Sonja Ritoša (Grubić)

A: I don't know, the christenings were also, I remember, that Stepinac who they made holy and everything, when I was a child I saw him christening people they shot, I don’t know what that meant, was he for or against them. Q:Where did you see that? A:In Belgrade. Q:So when Alojzije Stepinac A: I don’t know where that was. If it was Belgrade or where. Maybe it was in... Q:Zemun? A:Zemun. Q:Zemun was under NDH A:Pavelić, yes, I think so yes. Q: could you describe that? A: I just saw people and children line up like they did us by the trench and...they’d shoot them and this Stepinac blessed them. He kept blessing them. Q:You don’t know what happened after.. A:Don’t know. No, they shot them. People were shot, yes. People were shot. Q:You saw that? A: Yes, that is what I saw. That is what I saw. It’s still vivid in my head, you can’t imagine, the corpses, the legs, arms, on the roads after the bombings. Every now and then I remember that. It’s horrible. See, I have no good memories, I remember only the bad. Q: How old were you then? A: I was 8 when the war started. When we came back I was 12, 7th grade. We were living in Dušanovac and that apartment was on the ground floor, I remember this one story that maybe shouldn’t be told but when Russians came to free Belgrade there was fighting in the streets and they hid with us one night, they came one night, there was a wooden gate, they came through the gates with their jeep and said “Where are the girls?” they were looking for girls and my father hid my sisters, they already heard they were coming. One was in the living room in the kitchen, we had a couch in the living room, red and this drunken Russian fell through the window on the couch and slept drunk the whole night, dead drunk, they drank a lot, and asked for women. And since he was drunk he wet himself and in the morning got up and left, didn’t know anything, everything was red. And the kids made fun of him.

“I remember my father had a horse, he found his way, grew watermelons, I remember when I was little eating those melons, we fed them to the cattle. We made bricks from dirt and straw and built things from that, everything was fine until April 6th 1941. It was Easter. Mother already set the table so there were, one sister married, there were seven kids and mom and dad, that’s nine, big table, everything festive for Easter, cakes, meat, hot soup. It was about noon so just as we were about to eat a soldier came on a horse and told my dad: “Put the white flag up now. The war is here and you have to be ready in an hour. Take what you can, leave everything else.” And then my mom, and everything she would bring because that many kids, only kids, the youngest was 3 and a half and I was 8. And then my mom and dad tried, baby chicken hatched, ducklings, and she went to the neighbours and someone was kind and gave us money because you could take as much money as you wanted. Somebody gave money and somebody said: “that will be ours too”. And we took what we could and mom took it when they came, soldiers told us we had to go and mom carried my youngest sister, she bought her red shoes for Easter, every child got a present, she got the red shoes. Gajski Rih, that means rain in April, mud everywhere and they made us walk with the horses, many families, those who were not from there. Who was originally from there, Hungarian fascists, they didn’t bother them. And they were on horses making us walk through the mud and my sister lost her red shoe in the mud and my mom tried to pick it up and he hit her with a whip and that shoe, I know the baby was crying.”