Independent State of Croatia: Dead Silence

Third part of a documentary film on the Independent State of Croatia (NDH). “I remember there was a large room where children laid on straw. Some were sleeping. Others were dead, we just thought there were sleeping. Some roamed around, as if looking for something. They were crying and screaming, calling their mothers… Every morning, men came in with wheelbarrows. They loaded up the bodies of dead children and took them away. It was one of the hardest periods of my life, one that I will never forget.” This is how Milinko Čekić, now an eighty-year-old, remembers the part of his childhood he spent at the children’s camp in Sisak. The Independent State of Croatia established camps for children. The most notorious ones were in Sisak and Jastrebarsko. Children were brought to these camps from all over NDH, but the majority came from Kozara, a mountain in the north-western region of Bosnia. The third and last part of the documentary film on NDH speaks of the fates of Serbian children