Sonja Ritoša (Grubić)

I contracted diphtheria and I almost died, I was very sick. And everything was fine, my father was a resourceful man and he brought a few bottles of schnaps because he couldn’t get anything but money and those bottles of schnaps, he added water and through the wire he managed to contact passers by and all those poor people passing by, you know what it’s like with the wires, you can’t move and so we would feel sorry for them and he brought them schnaps and sold it so he had money and he would buy, he did that mostly. But one day they singled him out and told him to dig a hole outside. And he did that for a few days, they were going to shoot us, us children. And they lined us up, I remember that, us kids and we held our mothers and cried and when the hole was dug and he was like antifascist and since they were all lined up, soldiers and one, two he’s counting in Hungarian and we were crying, and then a Hungarian came and just as he was about to say three another officer came and says “wait”, he argues with the man and says “If he’s a communist what did the children do? Let them go” and they argued and we stayed alive. And then they put my dad away somewhere separately and we were there for three months, it felt like a year, I don’t know, I don’t know exactly. A long time. One day this man my father talked to told him “mr.Jovović we heard you are going to be deported in two days, from this camp, I don’t know for Auschwitz or where. So if you can hide behind a corner or something” and he told us where “I will arrange a boat to get you to Pančevo”. Because it’s through Danube, not from Novi Sad. And so the day came and it was not just us but two or three families his because there was a lot of people. And the man waited for us and we got on the boat to Pančevo...in Zemun. But when the soldiers called our names, when they were putting people in wagons, the camp people, they called our names and we weren’t there, the other family was not there. They knew what was going on right away and they called Pančevo and met us there.

A: I don't know, the christenings were also, I remember, that Stepinac who they made holy and everything, when I was a child I saw him christening people they shot, I don’t know what that meant, was he for or against them. Q:Where did you see that? A:In Belgrade. Q:So when Alojzije Stepinac A: I don’t know where that was. If it was Belgrade or where. Maybe it was in... Q:Zemun? A:Zemun. Q:Zemun was under NDH A:Pavelić, yes, I think so yes. Q: could you describe that? A: I just saw people and children line up like they did us by the trench and...they’d shoot them and this Stepinac blessed them. He kept blessing them. Q:You don’t know what happened after.. A:Don’t know. No, they shot them. People were shot, yes. People were shot. Q:You saw that? A: Yes, that is what I saw. That is what I saw. It’s still vivid in my head, you can’t imagine, the corpses, the legs, arms, on the roads after the bombings. Every now and then I remember that. It’s horrible. See, I have no good memories, I remember only the bad. Q: How old were you then? A: I was 8 when the war started. When we came back I was 12, 7th grade. We were living in Dušanovac and that apartment was on the ground floor, I remember this one story that maybe shouldn’t be told but when Russians came to free Belgrade there was fighting in the streets and they hid with us one night, they came one night, there was a wooden gate, they came through the gates with their jeep and said “Where are the girls?” they were looking for girls and my father hid my sisters, they already heard they were coming. One was in the living room in the kitchen, we had a couch in the living room, red and this drunken Russian fell through the window on the couch and slept drunk the whole night, dead drunk, they drank a lot, and asked for women. And since he was drunk he wet himself and in the morning got up and left, didn’t know anything, everything was red. And the kids made fun of him.