Twelve members from all the armies involved in the 1990s war in BiH, apart from Abdić’s supporters, but including JNA veterans, visited sites of execution, terror and suffering from the period of Nazi rule, the Soviet regime and the DDR in Berlin. Following the inscriptions of victims of the Holocaust, looking around Soviet and East German torture chambers, remembering the victims of two totalitarianisms that divided Europe in the 20th century, the veterans of our wars told their stories about what had happened to them and to us at the end of that fateful century
“All of our armies are former,” says Avdija from Brčko as we sit in the cafeteria of the Rheinland Pfalz representative office in Berlin. The purpose of the study visit of 12 war veterans from BiH and Serbia organised by the Centre for Non-Violent Action from Belgrade and Sarajevo was to visit places of execution, terror and suffering from the period of Nazi rule, the Soviet regime and the DDR. Among the group were members of all the armies in Bosnia and Herzegovina and a veteran of the former JNA, Novica, who had been wounded at the very beginning of the war in Croatia. We were only missing the armed supporters of Fikret Abdić to complete the picture of wartime chaos. War stories intertwined and latched onto each other giving the participants in the study visit a more comprehensive view of their participation in the war. Bosnian humour was the cornerstone of daily banter and it was easy to believe in the common characteristics of a BiH identity that incorporates this humour.
Veteran Novica’s Story
At the end of the trip, veteran Novica told me his wartime biography as we strolled around the Tegel Airport in Berlin: “I was wounded in 1991. I was a member of auxiliary JNA units tasked with pulling tanks out if they got into trouble. There was a tank that got hit in the engine. Thick black smoke was coming out of it. From the inside, I could hear the marksman wailing, he was stuck beneath the casings puller. He couldn’t get out. He panicked and couldn’t find the lever to move the puller. I entered the tank through another hatch, inside it was all smoke and oil. I freed him and started towards the hatch at the dome. When I put one leg through the hatch, a sniper bullet hit me just beneath the ankle. As I was pulling my other leg from the tank, I saw a guided Malyutka missile heading for the tank. Malyutka’s are quite slow, so you can spot them. I knew what would happen. The cumulative blast threw me from the tank and I landed on the asphalt lightly as if some hand had just placed me there. Then I saw my left boot was missing and I realised I had lost my leg. Later, they awarded me some medal for courage that I refused to accept, because I had not gone to Croatia to make Croats live like they wouldn’t want to, and I don’t need an award for being disabled. Later, I founded the Association of Serbian War Veterans for Peace, but they annulled the registration, because they didn’t like the name.”
As he talks, he doesn’t gesticulate much with his hands, one is missing a finger. His hands are scarred by severe burns. He wears a bellow-the-knee prosthesis on his left leg, and a scar on his right. That’s Novica’s story.
The Dead Will Not Rehabilitate Us
First, we visited the Topography of Terror, a museum at the site of the Third Reich ministry of security and police buildings. The curator led us through a labyrinth of hanging photographs trying to relate an overview of the genesis of Nazi terror. Among the photographs is the famous one of Nazis saluting Hitler, all but one who has his arms crossed over his chest in protest. Beneath the photograph is the name of that man with a note saying his identity is a matter of conjecture. At one point, Ljuban, a VRS veteran, said to me, “There’s Kadinjača!” When I approached the photograph, I saw it showed scenes of burning villages, faces of farmers, haystacks from Belarus. Horror always has the same face, everywhere.
The second day we went to visit the Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe (opened for the public on 12 May 2005) located in the historical centre of the city. The monument consists of 2.711 concrete blocks – stelae. Their number has no symbolic meaning. The Field of Stelae was constructed so that it can be entered from all directions through rows of blocks that become larger as you walk along, and then in the middle of the field, you find yourself in a tunnel of dark grey blocks five meters tall. The path between the blocks is level, then it descends into a valley, leaning left or right, then it ascends. People susceptible to panic are advised not to enter the memorial. The main feeling that comes over you is one of anxiety, fear and insignificance. The labyrinth shows how insignificant human life was from 1933 to 1945 in Nazi Germany, especially if you were a Jew, a homosexual, a Roma or a Jehovah’s Witness.
