Jan Svoboda

"Probably the worst thing we saw there was, I suppose it was a woman's body, because you could see the hair, it was always there on the bodies, even the clothes, the skirts were visible and stuff. So I would say most of those bodies were women. One woman had her legs spread lightly and she had two small skulls between her legs. Just heads. Just children's heads."

"Our job when we were there, because it was mined everywhere, was to somehow clear a small area. There was a special machine that came in and it was demining it. So they were demining some area for us. There was a kind of a mosque that had fallen down, and by the mosque we had made... they put up a field tent for us to sleep in. I think we were there for about five or six weeks. There was supposed to be a mass grave somewhere not far from the mosque where they supposedly had shot the people at that time. So there were several doctors from several states that came there, and they spent the day trying to find bodies. And then, of course, they found the mass grave and started to take out the remains of the people who had been there for several years. Because when a person dies, they have some weight. I'll say, for example, that if a person was 80 kilos, and if I put him in the ground, in two years he'll be nothing. But here, the way the mass grave was, the way the people were crammed into the pile, the people were just like 50 kilos. The one who had had 80 kilos, after the seven years or so that they were in the ground, that body still had quite a bit of that tissue. It was such decomposing tissue, it smelled awful. The tissues were melting and there was this disgusting water running everywhere as the bodies were being taken out, so there was just pools of this stinking water. It was 35 degrees outside and the doctors were taking the bodies out during the day. They put each body separately in a bag. And there were coolers brought in, and the bodies were put in the coolers. And always when there were already a few of those bodies, I don't know, I don't remember exactly, in the container, and the people were already stuffed in there, then we used to go to Sarajevo with armed escorts. There we went in the BVP, normally the trucks that were carrying the container, those were the UN white containers. And we, as SFOR, escorted them with BVP, normally armed, and they were taking the dead bodies to some hospital or whatever it was, I guess, where they were doing autopsies on the bodies and finding out if these people really came from that village and from that concentration camp Omarska."