communist, activist, during 1944, the smugglers of the letter Katica Bukovac, who delivered them to the Zagreb Camp Committee for help to camps. These letters, actually these messages written on pieces of paper, today, apart from the natural testimonies of the survivors of the inmates are the only real pictures of what happened in the collection and labor camps of the NDH.
The Jasenovac camp, modeled on the Third Reich concentration camp, was like other camps in the the territory of NDH under the command of the Ustasha Control Service, or its Office III - the Ustasha Defense, established in June 1941, responsible for concentration camps, their organization, maintenance, security and procedure against detainees. It was a multi-purpose camp, at the same time collecting and transitory (part of the detainees were sent to forced labor in other camps in occupied Europe), and working (the largest factory in NDH with free labor), and punishments (salted by opponents of the Ustasha the regime, especially the communists and anti-fascists, and for the retaliation and members of their families, regardless of their racial or ethnic affiliation), but it was primarily a death camp.
There were no gas chambers in the Jasenovac detention camp, people in this Ustasha camp were killed in a primitive manner, slaughter, physical beatings, metal molasses, starvation and heavy physical work. Ustash propaganda, the collecting camp represented a working and educational establishment, ignoring the number, purpose and purpose of the camp where people died in inconceivable ways, many of hunger, illness, malnutrition, or physical effort. Mass executions were a daily occurrence, Jasenovac execution sites decreased the bank of the Sava River, as well as forests Stara Gradiska.
Ivica Sabljak described in one of his messages the day when the Nazis came to his camp, several senior officers. The highly-skilled SS brigadiers kept themselves in the killer. Their elimination of the Jews was pure, precise, and its mechanism was extremely effective, but also human. The senior SS officer threatened the way in which the Ustashas (for their barbers) killed their victims, therefore without gas chambers, without the selection, disposal and sorting of clothes, footwear, gold usually in teeth (17 tons delivered to Berlin only from Auschwitz, gold extracted from human toothbrushes), the most primitive possible ways, the ways they were described in a simple sentence - butchery.
The aggravated Nazis kept, according to Ivica Sabljak's testimony, handkerchiefs on their mouths and publicly denounced the manner, the execution of mass killing, the execution of males and the slaughter of people who had been pawned like pigs. As a pig, a highly ranked SS said that to be completely precise, he was one of the active participants in mass executions and he came to Jasenovac with the explicit order of Fuhrer to turn a more efficient and faster-collecting camp into a factory of death.
Jasenovac was a concentration camp of the Holocaust, the camp was for its brutality shocked and Nazis, camp in which he practically exterminated an entire people, the Roma, the camp at the end which killed 19 006 children, children aged seven to seventeen years.
These children are these letters, and these testimonies are important, children who are slaughtered, not quenched with gas. Because of these children and that horror that we remember today, it's important to bow your head and it's important to accept the truth. The truth is just one and she's terrible. And the truth is in the letters Ivica Sabljka, communists and activists, a man who is at the end and I ended up by the Ustasha knife.