{"id":1315,"date":"2025-01-22T18:40:39","date_gmt":"2025-01-22T17:40:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cieh-chre.org\/porajmosinserbia\/?page_id=1315"},"modified":"2025-01-27T03:33:37","modified_gmt":"2025-01-27T02:33:37","slug":"testimony-of-stevan-kostic","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"http:\/\/cieh-chre.org\/porajmosinserbia\/testimony-of-stevan-kostic\/","title":{"rendered":"Testimony of Stevan Kosti\u0107"},"content":{"rendered":"

A question<\/h3>\n
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During the first two decades of our century, Holocaust research, genocide studies, and education in Serbia were marked by the transition toward the \"time after the witness\", into which we were ushered, not by the anticipated \"time of archives\", but through the continuity of the \"time of the interpretation\", as the method of projection of state narrative. This transition began in the pre-digital age, in the time of narrative control that was realized through two parts of the same mechanism - archives with privileged, controlled access, and historians of state institutions. When, back in 1986, the historian of the Historical Archive of the City of Belgrade Milena Radoj\u010di\u0107 and her assistant Milan Koljanin collected the testimonies of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camp at Sajmi\u0161te (Belgrade Fair). One of the witnesses, Stevan Kosti\u0107, who was seventeen at the time of his incarceration said that during the winter and spring of 1941-1942, he was in charge of food distribution and hygiene at the pavilion where he and other Roma were kept. He described the mass grave and the quicklime pit. The historians did not ask any additional questions, nor did they ask him to show them the location of the pit. Instead, they changed the direction of the questioning and did not return to the subject of the mass grave. In Dr. Koljanin's book about the camp at Sajmi\u0161te, the testimony of Stevan Kostic, as well as the testimony of the Deki\u0107 brothers, then ten, and thirteen-year-old boys, who also mention the events on the Sava embankment, are not quoted but rather cited as references to various events and locations sixteen times. The testimony of Stevan Kosti\u0107 was mentioned only as an indication with an archival signature:<\/span><\/p>\n

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\u201c...However, there are testimonies that several Roma were dying daily, that were buried in a large quicklime pit by the Sava riverbank , outside the camp wire, where the bodies were covered with carbol.\u201d <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

- footnote 271 IAB ZRP MG (nr) testimony of Stevan Kosti\u0107. <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

From the book, the readers cannot learn that the witness described himself as healthy, conscious, relatively well-fed with responsibilities in the operation of the camp and that removing the deceased and taking the bodies to the limestone was part of his job, nor that he knew the location of the mass grave.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Pg 11 <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Milena Radoj\u010di\u0107 - Were you heated like that in the pavilion with the Jews?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Kosti\u0107 Stevan - I didn\u2019t even spend the night with the Jews; already during the day, I arranged everything and was transferred to pavilion No. II.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Pg 12 <\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Milan Koljanin - when was that?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Kostic Stevan - that was in January.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

When I arrived, my mother and sisters were not just full of lice; there wasn't a piece of fabric that was without lice. We at the Autokomanda didn't have lice; there was steaming for lice. When I got there, the camp chief, a Jew, appointed me to be the hygiene supervisor and to keep an eye on the kitchen, to control what was being prepared, and to maintain hygiene in Pavilion No. II, the Gypsy pavilion. We had a nurse in our pavilion, a Jewish woman named Matilda. I didn't sleep with my mother at all; instead, I slept on a table at the clinic, which had a special section for the clinic, with boxes, and there were also some storage areas. For us, the storage was in the same pavilion; they brought food there, and I prepared it. They brought food from the central kitchen to that section; they would line up, receive a piece of cornbread, and food was distributed from large buckets. I shared the food distribution with another guy named Mija, who was from Resnik. I replaced him because he was sick; I was healthier, constantly moving around. I had to determine who would work, those who were healthier, who could get up; there were stroke victims, immobile people, wetting themselves, and we had to maintain hygiene. This Jewish nurse was with me, and I appointed orderlies from those who were mobile. There was one young man and some stronger women; I ordered that if someone died, they should be wrapped in a blanket, taken out to the lime pit, and thrown in. The lime pit was toward Sava, outside the fence, there was a gate so we wouldn't have to go around; there was no guard there, and we carried the dead out through that gate and threw them into the lime pit. No one was near that lime pit. One of the prisoners was responsible for covering the dead with lime; the lime pit was enormous.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Pg 13<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

During the day, at night, the children die, women by 5-6, sometimes one, two, sometimes ten. In the morning you hear them wailing, a family member, then they report it, the sister comes, confirms the death and then it is carried away.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

