Just a few times did some family members come here over the open pit of Šaran - to drop flowers down into the abyss and to light candles in a prayer for the victims to rest in peace.
For many who tried to visit this place where their loved ones were killed, it was hard even to find a path to this Memorial site because after you pass the the Village of Jadovno there is not even a signpost even today, and the locals purposely avoid any contact with us at all.
From the very establishment of the Independent State of Croatia, its Ustasha rulers and their armed groups sought to conceal the evil, the killings, the mass bloodshed and the massacres of the civilian population. Upon the elimination of the Jadovno camp in late August 1941, the perpetrators threw down into some of the pits large piles of tree branches and stones to cover the bodies of their murder victims, and at some of pits they closed up the entry with concrete. Many such killing sites remain hidden under a veil of secrecy to this very day.
And the perpetrators were not alone in erasing their traces. The resident population near these mass graves also contributed to keeping the truth unknown by hiding these locations from anyone who showed any interest, and over the course of inevitable natural processes, were aided in their task by dense new vegetation overgrowing and covering up any trace at all of many of the sites.
All during the war, the truth about the atrocities was manipulated in false documents, the crimes were hidden and minimized, and clues were completely erased. The Ustasha destroyed many other pieces of evidence as the war progressed.
In the post-war period (1945-1990) any public mention of the victims of Ustasha terror was greatly restricted both in physical human scale and in terms of its consequences.
Not only were certain individuals destroying any surviving written documents, but so too were authorities of liberated Yugoslavia preventing the collection or publication of authentic data about the Ustasha massacres of the Serbian and Jewish people. They did whatever they could to ensure that this subject was spoken of and written about as little as possible.
In general, it was seen as undesirable and counterproductive to the building of "brotherhood and unity" to even mention the Serbian and Jewish victims. It is well known that even some of the first to take up arms (prvoborci) opposed to this "silence" were themselves quickly punished.
Professor Ante Zemljar, who was himself from Pag Island, was the author of the one and only book about the Slana and Metajna camps, and after in 1947 and 1948 leading inhabitants of Pag to the area of the Slana camp to lay wreaths, ended up imprisoned on the Goli Otok (Naked Island) re-education camp.
Branko Cetina, one of the few people who managed to escape from the Jadovno camp, was immediately forced to retire after he gave a history class to families of Jadovno victims, even though he was a Communist Partisan officer with the rank of colonel.
Until recent days, only Jasenovac, among all the Ustashe death camps, known by many as a major site of slaughter of Serbian people, was respectfully memorialized with an annual commemoration of the anniversary of the inmates’ breakout, an event that gathers the families of the killed and even gets some media attention.
Rarely the "Danica", Sisak and Jastrebarsko camps are mentioned...
But as for the Jadovno Camp, barely a word was heard of it. It was as if there had been an imposed silence that had generated total "public amnesia." To date, even 69 years after the massacre of so many innocent people, these places remain unmarked, and no pity has been shown for these martyrs. This purposeful and controlled post-war silence and the accompanying eradication of the truth, took advantage of a lack of awareness among the victims’ own descendants – something that psychologists say has been very common ever since the war.
Inside the victims’ families, Jadovno was mentioned, but under that name, people generally implied this Šaran cave. It was still rare for any among them to know that near the pit there was a camp, and in any event, this location was unmarked and there was no road to get to this place.
The fact that right here there was once the entire Jadovno camp complex, was a fact virtually unknown not just to the public, but among our own families, and even today, only a very few people know anything about it.
The name of this execution site, the "1941 Jadovno complex of Ustasha camps” appeared in print for the first time only in 2007, as the title of the two-volume life’s work of Đure Zatezalo.
I have to say that without that capital work, finished in 1990 but never finding a publisher in Croatia, even today we would know almost nothing about Jadovno. Without Zatezalo’s full personal commitment to Jadovno history research and without his tremendous energy, our association, Jadovno 1941, would not even be here today.
The concealing of the truth about Jadovno, and the vilification and humiliation of the victims and their descendants continues to the present day. If you look around here, it all becomes completely clear…
If the truth of Jadovno were not still hidden, then the descendants of the victims would not have to wander aimlessly through this Velebit "nature resort" with Dr. Zatezalo, searching for the site where Jadovno operated, nor would they have to burn under the sun in a rocky desert looking for the location of the smashed memorial plaque at Slana, nor would they need to walk holding a proverbial "lantern" looking for anyone in Metajna willing to show them the way to the former concentration camp for women and children. If there were any respect for the victims, there would not be a bike-racing path between the Jadovno killing pits nor would the Slana Memorial area serve as a site for sunbathing, swimming and scuba diving.
I will not personally talk about the number of victims killed at the Jadovno Ustashe concentration camp in 1941 because I do not want to open the door to the abuse of this Jadovno Day of Remembrance by those who in their self-proclaimed "mathematical" calculations compare our victims to sardines in cans.
But, if you look at the research by Đuro Zatetalo, Francis Zdunić Leo, Fikreta Jelic-Bunić or Slavko Goldstein, you will see that all of them talk about tens of thousands of victims. It is difficult even for us to conceptualize such numbers in our own minds.
However, we descendants of Jadovno victims, counting the broken branches of our family trees in our genealogy -- only we can know and feel the pain of the irreparable loss represented by each life taken here at this site.
Until recently, there was no remembrance day for Jadovno. On the initiative of the descendants Association of Jadovno, June 24 has been designated as the "Jadovno 1941 Day of Remembrance." On that date in 1941, Slanat concentration camp on the island of Pag received its first detainees and Jadovno camp on Velebit mountain reached its full dimensions. So far, several institutions have recognized this date and put it into their calendars marking execution sites from World War II. I beg you, leaders of the institutions of the Republic of Croatia, do the same.
This day should be remembered and must remind us of the crime and the tragedy that occurred here – we must not forget, and must never let a similar fate ever befall anyone again.
I must say, some hinted to us that our Jadovno commemoration would best be held only on "round number" anniversaries such as the 70th, 75th, and 80th, so that when the 85th arrived, even the grandchildren of most Jadovno victims would no longer be among the living. Of course such proposals come as no surprise -- they are but a facet of the earlier-mentioned continuity.
No, we will come to Jadovno every year, and if God grants us, we will come here several times per year. Until the pits full of the remains of our family members have been replaced with graves…
Jadovno will stay in our souls, in our thoughts and in our prayers and all we do here represents merely dignified behavior toward the innocent victims, the members of our own families. And this is as well our responsibility to our descendants, it represents our commitment to a safe tomorrow and to the lesson never to forget Jadovno, so that it can never happen again.
Thank you.