The program titled “Stories from Captivity” was held at the Gallery of the National Museum Kraljevo, on Friday, May 9th, 2025, starting at 6 p.m. The gathering was welcomed by Darko Gučanin, director of the National Museum Kraljevo, who pointed out that the meeting of the descendants of Second World World War camp prisoners was symbolically organized on Victory Day, marking eight decades since the end of wartime conflicts in Europe. He emphasized that the idea for organizing this event, aimed at preserving the memory of ancestors’ suffering and collecting and recording testimonies and documents, originated from Nemanja Trifunović, curator of the National Museum Kraljevo, and Mrs. Andrea von Bilov.
Darko Gučanin, director of the National Museum Kraljevo, gave a lecture, beginning with a detailed description of the political and economic conditions in the German Empire, known as the Weimar Republic after the Great War. He described the circumstances that led to the rise of National Socialists and discussed Adolf Hitler’s political doctrine. He then spoke about the origins of the first concentration camps, linking them to the Spanish-Cuban War and the Boer War in the late 19th century. Gučanin defined a concentration camp as an enclosed space where people were imprisoned by authorities against their will. During the First World War, Austria-Hungary interned thousands of members of liberation movements in numerous camps. He noted that the Mauthausen camp had been active since June 1914 and, alongside Zejtinlik, was the largest cemetery for Serbian soldiers in the First World War. The camp resumed operations in 1938 and, during the Second World War, became a site for many prisoners from the Kraljevo area. Upon gaining power in Germany in 1933, the Nazis immediately began eliminating dissidents and political opponents. The first concentration camp, Dachau, was established in March 1933, initially imprisoning German citizens, primarily communists and other undesirable groups. It served as a model for all subsequent concentration camps. Death camps such as Auschwitz and Treblinka were primarily used to implement the so-called “Jewish question” and were located outside German territory. He particularly emphasized labor camps, where prisoners performed hard physical labor under inhumane conditions. Some labor camps functioned as sub-camps built near larger concentration camps. In his presentation, he also addressed camps for prisoners of war, highlighting those conditions in those camp – divided into separate sections for officers and enlisted soldiers – were relatively more bearable due to adherence to the Geneva Convention. However, Russian prisoners were excluded from the rights guaranteed by the convention, leading to a mortality rate of 47%, compared to 5% for British prisoners.
Afterward, Nemanja Trifunović, curator of the National Museum Kraljevo, spoke about conditions in the Kraljevo region during and after the brief April War, detailing the stages of local residents’ deportations to concentration camps. Most local fighters belonged to the Ibar Division, in the 58th Infantry Regiment of the Third Army, stationed in Macedonia. After only two days of conflict, this unit was defeated near Petrovo Selo, close to Skopje, and captured soldiers were transported in cattle wagons through Bulgaria, Romania, and Hungary to concentration camps. The second wave of Kraljevo residents being taken into captivity occurred in December 1941, following the uprising in Western Serbia and the Chetnik-Partisan siege of Kraljevo. Those accused of participating in the battles around Kraljevo were sent to the Banjica camp for selection; some were freed under municipal administration guarantees, while others were sent to camps not only in Germany but also to Norway. One notable case was Dragan Marinković from Adrani, who was interned in a Norwegian camp. Trifunović also mentioned deportations in the fall of 1942, as part of German operations against members of the Yugoslav Army in the Homeland (JVuO), when Kraljevo notables Radomir Vesnić and Vitomir Govedarević were imprisoned. The last prisoners from this region were sent to camps in the spring of 1943. The allocation of prisoners depended on their professions: rural people were assigned agricultural work on estates, craftsmen worked in factories supporting the German war industry, while officers remained in camps.
The second part of the program featured a live discussion with descendants of camp prisoners. In addition to the harrowing story shared by Mrs. von Bilov, who described in detail the horrors her father endured, and Darko Gučanin, who spoke about his grandfather’s captivity, about ten other attendees shared personal memories of their ancestors’ suffering. Various accounts were heard—some describing the return of survivors, others recounting the experiences of those who never made it home. Some descendants also spoke about relatives who decided to stay on German estates, where they had been forced into labor during the war. A common theme among most testimonies was the experience of prisoners walking back home from the camps. Illustrated with documents and family photographs, these memories were vivid, emotional, and invaluable to historians. One particularly captivating story was shared by a young boy about his great-grandfather, who walked for four months from Germany back to his hometown of Čukojevac. A nearly cinematic account was also given by the grandson of Velimir Lopičić from Ribnica, whose Mauthausen camp uniform is part of the museum’s permanent exhibit. Participants thanked the organizers and expressed the desire for more such gatherings, suggesting that an extensive research project be initiated at the state level to raise awareness of this crucial historical topic.