Prayerful remembrance on the victims in Jadovno

29/6/2011

Above the Saran pit in Jadovno, His Grace Bishop Gerasim of Gornji Karlovci with the concelebration of priests and monks of the Bishopric of Gornji Karlovci served the Holy Hierarchal Liturgy, and then the memorial service to all the killed Orthodox Serbs in the pits of Jadovno and other scaffolds in Croatia.

The Holy Liturgy was attended by a great number of believers who came from all parts of Croatia, Serbia and the Republic of Srpska to honour and pray for the souls of the innocently killed. Many of those who visited the Jadovno camp lost here some of their relatives. Among those is also the President of the Republic of Serbia Mr. Boris Tadic, who came with his mother to visit the greates scaffold of Serbs in Lika.

President Tadic said that he was honoured to have an opportunity to honour as the President of Serbia for the first time to the victims of the crime, which, as he said, no one should ever forget. “Tens of thousands of people were killed here just because they had their identity, name, position, faith. No one should ever forget it. Innocent victims deserve our remembrance, both today and each subsequent year, not just here but also on Pag and in Jasenovac”, Tadic said.
In Jadovno from May to August 1941 in 132 days of the existence of the camp, more than 40000 people was killed, among those 38000 were Serbs. The Saran pit is only one of the 32 pits on the Velebit mountain in which victims of the camp were thrown which had its branch offices in the bays Metajna and Slana on the island of Pag, where the corpses of women and children were thrown into the sea. The Camp Jadovno was founded by the authorities of the nazi creation the Independant State of Croatia (NDH), on the Velebit mountain, in Lika, soon after the proclamation of NDH in 1941.

Jadovno was, along with Jasenovac, the greatest Ustasha’s scaffold in the World War Two. The camp was closed by the end of 1941 by the Italian army. The memorial center, raised ten years after teh Second World War on the site of the camp, was devastated on the beginning of the 1990s.

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