44 Months in Jasenovac

By Egon Berger

An eyewitness account of a prisoner in Jasenovac, a concentration camp in the former Yugoslavia during WW II. This book is an authorized translation of the original book that was written in Croatian in 1966. What follows was written by the original publisher. 

There is no stronger or more reliable material than the one that is born from one’s own experience.

Eyewitnesses and direct participants provide us with not only the facts, but also that sublimely human spirit common to all happenings in which people participate. It doesn’t matter that this account is about the fear that the people of Jasenovac experienced, or about the deeds of their torturers.

For every one hundred thousand people in the Jasenovac camp during its horrifying four-year existence, there was only one—literally one—who survived. Those were the odds in the balance of life and death: one hundred thousand dead and one alive.

And there is a witness, right in front of us, who found the strength to reminisce, to go back to the place of his torture, to break the psychological barriers, and to lead us step by step through his nightmare, through waves of terror that exceed every notion of horror. From the beginning of his time at Jasenovac to the end, Egon Berger was witness—and victim—to a rampage without limit. Of those who survived, he is the only one who told the story.

Berger does not bring us a literary masterpiece—he brings us only the experience, a story about forty-four months of his life in a camp, told simply. A story is enough—a story that calls images to mind and makes us tremble with the thought, “Are such things possible?” For myself and every person who had been to Jasenovac and lived, it is a miracle that we survived.

Yes, it is possible, it is real, and it is true.

A terror arose in front of us from the oblivion. It should not be forgotten. Share this record with future generations who will hopefully not know such terror.

 

Ivo Frol, 1966

• Language: English
• Publisher: Publishdrive
• Release date: Mar 16, 2017
• ISBN: 9780998694825

Book preview

Maryland

I ARREST

The tramcar from Kustošije, where I had spent the night, stopped on the corner of Draškovićeve and Radićeve Street. The factory where I worked was at number 3 Radišinoj Street. In front of the workshop I noticed a suspicious man who looked like an agent, who were, at that time, chasing Jews and Serbians in the streets and deporting them to camps.

As soon as I entered the workshop, he came up to me and asked if I was the Egon Berger who worked there. I had to say yes. He told me to follow him to the police station, but when I started asking him questions, he revealed that he was taking me to a camp and that I should gather the things I might need there.

I gathered them as fast as I could, and he took me to Nova Ves, the jail where they held people before sending them to be captives of Jasenovac. We spent three days there, and on the fourth morning they took us to Zavrtnica Street, to the factory named Kristalum. There were sixty-three of us. None of us knew what awaited us. We thought that we would be forced to work for a time, which is not that bad. But then the guards handed us over to the Ustaše, who cussed and yelled at us, so we knew that it was going to be bad.

The floor was concrete, and only some of us had a blanket on which we could lie. We had to use the bathroom inside. The second morning, the doors opened and a new group of Jews came in. Jews were being rounded up everywhere, and they weren’t hard to find—they had to wear on their chest and back yellow rags with a big black letter Ž, which stands for Židov, or Jew in Croatian.

After eleven days, on September 10, we were loaded onto wagons and traveled through the night into the unknown.

II JASENOVAC

On September 11, 1941, forty of us arrived at Jasenovac. There were around two hundred well-armed Ustaše at the station. They sent us walking down a long road toward the woods. It was a hot day in autumn. We could not stop, even though the road was two miles long. It was really tiring, so we started throwing away our luggage, piece by piece.

We finally arrived. Just one look was enough to realize what it meant to be in a camp in the new Europe under German occupation. It was 1500 square feet surrounded by barbed wire. There were three shacks made of old wooden planks, and between every plank there was a gap one to two inches wide. It was obvious that the shacks were letting snow, wind, and rain inside.

In the first two shacks were around seven hundred Jews. They had come three days before us. They were the remaining captives from the island of Pag, where they had already suffered a great deal. They were afflicted with terrible hunger.

