KNIFE IN CRADLE, BLOOD, ASHES AND ONE SURVIVING WOMAN

BANJA LUKA, JUNE 30 /SRNA/ - Dara Milošević from Miloševići, near Banja Luka, who was the only one in her family to survive the bloody Ustasha massacre in her village on February 12, 1942, testifies that the Ustashas killed three of her children, one of whom was a baby in a cradle, and burned 15 Serbian peasants alive in one house.

After the massacre in Milakovići, Ustashas went to the next village - Miloševići. Dara Milošević was 24 at the time of the massacre and she is the sole survivor from her household - probably by pure luck.

"There were a lot of people in the house. Both small children and elderly people. We heard bangs, shooting in all directions. We didn't know what it was, but it didn't bode well, so we locked ourselves in immediately. We had one small window, when I looked, everything was black with Ustashas. It seems to me that one immediately appeared at the door. He was trying to open it. Aunt Đuja /65/ opened it, the Ustashas came in and immediately pointed their rifles at the people in the house," said Dara.

She states that the Ustasha ordered the household to go outside.

"I don't know who came out first. I only know that I came out almost last. Uncle Milan was lying on the bed. He couldn't get up and walk. He was sick. My little child was left there in the room, in the cradle. They just stabbed him. And they killed my uncle; they shot him in the mouth. We went outside. The children are walking alone. They cry. The women are silent. When we went outside, he lined us up. I asked him not to kill us, because we are not guilty of anything and not to touch our children. I asked him if he had anyone of his own anywhere? Let him think about his own. He says he has no one, but God, his only hope," Dara told Lazar Lukajić, author of the book "Ustashas and Friars Slaughter".

ONLY CHILD'S HAND IN ASHES

She says that the Ustasa who lined them up ordered them to turn away from him and forbade them to speak.

"As we turned, he fired a rifle or a machine gun. We all fell. I fell too. Or someone pushed me while falling from the bullets. I wasn't aware for a long time. When I came to my senses, my mouth was full of snow and gunpowder. I don't know if I was killed, wounded, or if I could get up on my feet. I don't know anything. Someone was pressing on me. They were falling on me. Or they were pushing. Or I fell myself from fear. Who knows? Later, I started to think a little. It was like that for a long time. I lay like that for a while, like dead. About half an hour," she recalls.

Dara said that she eventually realized that she was the only one left alive because no one around her was showing signs of life.

"I looked around me. Everything was bloody. I was bloody as well. There was blood in the snow. I couldn't even look because I was in pain. Everything around me was turning red, I felt sick, and I was scared. It all mixed up. I barely managed to get out. I wish I had died with them. Because they killed my three children. I got up," she recalls.

Dara said that by some miracle she was not even wounded.

"That's it. They had to knock me down. Those women around me, how could it be? That's how it had to be," she said.

She said that she somehow went to the house, where she saw her baby, which the Ustashas had stabbed first.

"Stabbed in the leg and chest. I don't know how I stayed on my feet. The house next to ours was burned down, and they found 15 people in the house and burned them alive. Only one child's hand remained in the ashes. I'm thinking where am I going to go now? What kind of life is this?" she said.

Dara remembers that she soon heard shots, so she hid in a field among the sheep.

"I hid there, I saw them passing in all directions, making sure no one is left alive. They also drove away the livestock they collected after killing people. They sang, they laughed," she said.

DISMEMBERED BODIES OF MURDERED BURIED IN PIT IN YARD

When the Ustashas retreated, Dara set out to try to find her man or anyone alive to tell what had happened, about the terrible crime she had witnessed.

"I headed across the railway to the village of Radulje, they didn't come there, they couldn't cross the stream because of the snow and drifts. During the night I made my way through the drifts. I arrived in the morning and found my man Boško there. They didn't know anything.

I told them what happened, that everyone is dead, except me. The next day, word had already spread about the Ustasha bloody feast, my brother-in-law and some partisans gathered at the house, so we headed towards the houses where the corpses remained. When we arrived, most of the bodies, especially the children, had been dismembered by the pigs. There was little to identify and bury. We basically buried everything in the yard in one sepulcher," said Dara.

TIME PASSES, BUT THE DOESN'T FADE

She finally said that, regardless of the time that has passed, the memory of the horrors she saw on that fateful February day does not fade nor does the pain diminish.

"So, I stayed alive, and it would have been better if I hadn't. Every day of my life I think about it, those images do not fade nor does the pain diminish," said Dara Milošević, in a confession documented in the book "Friars and Ustashas Slaughter". /end/