Beneath the Field of Stelae is a museum with an antechamber and four rooms. In the second room, called the Room of Dimensions, I cried as I sat on a white bench copying down the English translation of original journal entries and inscriptions made by Jews during the Holocaust. An unknown young man had filled the margins of a novel with accounts of the last days in the Lodz ghetto just before they were to be transported to camps at Chelmno and Auschwitz. The inscription was given in Polish, English, Yiddish and Hebrew. It showed desperation and hope, fear and a will to live. But most of all it portrayed a dreadful feeling of being lost, a naiveté so reminiscent of the beginning of the war in BiH. The young man writes how some are encouraged because they will finally be leaving the ghetto, others are looking forward to the labour camps, others still are brutally realistic and know they are going to their deaths, while some have lost all will to live and are peacefully waiting for their end. And how all these premonitions unpredictably shift within people, flickering like a dying flame. In the darkened Room of Names, the names of victims followed by years of birth and death are projected onto its four walls. A voice from behind the walls reads short biographies of those whose names are on the walls. For more than half of the 6 million murdered Jews, names and biographies are unknown. To read out the names and short biographies of all the victims, it would take 6 years, 7 months and 27 days.
Visoko, Home Sweet Home
We then visited the Hohenschönhausen memorial in Berlin, the site of the Soviet Special Camp 3 from 1945 to 1951, and then a camp for political prisoners of the East German secret police, the Stasi. Our guide was a former prisoner and gave us a detailed description of life in the prison. It is immediately clear that the Stasi prison was a three-star hotel compared to the Soviet special camp. While the Soviets foregrounded physical and psychological torture, the East Germans opted for the latter. One part of the Soviet prison was located underground and later abandoned by the East German administration. It was called the submarine, U-Boot in German. The cells there were oval and metal and had a few centimetres of water on the bottom. The punishment was to stand or sit for hours, without moving. The submarine was constantly flooded with the sound of enormous generators, and the lights were always kept on, so the prisoner had a feeling as if he would never make it up to the light of day.
The cells in the Stasi prison had a toilet bowl, wash basin, radiator, bed, window with clouded glass that light could pass through, everything Soviet prisoners could only dream of. The film The Lives of Others about the DDR and the Stasi secret service by Florian Henckel von Donnersmack that won the 2006 Oscar for best foreign language film was about this prison for good reason. There was no physical torture in the Stasi prison, the guards were unarmed. The walls of the corridors are still lined by wires with red connectors. The prisoner was not allowed to look at the guard, if he did so, the guard would pull on the wire, an alarm would go off, and round red ceiling lamps would come on. Then three thugs would arrive to hold the prisoner down while a doctor administered a tranquilliser by injection. The interior of this prison is a staple of socialist romanticism from the 1980s. Cream-coloured telephones, parquet-imitation linoleum, wallpaper, heavy curtains, sparse furniture and the omnipresent bright red ceiling lamps, as well as red switches show that Germans did indeed take into account the aesthetics of the prison. At that time, the prison smelled of soap and the sanitary conditions were quite good. After visiting Sachsenhausen, most of the veterans said they would gladly serve a few months in the Stasi prison. After visiting this type of prison, the only thing a person can feel is hatred for any form of state organisation.
Ljuban, a VRS Veteran
At the Berghof Peace Institute, a round table was held on the topic of Facing the Past for a Non-Violent Future – War Veterans for Peace (experience from the Balkans and Germany). Here, the veterans told their life stories, where the war invariably occupied a central position. Ljuban, a VRS veteran, a company commander, wounded in the leg by a sniper said how he rarely says anything to his family about the war. Before the war, he was a civil engineer. He said civil engineers had a special relationship with the buildings they constructed. He had worked on constructing the Poljud stadium and other buildings in former Yugoslavia, but has been afraid to visit them since.