There were around six hundred Serbs in the third shack. Every shack could hold three hundred fifty people, so they were already above capacity. Our arrival doubled the number of occupants, so every captive had about fiften inches of room to lie. On shoulders, coat lapels, and clothes were sluggish lice, now moving from old to new captives.

The Ustaše had not yet totally robbed us, so we still had some food. One of my friends whom I had known since childhood came to me with tears in his eyes and begged me for some bread. I did not have any, so I gave him a piece of walnut cake. He greedily stuffed the big piece of cake in his mouth and ate as if nobody else in the world existed. Another man started collecting cake crumbles that had fallen onto the ground.

New groups were constantly coming through, and life became harder and harder.

III THE BIG DAM

At the end of September, the construction of the big dam started. It was also the start of the daily destruction of hundreds of lives.

We would wake up at two thirty in the morning. We would get some warm water in which we would put crumbs of tea, until we ran out. That only happened in the beginning. Later on they wouldn’t even give us any warm water. At around five we would start walking. They would beat us with gun stocks and scream at us as we walked the hour to the dam. The work would start at six and stop at ten, and then we would have a ten-minute break. After the break we would go back to work until twelve. Then we would walk back to the camp. We would have a couple of minutes to eat lunch and then we would go back to work. Our lunch consisted of two or three cooked potatoes. Some of them would be rotten, but we still ate them greedily as if they were not. That was how, with all that hard work, our resistance started breaking down.

The base of the dam had a surface about eighty feet wide. One prisoner would dig the dirt and throw it in a wheelbarrow, the second would drive it away, while the third would take a wooden bat and beat the dirt.

From time to time, we would find cabbage roots, carrots, or beets. It was such a delicacy for us. The grass and leaves that we ate much of the time to satiate the hunger was processed poorly by our bodies and made us sick. The Ustaše, even though they knew that they did not feed us anything, let rain fall on us and the lice crawl on us and and leave purulent wounds. They beat us and yelled at us, saying we were lazy and that we did not want to work.

New people arrived everyday. They came from a variety of religious and professional backgrounds. There were some prisoners from the jail in Koprivnica, masses of Serbian peasants, Croatian workers and intellectuals, and some others. There was no more space in the shacks to sleep. We would have to sit with our feet pressed together. The rain poured constantly, so there was no dry place in the shack. There was already over a foot of water flooding the cabin. Death was becoming more and more frequent. The dead people soon began to float around the shack. This was painful for us to see. Later on we did not feel that sad about the deaths because they occurred more and more frequently with each day. We were all aware that no one would make it out alive. We would not survive even a month if the human organism wasn’t strong, and there were cases in which people would shut down after five or six days. I did not fear that I would be floating any time soon.

Hunger came first. I was no longer a man who needed a warm room and a set table to enjoy lunch. All of us who were starving had only one aspiration in life: to eat. Our biggest wish was for bread. In all four years, among all the captives I encountered, that was our only thought. In the beginning I craved something sweet, but then I had only one wish—to fill my belly. Sometimes we would have bean soup for lunch. Even though we were insanely hungry, we still would try to stand at the end of the line, because at the bottom of the cauldron there were more beans.

At the beginning of our time at the camp, there were some individuals who had pride. They wanted to show that they did not care if they were first or last in line at the cauldron. This showed some human character. However, later, when the hunger became worse, we stopped being humans. To be apathetic meant to finish food fast, and to finish life fast.

I had a friend,

Reviews for 44 Months in Jasenovac

[Robert Urban · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

For the first time in my life, I felt I could truly empathize with the Jews who lost loved ones during the Holocaust. For I am both an Orthodox Christian and part Serb.

[Pyry · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Many people have not learnt Croatian history which has roots in some heavy racism and terrorism. As a Finn studying this part of the world, most people seem to blame Serbians for aggression but they have little knowledge of Croatia's nationalistic activities, only caring about their Croatian summer holidays