Milena Radoj\u010di\u0107 - did the camp commander, the German, come to visit your pavilion?<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Six years after the interview, the publication of a short, inadequate description of the testimony and his signature technically fulfilled the basic task of a historian - to transmit and publish documents and testimonies relevant to the history of the place and time he deals with. However, in the case of the camp at Sajmi\u0161te and Roma testimonies, their content and essence were not conveyed to the public. Within their narrow view of the scope of their work, historians did not pass the information about possible locations of mass burials onto other institutions either. Neither in 1986, when it was still possible to bring witnesses to the location, nor later, when unregulated, feral, and then state construction irrevocably changed the structure of Sajmi\u0161te. In contrast to the demolition of the German pavilion in 2023, where the key testimony was a secondary and post-war one, however<\/span> reliably transmitted, the testimonies about the quicklime pit on the Sava riverbank were mentioned by a signature in the book about the camp, and thus, are part of its official history. In addition, in the fall of 2024, Dr. Koljanin, the last living participant in Stevan Kosti\u0107's interview and the chief historian of the \"Memorial Center Staro Sajmi\u0161te \", did not provide timely information about the testimonies mentioned in his book to the relevant institutions of the Republic and the city of Belgrade before they removed a two-meter thick layer of soil from the embankment, including from the wider area of \u200b\u200bthe locations described in the testimonies, for the works on replacing the Sava bridge. The information was also not shared by the historical and memorial institutions of the state \"Memorial Center Staro Sajmi\u0161te\", its historical and social science institutes, the University Department of History, or the \"umbrella\" institution, the \"Museum of Genocide Victims\".<\/span><\/p>\n

Until the soil was removed, it was possible to speculate about the condition of the location on the Sava, as well as others, both at Sajmi\u0161te and around Belgrade. It is plausible that the location was included in the occupiers' graves burning action in the winter and spring of 1944, when the ashes from Jajinci and Rakovica were dumped near the lower point of Ada, or that it was somehow destroyed during the post-war works on the expansion of the embankment. In both cases, at least some testimonies would probably remain. Even the regular flooding of the river generally does not carry away what was buried deep enough. The only thing we know for sure today is that the witnesses, the pensioners taking stock of their lives, were the ones for whom it was important to convey to us that these sites still exist and what took place there. Today, after the silence of historians and institutions, as well as the state's decision to excavate the sites without archeological research, we cannot confront the issues of protecting the sites of mass crimes independently of the issue of the state of historiography and the political and economic profile of historical-memorial institutions in Serbia.<\/span><\/p>\n

The first question is about the trust in the ethics of historians in their selection of sources between the factual and the interpretive plane that forms the context of the narrative presentation. Where, or better, when, in this case, does the interpretive distancing of the historian from the witness begin? Can it already be seen in the preparation of scientific work? Isn't it already in the space left for secondary sources, the selection of testimonies, and their reduction to the role of indicators - supplementary, curt references, or just archival signatures, without citations as the space for the speech of the subject? The appropriation of the narrator's position is characteristic of the Serbian historiography of the<\/span> Second World War written since the period of the nationalist rise and the wars of the 1990s. This leads us to a further series of questions: Who is the subject in the interpretive historiography of the period of nationalism? The victim, the witness, the historian himself, or his employer, as in this case - the state? Is the witness, especially when he is no longer alive still a political subject? Is such a subject allowed to speak, does it have hers\/his autonomous political voice, and who is qualified to permit it to be heard, and at what volume? What is the role of testimony in the era of cooperation between some historians and the state in the removal of physical evidence from the very locations of the mass crimes that the witnesses were speaking about? Is the location of the crime also part of the \"body of evidence\" and is every building, tree, and archaeological layer also an integral, physical part of the evidence? Therefore, is the destruction of the crime scene and the prevention of archaeological research an integral and logical phase of denial of genocide that follows the rehabilitation of criminals and the neglect of witnesses and their words? Are \"cultural heritage\" and \"culture of memory\" adequate definitions for what is still an active field of projection of political and economic interest in Serbia?<\/span><\/p>\n

The political positions of the nationalist governments, such as the fight against the International Tribunal for War Crimes and the institutional denial of genocide in the 1990s were projected onto the Second World War and institutionalized by the passing of a series of laws on public memory: On the rehabilitation of war criminals of the Second World War, on the restitution of property, on the \"removal of the consequences\" of the Holocaust, as well as the law on the establishment of the \"Memorial Center Staro Sajmi\u0161te\". These laws have a negative impact on education, victims' rights, national and religious minorities, and the reduction of the protection status of the sites of suffering. The content and the selective application of these laws still provide a framework for Serbian historiography as the producer of a unified \"national narrative\" in education and memorialization. They are also the reason for the continued resistance of citizens, the political and professional public, in their fight against revisionism, and for transnational and transitional justice and education based on science and facts.<\/span><\/p>\n

We hope that these questions and topics will be among those that will be asked by today's and new generations of historians as part of the necessary revision of the historiography of the nationalist period. In our view, it is necessary to re-evaluate and protect historical sources - the testimonies, archives, and the locations of mass crimes in Serbia. We hope that the generations for whom testimonies will not be divided by nationality and usability in the construction of political narratives will be the ones who will have empathy for the victims, basic trust for witnesses, and an awareness that crime scenes must be investigated using all available scientific methods to establish not just the scientific basis, but, through education, also a social consensus that history happens once and cannot be changed retroactively. Today, when we are facing the consequences of the demolition at Staro Sajmi\u0161te, the question arises as to whether future generations of historians, archaeologists, sociologists, architects, and artists will be able to go back at least those four decades and finally pose, if not to the witnesses, then to themselves, a simple, but in essence, a generational question: \"What kind of history do we have, and how was it formed?\" We hope that with their answer, they will change the course of the current history of the sites of mass crimes and show that from these very places, a better, more humane society can be built in Serbia.<\/span><\/p>\n

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Sava embankment at the Sajmi\u0161te camp, November 2024-January 2025 <\/h3>\n\t\t\n\t\t
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