Read clearly

There is one question to which Canon J. Felicinović answered, although vaguely. If you read “Personal Memories” on page 4 you can read about the arrest of Janko Rausavljević and Lazo Rakić (clerks from Pag) where you can find out that Felicinović had to renounce his superior and young associate, the Camp Commander of the Ustasha Headquarters in Pag. I quote:

“In the town of Pag lived Martin Rudelić from Brašani near Gospić who worked as a post office clerk. On July 1, 1941 he illegally and without a cause arrested customs officer Janko Rausavljević and Lazo Rakić who were Orthodox Christians. He found a ship on which he planned to take them to Slano. After I found that out I immediately phoned Great Governor Frković in Gospić. Young Ustashas in the town did not like it and tried to persuade me not to interfere with the work of the Ustasha police force, as I could have problems. I told them that I was a Catholic priest and that I could not allow such crimes to happen. I told the Great Governor that these two men were quiet, good people, that their wives were Croatian and that I would guarantee for them with my life. The Great Governor then called clerk Rudelić on the telephone and told him to immediately release the two Serbs. But he replied the Great Governor: “I am only obeying the orders of the Camp Commander.” Rudelić then took both of them to Slano to be killed. Immediately after that I took a boat from the Pag Salt Factory^[36]. With me was the Camp Commander of Pag, although minutes before he had tried to persuade me not to interfere…”

Maybe this is enough to answer the old question: Who ordered the arrest of the two men?

Marin Rudelić “Žicar” was not a soldier, but a clerk, working in the “police force”, an Ustasha by his political views, subordinate to the “Ustasha Headquarters” in Pag which was run by the Camp Officer. So Martin was subordinate to him. In order to arrest Janko and Lazo he needed to receive and order from the person in Pag who took care of the “purity” of Croats, from his Camp Officer. The Camp Officer and his lieutenants were all “younger Ustashas”, as Felicinović calls them. According to him, all these Ustashas wanted to arrest the two men. Then he says that the “younger Ustashas” were not pleased for Felicinović interfering and warned him of that.

In the mean time family, friends and us, SKOJ members, take action and exert pressure on Felicinović and Oguić, even through the Italian commander using their man Marko Kiž.

The “younger Ustashas” continue to support Rudelić (until we broke them) and encourage him to take the two men to Slana as soon as possible. Martin took a ship from Pag, so some official had ordered him to take a ship, and Martin took the two men to Slana, which is five kilometres away.

The rescue was very dramatic. We had to find them alive. Felicinović claims that he took a ship from the Salt Factory and rushed to catch them. According to him, with him on the ship was the person “who just recently had tried to persuade me not to interfere”. As we saw earlier, the “young Ustashas” did not “persuade”, but threatened with “problems”, and we know what kind! But they were friends so I can say that. The “young Ustasha” with him on the ship was the “Pag Camp Officer”. Who was that? The only one whom Martin Rudelić obeyed and “executes his orders”^[37].

Isn’t that the Camp Officer who told us he had visited to Slana just “out of curiosity”?

The answer to this is clear to anyone who reads Felicinović’s text more carefully than the journalists and historians who wrote articles in “Novi list” from Rijeka did.

Perhaps unnecessary quotes

For the sake of past and future references, without burdening the book too much with the whole cheap text of Felicinović’s so-called “Personal Memories” 9 pages long, from his deliberate (or senile) deceptions I will still, because of the readers, quote the parts I commented on.

Let us not forget, that the information about the camp, which is somewhat true, Felicinović found in already published documents and articles (he wrote the memories in 1978!), and this general information was well-known by everybody in Pag. It is important to identify the parts which he entwines with the real data in order to make it more believable. This is an old and tried method. The proof that Felicinović was familiar with the Italian document made by Dr. Stazi is his quoting of numbers which are Italian in origin. We do not need other evidence! And then immediately he lies shamelessly that a Franciscan monk was found amongst the dead, that some women asked him whether it was a sin to take the clothes of the people murdered in Jadovno, that a young Jewish woman was excavated in his presence holding a suitcase full of valuables, etc…

Felicinović:

“… As the President of the “Red Cross” of the town of Pag, etc, but mostly as a priest, I went there in a motor boat which delivered mail to Slana camp.

“No civilians were allowed close to the camp. The guards would fire if they saw someone 500 metres away…

“The main organiser of the Pag camp, Mijo Babić promised to me while he was on Pag that the treatment in the camp will be good and that it would be only a “purgatory” – a correction facility…

“That day I went through the camp and did not notice anything that would be considered terrible. The food was not bad^[38], but the barracks were poor. The camp was surrounded with tall barbed wire and divided into two fields. Women were on the right, and men and the wooden Ustashas administration barracks on the left^[39].

