WITNESS FROM ISRAEL TESTIFIES IN SAKIC WAR CRIMES TRIAL

ZAGREB, May 24 (Hina) - Witness Zdenko Schwartz from Israel on Monday testified at the Zagreb County Court in the trial of Dinko Sakic, war crimes suspect and former commander of a Croatian World War Two concentration camp. The Monday main hearing was supposed to begin with Schwartz's testimony, but given that he was late, the testimonies of two witnesses unable to attend due to poor health were read in court. Schwartz, aged 85, arrived in Zagreb on Sunday. He left Palace hotel he is staying in this morning without being seen by a policeman guarding the entrance, boarded a tram and went around Zagreb, where he lived 50 years ago and where he was arrested by the Ustashi in September 1941. He finally dropped by at a friend's, where he felt weak, lay down and fell asleep. He eventually appeared in court three hours late. At the beginning of the testimony he refused to have the main hearing translated into Hebrew because, he said, he has not forgotten Croatian. After his arrest in Zagreb in 1941, Schwartz spent the next four years between the concentration camps in Jasenovac, Stara Gradiska, and Lepoglava. In mid-April 1944, he jumped off a train from Lepoglava to the Jasenovac camp, thus saving his life. He remembered Sakic as the commander at the Jasenovac camp, but did not know when he took the position. The witness accused Sakic as being one of the Ustashi who played the so called hunting game at the camp. "The Ustashi would line a group of inmates on a clearing in front of headquarters, order them to run, and then shoot at them." On one occasion he said he saw Sakic play the hunting game by shooting at the inmates from a headquarters window. Asked about the number of inmates in the camp, Schwartz said "5,000 inmates at the most could be in the camp at one time," but added, some 700,000 had passed through. Speaking about the poor conditions at the camp, where illnesses raged, the witness said he would not have survived had his Croat friends from Zagreb not sent him food packages on a regular basis. The worst thing he had seen was the murder of a pregnant Romany woman. "I was present when an Ustashi asked her what sex the baby would be. When she answered she didn't know, he ordered her to lie down so he could check. He ripped her stomach open before my eyes. Taking out the baby he said it was a boy, threw the baby in the air and stabbed it with a bayonet." The abuse at the camp was a daily occurrence, Schwartz said. "One only had to fall on the ground because of weakness for the Ustashi to beat them to death with rifle butts." There were no mass executions at the camp, because it would have been difficult to take the bodies outside and bury them, he said. The reasons why musters took place and why inmates were selected varied. "On one occasion they singled out inmates who had no working skills, on another they singled out people only because they wore glasses or a moustache." Schwartz said he had heard about mass executions at Gradina, the abuse and killings in the bell-tower, and about Picili's furnace, where "they sometimes incinerated people who were alive." "I never saw that, but we concluded they were burning human flesh by the smoke coming from the brickworks' chimney and by the stench." He also said "the Ustashi made failed attempts to make soap from the corpses." The way the Ustashi would treat the inmates depended on the former's mood and character. During his testimony, Schwartz could not determine the period of time he was detained in each of the three camps, nor when a certain event took place. Many defence questions thus remained unanswered. Today's main hearing was attended by international Jewish organisation B'nai B'rith honorary president Tommy Baer and director Alan M. Schneider. The Sakic trial will resume on May 26. (hina) ha jn