The Serbs from Čelebić and nearby villages were forced to send their children to school in the very building where their mothers, sisters, daughters had been brutally murdered and raped — and to remain silent about it.
In response to recent public gatherings intended to express remembrance and condemnation of the ethnic cleansing of Serbs during Operation “Storm” in 1995, certain public figures have spoken out without genuine solidarity toward the victims and the displaced — clearly aiming to urge Serbs to once again forget everything, for the sake of some new “greater interest.”
The conclusions drawn by such critics are unbelievably malicious, much like the grotesque stance once held in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia — a legacy our people have clearly inherited — that it’s not good for us to speak of our own victims, even when such remembrance is accompanied by Christian messages of forgiveness and calls for coexistence, as was the case in Novi Sad.
And while in Croatia the authorities have, for decades, celebrated the ethnic cleansing of their Serb citizens with fanfare and concerts of Ustaša music, and the authorities in Sarajevo have turned the crime in Srebrenica into a myth, some — including within Serbia — expect Serbs not to publicly commemorate their own suffering. Just like before, in the name of forgetting and “brotherhood and unity.”
I write this not to stir emotions, but to show — through a personal example — the level of absurdity to which this “culture of forgetting” has brought us.
My ancestors are from the villages of the Livanjsko Polje (Čaprazlije and Čelebić), where in 1941 the Ustaše from Livno, Duvno and the surrounding Croatian villages killed 1,600 men, women and children in just a few days — from Ognjena Marija (July 30) to Ilindan (August 2). They murdered them with knives, axes, saws, hammers and by throwing living people into pits on Mount Dinara. Among the dead were members of my parents’ families.
Perhaps the most brutal killings during those days took place in the primary school in Čelebić. There, the Ustaše— together with some local Croatian villagers — murdered the people of Čelebić in the classrooms in ways that defy human understanding. It should not be forgotten that some neighbours did secretly warn the Serbs of what was being planned, but the naive people did not believe it, as even under Ottoman rule there had been no such atrocities in that area.
After the war, the school was whitewashed — there were no longer any traces of the blood of Serbian villagers on the walls — and the new authorities, “in the name of a higher interest,” nurturing a culture of forgetting, decided that the school would continue operating without any marker or sign to recall those summer days of 1941, when dark forces and pure evil, alongside unimaginable human suffering, coexisted within the classrooms of Čelebić. The school bell rang again, mingled with the sounds of children’s laughter. Serbian and Croatian children — the children of martyrs and the children of executioners — continued to build a “brighter future” together in that school. In the classrooms that had served as torture chambers and execution sites for their closest relatives, my mother, her sisters and brother were forced to learn their first letters and numbers, to draw, to sing, to rejoice — and to erase from memory all that had happened in those same classrooms to their families on Ognjena Marija, just a few years earlier. And so it went on until 1992, when war once again knocked on the doors of the Čelebić school, which became a dividing line between the warring sides — Serbs and Croats — in the Livanjsko Polje.
For decades, the atrocities committed in the Čelebić school were only whispered about, and only within the closest family circles. That is how I came to learn about them. As if my ancestors had done something wrong and had deserved that punishment — so their descendants were not even allowed to speak of it, only to whisper.
Only the remnants of hair and braided girl’s plaits entwined with beads, found in the nearby bushes around the school when students would stumble upon them, silently bore witness and pointed to the terrible things that had happened there to Serbian girls and young women.
Listening to the critics of the commemoration in Novi Sad, I ask myself — and they should ask themselves as well — was there any other people in the SFR of Yugoslavia who had an experience like the Serbs from the territory of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH)? The Serbs from Čelebić and the surrounding villages had to send their children to school — into the very building where their mothers, sisters and daughters had been brutally murdered and raped — for their children to spend time, study and sing in classrooms that, just a few years earlier, had been soaked in the blood of their relatives. And they were expected to stay silent about those crimes.
As a citizen of this country and a descendant of Serbs from a region tragic for them — where Herzegovina, Bosnia and Dalmatia meet — I understood the message of such commemorations: that we no longer have to forget, and that we too, like other peoples, can mark the dates of our suffering in a dignified way, one that offends no one and does not incite hatred or revenge, but instead remembers peacefully and with reverence — so that it is never repeated. I hope the majority of my fellow citizens understood it the same way.
For decades, the school in Čelebić — without any marker or sign — stood as a silent witness to the horrors that took place there in 1941, during the same time of year as the exodus of the Krajina Serbs in 1995. It was forbidden to speak about it, and everything had to be forgotten.
And precisely because of that, the same must not be done with “Operation Storm” and its consequences as was done with the school in Čelebić. It is fair to ask: had the culture of forgetting not been nurtured, would that people — in the very same region — have experienced another pogrom in 1995? Yet it happened. There are no more Serbs there. Not in Čelebić, not in Čaprazlije. Nor much farther beyond.
Should we stay silent and forget again, as the critics of the Novi Sad gathering suggest? And who needs that — and why?
(Politika, August 16, 2022)