LAJŠIĆ: DOCUMENTARY SERIES "JAME" - MOSAIC OF CRIME

PRIJEDOR, APRIL 24 /SRNA/ - The goal of the documentary series "Jame" /The Pits/ is to present a mosaic of crimes committed against the Serbian people during World War II, across numerous micro-locations with dozens, hundreds, or thousands of civilian victims, the series' author Nedeljko Lajšić told SRNA.

Lajšić noted that the series will serve as a lasting record of crimes that are not widely known to the general public, and as a legacy for future generations. He emphasized that his generation did not learn about these events in history classes, but that today, younger historians are doing tremendous work in researching, documenting, and publishing accounts of the lesser-known suffering of the Serbian people. "Among our people, there is little awareness of the scale of the suffering during the Second World War, yet every Serbian family in the Kozara region has ancestors who perished at one of the execution sites. It is a fact that Kozara filled Jasenovac, and much is known about Jasenovac. But here, we are dealing with places that are barely known, and perhaps there is no smaller area in Europe with so much suffering," Lajšić pointed out. Most of the documentaries share a common geographical focus - the wider Kozara region, and a time frame - around the Feast of St. Elijah /Ilindan/ in 1942. "That was the period after the Battle of Kozara, when a merciless and massive crackdown on the population began. The so-called `rakes` swept through Serbian villages - people were killed, villages burned. Everything was wiped out, nothing left behind. In Crno Vrelo near Bosanska Krupa, only one man survived the mass slaughter - Ilija Studen. The truth is like water - it has to surface somewhere, sometime," Lajšić emphasized. He listed the sources for the documentary material as historians who have researched individual sites of atrocities, surviving witnesses, extensive archival material, authentic footage of the locations then and now, court transcripts from trials held in 1945 and 1946, and testimonies from descendants of the victims. "Some of the footage is being shown for the first time. Also, those court records contain vivid, cinematic images. For example, a young girl at a trial identifies the killers of her parents. The war hadn't even ended yet, and already the commissions for determining the crimes of the occupiers and their collaborators had begun their work within the local people's liberation committees," Lajšić noted. Lajšić's series "Jame" is produced by "Filmske Novosti" from Belgrade, with support from the Ministry of Culture of Serbia. It is premiering on RTS. The first six half-hour episodes were produced last year, and the airing of 12 new documentaries will begin in the fall. "Last year, the following episodes were broadcast: Čipuljić near Bugojno, Garavice near Bihać, Crna Ruka near Bosanska Krupa, Šušnjar near Sanski Most, Vurune near Novi Grad, the grave of blood and brains in Draksenić near Kozarska Dubica. This year, we are working on Jelovac, Palančište, Trnopolje, Šargovac, Drakulić, Motike, Kostajnica, Međeđa near Kozarska Dubica, Mehino Stanje near Velika Kladuša, and beyond the northwest of BiH, we have the Ilindan massacre in the church in Glina and Brod on the Drina River," Lajšić specified. He thanked Tanja Tuleković and Mirko Dimić from the Memorial Area Donja Gradina, as well as historians from Prijedor, Boris Radaković and Marina Ljubičić Bogunović, and the priests of the Serbian Orthodox Church for their assistance in locating descendants of displaced families, and especially the director of "Filmske Novosti" from Belgrade, Vladimir Tomčić, whose grandfather perished in the Second World War in Prijedor, on the bridge in Tukovi. "Surviving witnesses are rare, as they are people over 80 or 90 years old, but the response from descendants has been incredible. Their desire to testify, to record and preserve what they heard within their families, and perhaps only within their families, is fascinating. It was from them that the gatherings and lighting of candles at the sites of suffering began immediately after the war, and it wasn’t until the 1960s and 1970s that the excavation of graves began," Lajšić said. One of the witnesses to the excavation of the victims in Šargovac, Drakulić, and Motike near Banja Luka is the renowned Banja Luka lawyer Nebojša Pantić. "He testified that in the pit, he found a marble, which turned out to belong to his uncle, who was killed as a child at the age of nine or ten. One father found the braid of his daughter. We have faced a lot of denial of these crimes, but whenever someone mentions the suffering, they should always look around them," Lajšić said. When it comes to the large monuments that the previous state began building decades after the war, he believes that they were constructed in a controlled and measured way, to soften and deceive. "This can be seen in the controversial terminology. There can be no suffering from the fascist hand if it was caused by neighbors. It can't be that children died if they were murdered. We are a people who suffered. And we don't need to prove that to anyone. We publish with the message that we remember. Here, in our region, we didn't even know about Palančište, Jelovac, Trnopolje, or the Prijedor brick factory. Freedom was fought for on the backs of those who perished, and everyone has been warming themselves by it," Lajšić emphasized. Lajšić is the author of over 30 documentary films, co-author of numerous projects, and has been awarded multiple times at various domestic and international festivals. He is most proud of his work on Major Milan Tepić in "Nebo nad Bjelovarom" /Sky Over Bjelovar/. He has worked for 30 years as a cameraman at RTRS, where he is the author of the current series "Moje mjesto" /My Place/. "We will continue working on Jame, unfortunately. There are many execution sites in Lika, Kordun, and Banija that we haven’t even touched yet," he said. On the occasion of the 80th anniversary of the breakthrough of the Jasenovac concentration camp prisoners, a screening of documentaries from the "Jame" series by Nedeljko Lajšić will be held tomorrow in the "Kozara" cinema in Prijedor, organized by the City Administration of Prijedor in cooperation with "Filmske Novosti" from Belgrade.