New York -- More than 50 years of U.S. silence concerning the Yugoslav holocaust came dramatically to an end on October 30, when 16 survivors of the Jasenovac death camp bore witness at the first international conference ever convened to document the butchery inflicted on Serbs, Jews and Romanies by the Independent State of Croatia during World War II. 
     Documents presented at the conference by historians, authors and holocaust scholars indicate that, at a minimum, 500,000 Yugoslavs were murdered from 1941 to 1945 in a system of bestial death camps centered in Jasenovac, Croatia. The vast majority of victims were Serbs, though tens of thousands of Jews and Romanies (more commonly known as gypsies) were also killed. 
Nightmarish Suffering 
     "I have a nightmare in my head," Jasenovac survivor Mara Vejnovic told the conference. "I hear the cries of human pain, of grief, of helplessness and madness when the children are taken off to be killed. I remember women stabbed to death as they refuse to surrender them." 
     Eta Najfield, a doctor and professor of medicine at the University of Belgrade who was among the survivors that testified, declared forcefully: "After 50 years, I can speak loudly about my loved ones who perished in Jasenovac. 
     "By all accounts," she added, "the concentration camps in Jasenovac and Stara Graduska were the most brutal and bestial in all of Europe." Mrs. Najfleld alone lost 56 members of her family. 
     Numerous scholars at the conference confirmed that Jasenovac was the largest death camp outside the Third Reich and was the third most deadly of all Nazi death camps. Unlike all other camps, though, Jasenovac was administered almost entirely by Croatian fascists who called themselves Ustashi. They were led by Ante Pavelic, named by the Nazis as head of the Independent State of Croatia (NDH), which expanded its territory in World War 11 to include all of Bosnia and an area all the way to Zemun, near Belgrade. 
     The International Conference and Exhibition on the Jasenovac Concentration Camps, sponsored by the Holocaust Resource Center at Angsborough Community College in Brooklyn, also included an extensive photographic presentation of the horrors visited on the prisoners at Jasenovac, as well as displays of paraphernalia used for human butchery in the camps. 
     The exhibition, mounted by curator Mladen Kumovic of the Museum of Vojvodina for display at the Museum of the Victims of Genocide in Belgrade, had only appeared outside Yugoslavia once before at a showing in Vienna, Austria. 
Genocide Documented 
     "Jasenovac is as appropriate a subject for investigation as any other death camp in Europe, from Auschwitz to Dachau," said Dr. Eli Rosenbaum of the U. S. Justice Departtnent's Office of Special Investigation, the governmental unit that revealed former U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim's role as an SS operative in Yugoslavia. Rosenbaurrf s office also extradited Ustasha Interior Minister Andrija Artukovich to Yugoslavia for trial and conviction as a war criminal.  

Jasenovac Survivor Lilijana Ivanisovic grieves as she recounts how Ustashi guards "separated babies from their mothers' breasts and threw them into pits. "  

     At the conference, Dr. Rosenbaum also documented evidence of Waldheim's direct involvement in shipping Serb prisoners from the killing grounds of Kozara in the German's Western Bosnia Command to the nearby Jasenovac camps. His presentation included evidence from German documents seized by U.S. Armed forces and currently housed in the U. S. National Archives. These documents, which include reports from Jasenovac camp Director Max Luberic, cite the "liquidation" of 220,000 prisoners as early in the war as December of 1943 -- fully 120,000 of them identified specifically as Jasenovac prisoners. 
     Dr. Rosenbaum cited laws passed by the NDH and signed by Pavelic that called for incarceration of "undesirables. " Later edicts ordered imprisonment of non-Croatian families and especially children. "I shuttered when I read that," Dr. Rosenbaum said. "A law directing that children be sent to concentration camps!" 
     Professor Christopher Simpson, an author and expert in the "ratline" escape routes created through the Vatican for Ustashi leaders following the war, stated flatly: "Genocide is not a learned activity It requires the organization of a State. 
     These are crimes that require participation by a much wider range of figures than guards." 
     The testimony of survivors at the conference, convened by Dr. Bernard Klein, Chairman of the History Department at Kingsborough Community College, revealed in horrifying detail that there was ample cause for Dr. Rosenbaum's disgust and Professor Simpson's judgment, as did numerous papers presented at the conference by other historians, authors, and recognized holocaust scholars. 
Widespread Infanticide 
     The terror of one day in particular stood out in the mind of survivor Bozo Shvartz, who lost 30 members of his family. It was a day among many during his 16 months in Jasenovac, he told the conference; a day when he witnessed the torture of children being brought to the camp from Kozara Mountain. 
     "The day was as beautiful as this one," he recounted, referring to the elegant autumn shining over Brooklyn. "They brought in the children shivering. One Ustasha took a child by the hand and spun him around over his head" until the child's body flew apart, leaving only its hand in the Ustasha's grip. Others guards tried to spear the child with their bayonets as it spun. 
     Many in the audience wept openly with Lilijana Ivanisovic as she recalled how the Ustashi literally "separated babies from their mothers' breasts and threw them into pits" at Stara Graduska, the camp in the Jasenovac system to which women were sent. 
     Survivors told of starvation driving some prisoners to cannibalism; others to desperate searches for nutrition.  Mrs. Ivanisovic recalled how she and other prisoners couldn't wait to cat the grass on which their keepers had wiped their hands after carrying off the dead. "I was most happy to see the grave diggers, because then I knew there would be [freshly unearthed] grass to eat." Starvation caused her to lick her fingers so hard that the skin ultimately wore away to the bone.