“… Mrs Anđelka Maržić from Pag, in the utmost secrecy warned me one night that her son Šime, a skipper, with his ship transports food to Slano, and sometimes he transported inmates from Slana to another place a bit farther called “Furnaža”. It is a place on the same cape of the Pag Island and she said that on one field there was a ditch where they killed them. They usually took men and women from Slana camp to Furnaža on foot, killed them there and threw into the ditch they prepared. Mrs Anđelka Maržić asked me to help her son be relieved of that duty, because he was going insane with things happening on his ship, Ustashas cracking skulls of people resisting them and throwing their bodies into the sea. When I found out about this, the next morning I immediately went to Senj to inform divine Bishop Dr. Burić^[40] of the atrocities being committed in Slana and asked him to see the Poglavnik and protest against this genocide committed by a handful of drunken Ustashas and make them stop it. I did not find the divine bishop in Senj, because he had already went to Zagreb to protest against genocide in Lika. The abbot personally went to see the Poglavnik to protest in the name of the Holy See. The Poglavnik told him that he had already sent a telegram to all the authorities forbidding them to kill anyone without a court hearing. When Abbot Marcone went to see the Poglavnik again to ask him to make more influence, he asked the Italian Ambassador in Zagreb at the time to come with him. The Ambassador was reluctant saying that the Poglavnik shouted at him saying that the Italian soldiers instead of fighting in Russia were just fooling around with women and making mess in his country. Abbot Marcone went alone to see Pavelić saying: “I must go because human lives are at stake as well as Christianity and civilisation”…

“… I had enough. I also wrote to Poglavnik (who respected me) a determined letter as a canon and Croatian patriot, against those shameful atrocities being committed in Slano and the disgrace of the NDH. I asked County Manager Dr. Cijevanović^[41], who was going to Zagreb, to take my latter to the Poglavnik. Many years later Cijevanović confessed to me that he had destroyed my letter because he was afraid to give it to Poglavnik Pavelić, because Slana is a part of his district…”

“… I organised a one hour prayer in the church of the Benedictine Convent against the genocide in Slano camp, praying to God to have mercy over the Croatian people because of the crimes of few inhuman bullies. I said that the Church and Christianity condemn killing and demand respect for human character…”

“… When I found out that the camp had been disbanded, I asked the District Administration in Karlobag to allow me to take some wooden boards because there were not enough boards in Pag for coffins and other needs, and I was allowed. Then I went to Slana on a ship and while people were loading boards on the ship I examined the camp. Amongst (the trash) I found two little pieces a paper that spoke about the savage treatment of the victims. In the main Ustasha barracks I found a piece of paper (cardboard) on which there was a record with names and dates of women and girls raped in the camp and by which Ustasha…”

“… On another piece of paper in the female camp I found near the barbed wire was a desperate letter from a violated woman to her husband in which he asked him for help, to protect and save her, because she wanted to remain faithful at any price. While she was writing that he probably had already been dead. The poor woman did not manage to throw her letter across the wire^[42]”. What if she did throw it across? … “One man from Pag took me in a small boat to “Furnaža” and showed me the ditches where the victims had been buried. The ditches were covered with five to twelve centimetres of earth and pieces of rock to cover up the trace. Some of the shepherds from Pag knew this, because they could see from the Sv. Juraj Hill (St. George) what was going on in “Furnaža”. The main ditch was about fifty metres long, four metres wide and two to three metres deep. There were six arms of the ditch filled with corpses (and empty space for more victims) with men, women and children buried together…”

“… Italians invited an International Red Cross commission to come to Pag to examine “Furnaža”, the graveyard of innocent victims of Nazis in Croatia. They asked me to accompany them as the President of the Pag Red Cross. I was reluctant because I was ashamed. It was just few days after Ustashas had left Slana camp and killed their last victims and took with them several hundreds of women and children to Kruščica camp. Finally I accepted and we went to Furnaža in a boat. In the centre of the main ditch there was room for several victims more. A terrible stench of corpses was coming out of the main ditch because the bodies had not been buried well…”

“The doctors from that commission removed ten centimetres of earth covering the corpses on the southern part of the ditch. They immediately came across the first row of corpses. One young Italian doctor opened the hand of a Jewish woman from Varaždin who firmly held onto her small suitcase and took it. In it was her post and bank chequebook, lots of foreign currency, several gold watches, female jewellery and one beautiful platinum cigarette case. In the centre was a thick layer of gold surrounded by brilliants of various sizes. While looking at that sad, terrible and shocking scene, which they photographed, a Swiss doctor said: “I know Croats, they are good people. These atrocities were committed by drunken people as ordered by Nazis.” I suggested using the valuables found on the victims to build a mausoleum. The head of the commission replied that that was impossible since everything had to go through II Armata, then to the Ministry of War in Rome, then to the Foreign Ministry, and then to Zagreb through the same bureaucracy. The most of it would be stolen and nothing would happen in the end. He suggested throwing everything in the Pag Channel where the sea is deepest and most of the people agreed and did it in my presence. I could not sleep for several days, tortured by the horrible things I had seen…”

The ending was almost poetic, and the words of the Swiss doctors almost rehabilitated all of us, because this evil was “committed by drunken men”, and not Ustashas and Felicinović’s recruits. We only need to shake our tail to remove drops of water on it!

We are going to talk about this filthy fabrication with the suitcase later in the book, but now I would just like to stress that the sentence “…filled with corpses of men, women and children buried together…” are exactly the same in the Italian report ((… fosse erano mescolate uomini, donne e bambini). I don’t think that I am mistaken to say that these sentences seem to be copied from the Italian report and the words of a man who was at the scene of the crime.