“How do I explain to my children that I am not a monster or a killer? Because I am not. How do I explain to them what happened? When I myself don’t know what happened?” With this, Ljuban ended his sincere and emotional story about his experience of the war and post-war living.
The youngest veteran of the BiH Army, Narcis, lost his father and brother, both members of the BiH Army, when he was 14. He talked about his experience and the feeling that he never had a childhood. When you hear this form a tall corpulent man in his thirties, you can feel the trauma suck the air out of the room and everyone finds it hard to breathe. “When I walk by a children’s playground, I sometimes feel the desire to go play myself, because I didn’t have a childhood. I never knew child’s play,” Narcis says. Then Mirko from the vicinity of Brčko spoke. He was a member of the HVO and he lost a leg in the battlefield. Mirko believes all people are good and should serve good.
It is difficult to fathom the strength of these people who are able to understand one another, to forgive and to go on with life believing in a future after everything they have been through. Their moving stories are proof that a person can rise above his pain, above himself and work for a higher, a more noble cause.
Sachsenhausen
At the entrance gate to the Nazi camp, the hands on the clock show 11:08, when the break-out of Buchenwald camp prisoners began. Our guide believes this piece of information is a myth. A police academy has been situated here since 2006. During the Nazi regime, this was a labour camp and a command for all the concentration camps in Europe. After World War II, new camp prisoners moved into the old camp: Nazis and enemies of the Soviet regime. Sachsenhausen is situated near the town of Oranienburg. The area around the camp contains mass graves from the soviet period. During the Nazi period, SS units were stationed here. This is where guards and commanders, the staff of future concentration camps, were trained. There are no mass graves from this period, because the Nazis burned the bodies of their victims depositing the ashes into underground pits that were preserved.
What is today a library used to house tanks. Today, police dogs are not used in the training because of their role in the camps, and the shooting range is soundproofed to keep passers-by from hearing the shots that could evoke the camp. Still, research studies have shown that Oranienburg is home to a not insignificant number of neo-Nazis. After a visit to the camp by Israeli Prime Ministers in 1992, the neo-Nazis tried to set fire to barrack 38 (which is part of the group called Jewish Barracks). In this camp, an experimental gas chamber of “smaller proportions” was first used. Before the chamber, people would undergo a medical examination and be marked by pen if they had gold teeth or other precious metals implanted in their bodies – they would be shot in the execution pit. Death by gas poisoning is not instantaneous, people suffocate to their death in the most dreadful agony over 10 to 20 minutes. The pain is so severe that people break their own bones. The bodies are then loaded into the crematoria.
There were about 300 people in a barrack. Three grown men shared a single cot. They received 300 grams of bread and half a litre of water per day. They slept from 10 p.m. to 3:30 a.m. The rest of their time they spent working. As we walk through the camp, cranes fly overhead letting out hoarse shrieks. In the nearby forests they gather into large flocks and fly off to Africa. The lifespan of a camp prisoner was 6 to 8 weeks.
The careers of many SS officers began here and ended in Auschwitz, Treblinka… Officers had good quality living at the camps. One of the preserved buildings is a Casino where films were screened, theatre performances put on, concerts held. This is where the SS rested after a day of killing people. The majority of those killed here, a rough estimate of 35000, were Soviet prisoners of war. It is presumed that Stalin’s son was among them. During the Soviet special camp for denazification (1945 – 1952) 12000 people died here of starvation, disease and exposure.
I was fascinated by the slag at Apelplatz (the place of roll-call) in Sachsenhausen with a shoot of grass breaking through here and there. The colour of the earth and the horror of the open space that could accommodate some twenty thousand people. The wind now blows across it as visitors to the Memorial walk through. The cranes fly in irregular V formations, almost like signs by the road, and their shrieks will remind me of the shadows of prisoners walking in Apelplatz at dusk. From here you could only “rise in smoke to the sky”. This verse from Paul Celan’s poem Death Fugue best explains the dread you can still feel as you walk across the slag of the Sachsenhausen concentration camp.
published in bh. magazine “Dani”
2nd November 2012