I went to the Jasenovac concentration camp to describe what I would see there. It was the end of April—the days were beautiful, the sky clear, the sun warm. The year—1945. And the river... we’re walking beside the Una River. The handful of small towns and settlements along this road have been liberated from the Ustasha and the Germans: Bosanski Novi, Dvor na Uni, Kostajnica, and Dubica. There are hills to our left, and beyond the hills, heavy artillery fire—it sounds like it’s underground, somehow. We know the road has been mined up ahead, but there’s no way of knowing where, so, with any luck, you keep pressing on…

Late morning—it’s the first of May, and we’ve reached the Sava. We see the Jasenovac camp across the water. Masts of white smoke rise vertically into the open sky. It’s the houses in Jasenovac burning, those that haven’t already burnt down—it’s the seeds in the oil refinery burning, those that have just caught fire. A little bit of the smoke splits off and clings to the water, hanging over the river like morning fog.

Here, everything spreads out before us—the Sava, and the sky, and over there, Slavonia... to the left of us, on the right side of the Sava, but a long way from Jasenovac, howitzers still rumble.

But as for Jasenovac, everything here has already been reduced to rubble…it’s plain to see from this side of the water—smoldering ruins, toppled ramparts...as if he had leapt from the flames themselves, an oldish man staggered up to us. It was obvious he was fleeing something, so our soldiers apprehended him. We asked him who he was and where he was going, but he couldn’t say a word. He was shaking, eyes darting back and forth, weeping. It seemed he was hysterical—he would scream if he had the strength, but he didn’t have the strength for anything, nor the willpower, but to weep, and he wept like a gutter—and when the elderly weep, it is an excruciating sight…

We got into an old, rickety rowboat to cross over to Jasenovac, and left the old man to go where he was headed. I observed him from the boat and saw that he was helpless to go anywhere. He stared after us and stood as if anchored in place. And then he started to run—but he couldn’t take the road, so set off along a grove of plum trees. I ask the helmsman if he knows who the man is, and he replies that the man was a prisoner from Jasenovac, that, somehow, he’d made it out alive, and was going home. He’d lost his mind from what he experienced in the camp, and now he was going home, if there was a house left, and if he was able to find it.

It wasn’t necessary to mention the man’s madness, because it was abundantly clear the man was mad. I wondered what would happen when his legs gave out on the mined roads along the Una, the roads he doesn’t know are mined!

There are a lot of things people don’t know nowadays… Because everything changes from day to day, from hour to hour…already since we’ve been here, a few hours, the artillery fire has grown even more distant—or so it seemed to me. Where was that prisoner when those cannons were thundering here, and what had thundered over that old man’s head!

When was he imprisoned in the camp, when had he gone mad there—from what great tragedy?

He wept like a child!

The Sava is here—its broad waters facing Jasenovac. It seems to be deep, too. I take note of the spring sunlight laid out across its watery mirror. There is no joy in that sunlight today, only sorrow—because it falls on corpses! We saw human corpses all around us. The water carries them. They stand out like black dots on the water that move, migrate. The water carries some towards us—we see them up-close, we see their faces, bound hands, slit throats, bloated stomachs, charred skin…The water carries them, turns them, capsizes them. Those taken by the current pass by quicker, but those tossed to the banks linger, lagging behind like travelers grown weary on the road…There’s hardly anything on them—a blackened piece of coat, or, depending on the corpse, nothing at all; in the sun their naked stomachs shine, their hips, backs, legs, napes of necks. Some of them are women’s corpses, some men’s, but all equally naked. Above them swarms of flies circle, making their way down the Sava.

Those victims have no names of their own. The life inside them was taken maybe this morning, maybe yesterday, maybe two or three days ago, and now they’re here, on the water, just like that: lifeless, nameless, documentless, painless... and for the dead, the water is the only road that’s still worth traveling…

There’s no way of knowing where they’ll stop, and what might stop them on the way, but it doesn’t matter anymore because they’re already in their graves! Whatever’s left to be seen by human eyes, and whatever this water still carries—it makes the warning all the greater!

Their paths and the path of our boat diverged, because we were nearing the bank and they were going to “the other side”…

And here, we’ve docked.

The land we plant our feet upon—Slavonia.

But the place to which we’ve come—Jasenovac. I utter that frightful word a few times. Jasenovac, Jasenovac, Jasenovac…! How many letters had been sent to this place in these last four years of war! To a son, a brother, a father, a husband, a wife, a sister! And how many tears had stained them! Going to bed, waking up, eating, walking, traveling, thinking of this place, of Jasenovac, of one of their own inside it—their son, their daughter.

This place was far away then, and too far away! Only letters could find it, if they found it.

Well wishes and greetings arrived, if they arrived, but they received no reply.

From the water to the shore was strewn slippery mud through which we barely managed to clamber—there was no dock to speak of. Stumbling, looking ahead at where we would make landfall, I caught sight of several soldiers on the shore and saw that they were coming to meet us. Young men, combat ready—on edge from recent battle, and curious to find out who we were. By their conduct it was clear that they were new recruits. They told us that the Ustasha and Germans had burnt down the whole of Jasenovac, which we could see for ourselves.

We requested to be taken to the command post, if command was established, and they told us that they would take us where we needed, but they didn’t know if it would be what we were looking for.

Before us was a winding road and a green plum orchard. And I knew, a little farther down the road, Jasenovac would meet us. That Jasenovac, a word uttered countless times, over which a million eyes had wept themselves dry, a million hearts had grieved, and which a million tongues had cursed!

