The 66-year-old Dragutin Berghofer - Beli described on Wednesday, the first day of his testimony, how all detained at the Ovcara farm outside Vukovar were brutally tortured when the eastern Croatian town fell into the Serbs' hands.
He spoke of how some 350 civilians had been captured in the Vukovar hospital following Major Sljivancanin's order and then transferred on buses first to a JNA military barracks and then about 270 of them to the farm on 20 November 1991.
He said that armed men started to beat them on the buses.
Describing their torture in the hangar at Ovcara, the witness said that he was not sure whether "the civilised world can understand how they were beaten".
"As soon as we left the buses we had to pass between two lines of soldiers who were beating us with clubs, military boots, fists," the witness said yesterday, when he told the court that only seven survived the Ovcara massacre after their neighbours or acquaintances of Serb origin intervened and saved them.
Berghofer was detained in the Ovcara hangar for about two hours when soldier Goran Ivankovic, the son of his friend, Doctor Mladen Ivankovic, took him away from the hangar. He and another six released men were brought back to Vukovar.
"Those who remained (at Ovcara) are not alive. They were aged 16 to 70," the witness said on Thursday, when he read out the names of 32 victims whom he had known. They were his acquaintances or neighbours whom he saw for the last time at Ovcara.
The witness suggested that trial chamber judges should see the parents of some victims who have never recuperated from their loss.
He also said that his second wife and a daughter from a previous marriage had been killed. His wife lost her life in a shelling of the town, while his daughter, he said, was killed by their Serb acquaintance, Pavle Cvijanovic, whom "we provided with food until 17 November (1991)", the witness said.