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In Bjelovar, in 1941 a collection center was erected for Serbs from Bjelovar and the surrounding areas. A month and a half after leaving the hospital, two armed soldiers came for us. They said that we could bring two suitcases. We already had the suitcases ready, because we knew that people were being taken to camps. They had already taken my mother-in-law to the collection center in Bjelovar, my father-in-law was not taken only because he was sick and in the hospital in Zagreb at the time. After being released from the hospital he moved in with us because his house had been confiscated, and his wife taken to the collection center in Bjelovar. That night when they came for my husband, children and I they also took my father-in-law. He was reunited with his wife in the camp. When we arrived in the collection center in Bjelovar they searched us to the bone. They even stripped my baby. They expected to find gold. Luckily the 10 gold coins that I received as a wedding present, I covered with fabric and sewed onto a dress as buttons. They did not find them.
The camp was three-stories high. We slept on boards with straw. The food was very poor in the camp. My mother Cornelia managed from time to time to secretly pass us some food by bribing the guards. We were in the camp five months when my mother finally managed to get in to see me so we could talk. To get permission for this 10 minute conversation she had to give a large amount of slaughtered poultry. During her visit she told me that she and my father had obtained visas for Switzerland, but that they would not go because they did not know what would happen to me and my children, and they did not have any news about my sister Ruzica. I begged her to go home immediately, collect the necessary things and go with my father to Switzerland while it was still possible, because they were certainly preparing even worse things for the Jews than for the Serbs. My mother did not listen to me and after just two days they took her and my father away. My father was killed in the Jasenovac death camp in 1942 and my mother was taken to the women’s camp in Lobor Grad near Krapina, where she contracted typhus fever and died in 1942.
The camp was three-stories high. We slept on boards with straw. The food was very poor in the camp. My mother Cornelia managed from time to time to secretly pass us some food by bribing the guards. We were in the camp five months when my mother finally managed to get in to see me so we could talk. To get permission for this 10 minute conversation she had to give a large amount of slaughtered poultry. During her visit she told me that she and my father had obtained visas for Switzerland, but that they would not go because they did not know what would happen to me and my children, and they did not have any news about my sister Ruzica. I begged her to go home immediately, collect the necessary things and go with my father to Switzerland while it was still possible, because they were certainly preparing even worse things for the Jews than for the Serbs. My mother did not listen to me and after just two days they took her and my father away. My father was killed in the Jasenovac death camp in 1942 and my mother was taken to the women’s camp in Lobor Grad near Krapina, where she contracted typhus fever and died in 1942.
Location
Serbia
Interview
Jelisaveta Bubic