And at last, here it is! There’s the place, there’s the name, there it is—the last stop on the journey of some 700 thousand feet that had crossed this same street, to return to it no more—not to it nor any other!

Now I see what I didn’t think I would ever see. I see what was once a human settlement. I see what were once human houses. But there’s not anything anymore—not a settlement, nor houses, nor a picture of anything but wreckage, ruins, soot—a wasteland, a cold wasteland left in the wake of fiery destruction. The fire is still going here, still burning—beams burning, the remnants of trees burning, embers burning…Thousands of black embers protrude from the earth—saying that this is the path the killer traced! It’s horrifying to look upon such traces, but here we look and see only embers, tar, charcoal, blackened ramparts, blackened earth…

Everything in this settlement that once stood on its own legs has fallen to the ground. Only the chimneys, from which smoke no longer belches, are left standing…They jut out grotesquely over the rubble like an arm extended into the empty sky; but the sky is blue and beautiful today, today is a spring day. While everything below fell to the ground—everything was razed to flat earth, and died…

Today this place is a grave, a tomb…

I took a few steps forward and stopped; I couldn’t go further—my path was blocked by a mountain of bricks and dust, bricks that were no longer yellow but black from fire and soot. Here, wherever you turn, everything is black: black ash, black tar, black embers, black earth—hideous, such a hideous and unbearable wasteland, and a silence that assaults the senses!

A few more steps and I’m at a crossroads, where someone might appear, most likely a soldier, but perhaps even a civilian. I wait, but I see that it’s in vain. I look down each of the four streets that meet at the intersection, but nobody appears. The farther I go, the less hope I have.

Nobody!

The cavities of burnt-out windows gape horribly.

Wooden beams along the street, embers.

And above—smokestacks!

Finally, a living creature here. A real living creature in this place that once bore the name of a town—here, a stork! White, tall, like a heap of snow against the sky because it stands on one leg, on one particularly tall chimney, which no longer retains any walls around it. The bird stands and looks off somewhere in the distance. Her nest is here—a prick of black against the sky, a large mass of branches and soil—and she’s inside of it. A stork! Her legs are long and thin as a blade of wheat, and if a person didn’t look closely enough, they wouldn’t even be able to see those legs, so it seems as if the bird isn’t leaning on anything at all but floating above the blackness below—so white, and all alone! Occasionally she turns and looks at the abandoned settlement below, as if to marvel at it, wondering: what was it, what could have happened for it to look that way! The world below her looks like it had weathered a flood—which only that bird, that stork in her nest, in Noah’s ark, had survived! She suddenly began clattering her bill—as if contacting someone, and it was the only voice to be heard in this wasteland—in time with the sound of distant artillery fire that felt like it came from underground, which came down the Sava, the same direction the human corpses are traveling…

—————————

Here—in front of me is yet another trace of the killer, one more print he left behind. It’s a heap of the bloodied remnants of clothes and shoes. The ones who wore these men’s suits, these bloody women’s blouses, these tatters stuck together in clumps, are no more…

And this entire pile of dresses and rags is doused in gasoline, to burn better, but the killer didn’t manage to light it, so it’s left like a clue, to mark where he passed…

I go further down the eastern side of the camp—along the Sava, its bank—and there are scraps of fabric, dresses, stockings, shoes, opanci, hats, and skirts everywhere—the clothing of women, men, children—remnants of the people who are no longer here, because they were carried away by the water, swallowed by the earth, immolated by fire!

A fire pit…surrounded by the unburnt remnants of clothing. Something terrible, as if the shrieking devil himself were standing here. The soil greasy, slippery. The riverbank is steep here. Down in the water below, a willow grove grows. An awful stench pours out from behind it. I lean out over the slippery bank and look down at the willow grove in the water. And what I see—an atrocity! Piles of naked corpses! They reek of an intense odor. These are the ones who were stripped on the bank above, for their suits and dresses to be set ablaze—naked and dead, cast off down the steep embankment into the water below.

The current below is not strong, and the willows are here, so the corpses were caught up in them. They bent towards each other. There were around forty or fifty of them. Each is turned on its side. They don’t even have sides anymore; some of their faces are turned toward the water, some to the sky, some across the water, to where Mount Kozara rises in the distance.

Some no longer have their faces. They have no heads. One is missing a hand. A leg. Or there is not a single leg at all. And some don’t resemble human corpses so much as an indeterminate object that blackens the water and around which flies swarm. The water has raised one of the corpses higher onto a branch. The head can no longer be distinguished from the rest of the body. And so—from the branch, no longer resembling a human, as if speaking to those below… What could it even say to them… if it could really speak! Another one looks like charcoal. It’s turned toward the bank. He was young, that much can be seen. Now he’s like charcoal, like tar. The water rocks him farther, and it seems as if he’ll turn around and leave. Some are already going: the ones farther from the shore and closer to the current are rolling over—the current rolls them over and carries them away.

They leave like that, one by one…

They depart as if from a dock, to pull into some other dock…They start on their journey, but they are dead. In their place others arrive because new corpses are constantly arriving along the Sava. The current here throws them to the bank, and here they are! They drop anchor in this lull of the river like travelers at an inn. They’ll spend the night, spend the day, and stay who knows how long here, and then they’ll set off on their journey again!

And like that, dead and missing pieces—legs, faces, hands, shoulders, feet, heads—they are only pieces of parts, and remnants of remainders…