Story Behind The Book
As a double victim of Balkan Genocide, in 1942 in the village of Vojnic, Croatia where my father was born, Croatian Nazis and their Nazi Catholic priests gathered 97 Serbs in the Serbian Orthodox church on the pretext that they would be converted to Catholicism and their lives would be spared. The doors were lock from the outside and the church was burned to the ground. Seventeen of those victims were my relatives. On a trip to Croatia in the 1980s I photographed the ruins of that church where Marshall Tito had placed a memorial plaque to its victims. In 1995, Croatian President Franjo Tudjman had the site bulldozed along with the Jasenovac Concentration Camp, known by historians as "The Auschwitz of the Balkans" where 700,000 Serbs 60,000 Jews and 70,000 Roma Gypsies were put to death. A separate wing of the Concentration Camp was run by Catholic nuns who liquidated 90,000 Serbian children under the age of ten with poison to save bullets. 740 criminal Catholic priests escaped Croatia in 1945 through the "Vatican Ratline" for Argentina. Ante Pavelich, the Nazi president of Croatia also fled through the Vatican Ratline and became the "Security Advisor" to Juan Peron who issued 34,000 visas to Croatian war criminals... none were ever brought to justice. During "Operation Storm" in 1995 when 250,000 Serbs were "ethnically cleansed" from Croatia, the last 5 relatives of my name were too old and too sick to flee ... one month later the Red Cross notified me that they were found with their throats slit. This book is a collection of my published article and letters over a 10 year period, a way of memorializing my family and relatives and documentation against those who perpetrated a second Genocide in Croatia of 40,000 Serbians in 1991.