Šušnjar 1941.

Proceedings – papers, testimonies and documents

Oštra Luka, 2008.

Srpski

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On 1st August 2008, Oštra Luka was the venue of the ‘Šušnjar 1941’ Round Table, exactly sixty-seven years after the terrible massacre at the hands of the Ustashi on St. Elijah’s Day, when between 7,000 and 10,000 Serbs and Jews of what was then the District of Sanski Most (the exact number has not been ascertained yet, but we should hope it will be within a reasonable period of time) were brutally killed only because they were members of a different religion and a different nation.

The organisers of the Round Table were the Municipality of Oštra Luka and the Association of Displaced Serbs from Sanski Most ‘The Hearths of Sanski Most’, with the seat in Banja Luka, and members of the Organising Board were: Drena Kuridža (Chair), Čedo Majkić (Deputy Chair), Professor Vladimir Lukić, PhD, Dragan Davidović, MA, Milorad Janjetović, Radovan Krejić, Dujo Milanko, Mihajlo Orlović, Đuro Ćopić and Gojko Čičić.

More than thirty papers and testimonies were heard in the Round Table, along with around forty historians, social and political workers, eyewitnesses to the persecution, writers, publicists, journalists and representatives of associations and institutions, who work hard to reveal the truth about the persecution of innocent people in World War II and other wars for liberation and to ensure the memory of them is preserved.

The Round Table, facilitated by writer Ranko Pavlović, began with Boro Kapetanović, a writer, who recited a disturbing peom about the atrocity at Šušnjar, after which V. Rev. Petar Milovac and Rabbi Jozef Atijas said prayers for the victims of Šušnjar. At the same time, they blessed the attendees. After the guests welcomed the gathering and wished it success, the papers were read and testimonies given; in the end, after a discussion, the conclusions were adopted unanimously, among which one of the most important was that similar gatherings should continue to be held, because it is one of the best ways to fi nally retrieve the truth about these persecutions from obscurity, into which it was pushed for decades.

Apart from the papers which were read in the Round Table and the testimonies of those who escaped the Ustasha knife and mallet, these Proceedings also contain the papers and testimonies of those who were not able to attend the gathering at Oštra Luka, because of illness or for other reasons. The deeply-moving accounts of those who survived the bloody Ustasha feast at Šušnjar by mere chance were written down by Mihajlo Orlović, a publicist and writer.

These Proceedings are published in the Serbian and English language, as the organisers of the ‘Šušnjar 1941’ Round Table are convinced it is one of the ways to have the international public also learn the truth about the persecution against Serbian people.