Members of the Association of Prisoners in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Regional Union of Associations of Prisoners of the Banja Luka Region, the Association of Prisoners “Prijedor `92.” and the Kozarac Inmates’ Association, today from 11:00 a.m. at the location of the former Trnopolje camp near Prijedor, will hold an event to commemorate the 31st anniversary of the formation of that concentration camp through which the inmates passed during the aggression against the state of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
Alma Karabasic from Kamicani near Prijedor was imprisoned as a minor in the spring of 1992 with her mother, younger brother, and other women and children in the ”Trnopolje” camp, while her father headed with the men to – for them – safe territory, but his body was later found in a mass grave.
At the end of May 1992, shortly after her sixteenth birthday, Alma Karabasic, then Alic, with dozens of women and children arrived at the ”Trnopolje” camp, which had just been formed by the decision of the Crisis Staff of the city of Prijedor with the intention of housing the civilian population from the area of Kozarac, and later civilians were also brought from other Prijedor settlements.
”We were in the hall. I don’t know if it was a sports hall. It looked more like a theater hall. It was crowded. We almost slept on top of each other. Mom found three empty beer crates somewhere, so we sat on them. Our aunts and their children were with us, many more women with children, my peers and younger, older women,” Alma recalls, as well as that they slept on the floor of the hall guarded by armed guards.
As she says, the hygienic conditions and diet were poor.
”That first night we were inside. We couldn’t go out anywhere. Later we only went out to get food. There were lines in front of the cauldron. I remember the bitter bread and boiled wheat in the broth the most if there was anything. Nothing much. There was mostly no food,” she adds, describing how she remembers the month of detention in “Trnopolje”.
Wagons of fear and robbery
In Alma’s memory, the stomping of soldiers’ boots on the stones next to the railroad tracks still echoes where the train with which she was deported from “Trnopolje” with her mother, brother, and dozens of other women and children stopped a month later.
”We rode in cattle wagons. There were more than 100 of us in each wagon. Nobody knew where we were going. We traveled all night. Women put their hands with containers through the window to catch the rainwater. Before dawn, we stopped somewhere. Then I heard those boots. Bosnian Serb soldiers opened the wagons and said that whoever needs to go to the toilet can pour himself some water. There were fountains somewhere near the railway,” Alma describes.
”They pushed us out at the quarry. The river Bosna flows there. They told us to cross the bridge and that our people were waiting for us up there. We went on foot. Stanic Rijeka was the first stop. The locals welcomed us there. We went to a school. We spent the night there. Then they drove us in tractors and horse-drawn carts and placed us in houses. We were there for five days. We were also in the Klokotnica settlement and in Gracanica for a short time. Afterward, we arrived at Bosanski Brod, from where the buses took us to Zagreb,” she adds.
Unanswered messages hinted at the father’s fate
Alma, her mother, and her brother lived in Croatia for half a year. Her mother, she says, sent messages through the Red Cross to her husband Ekrem, Alma’s father.
”There was never a reply to any of our messages. We were waiting for him, and when some inmates from Prijedor arrived in Karlovac after their release, they couldn’t tell us what happened to Dad. After unanswered messages, we guessed what happened,” Alma said, Detektor reports.
E.Dz.
