MIRJANA RADMAN TESTIFIES AT TRIAL OF DINKO SAKIC

ZAGREB, April 6 (Hina) - The trial of Dinko Sakic, a former commander of the Ustashi concentration camp in Jasenovac, resumed on Tuesday at Zagreb County Court when Mirjana Radman, aged 68, began her testimony. In July 1942, Mirjana Radman, who was then a ten-year-old girl, was taken along with the family of her mother, who was a Jew, to Osijek and then transported to the female camp in Djakovo where she was separated from her family. After that she was taken to Jaska and several days later to the Jasenovac camp. She left the Jasenovac camp in December 1942, when her father came to take her with a certificate that Mirjana was a Croat. The witness said today that during her stay in the camp she had not seen or heard of the defendant Dinko Sakic. Mrs. Radman added that she had heard for Sakic for the first time before his extradition to Croatia. Being asked by the head of the panel of judges, at the beginning of her testimony, how she was feeling now, Mrs. Radman answered she was not quite comfortable. "I am a child whose mother is a Jew and father is Croat. The entire family of my mother was killed, I was the only to be saved because I was a child of a Croat," she stressed and began crying. "In the camp, in August or September 1942, I saw my dead grandmother on a cart loaded with several bodies. I recognised her by her dress, and subsequently other children told me that the corpses had been driven away to be burnt," she said. According to her, other members of her mother's family were killed in camps of Auschwitz, Matthausen and Jasenovac. She added that in the Jasenovac camp there was also her uncle, a doctor, who asked her never to admit that she was a Jew or that he was her uncle. Her mother survived the war being protected in the mix marriage, while her father was killed by Chetniks in 1943, Radman said. A few days prior to her deportation to the Jasenovac camp, Mirjana Radman along with a group of children was accommodated in Jaska where Catholic nuns received them, gave them warm meals, washed and dressed them. "We were very nicely treated there," she added. Upon her arrival in the Jasenovac camp she stayed in a barracks with other Jewish children, the oldest of whom was twelve. Youngest children were five or six year old, she said. The witness does not know how many children were in the barracks and in the entire camp, but she remembers that all of them had yellow signs on their clothes - all of them wore a yellow ribbon around their arms and on their breasts a sign with the first letter with which the Croatian word for Jews begins. She also remembers how sick children used to be taken away, but she does not know what happened with them. Children who were not seriously ill would come back to the barracks, while those who were more seriously ill would never return. Radman did not see the punishment or abuse of children neither could she remember whether other groups of children had come to the Jasenovac camp after her arrival there. She also remembers the fear instilled by the then commander of the camp, Maks Luburic. The witness told the court that she could not remember many things since she had been child who had been introverted. "All the time I cared for my friend Tamara Braun, two year younger than myself, who went to Israel after the war," Radman explained. After the war, the witness Mirjana married and lived in Banja Luka, a city in the north-west of Bosnia-Herzegovina. She told the court that in 1996 she was evicted from that town, now in the Bosnian Serb entity. They expelled me accusing me of being "Ustashi", she said crying again, and added that a Jewish organisation saved her this time. During the testimony, TV cameras did not film the face of the witness Mirjana Radman. (hina) jn ms