PLEASE NOTE: This book contains graphic description ... - HUNSOR

all the captured Serbs, as neither side gave mercy. Upon seeing beheaded Hungarian corpses onthe main square of the village, the Hungarian soldiers fought with an even more ruthless fury.After the bloody struggle, about two thousand Serb frontier guards were found dead onthe battle field. The Hungarian casualties came to 200.According to the Serbian notion of valor, the villagers of Srbobran, which was renamedSzenttamas in 1941, could not have surrendered to the arriving Hungarian troops without puttingup a fight.The Hungarian soldiers were fired at in the streets or from attics. They sometimes firedback, but were not always hitting the place where the snipers were shooting from.During the days of the Hungarian entry in 1941, ninety-two Serbs from Szenttamas died.In the following months the Hungarians interned twelve people, accused with illegalsubversive activity and the counter-intelligence corps arrested and took away twenty-onevillagers.Without any investigation, we can easily assume that among the dead, the interned, andthose accused of espionage, there may have been those who were completely innocent and hadto suffer despite their innocence, says a Yugoslavian summary made in 1946.No one can tell whether the bloodshed of 1849 or that of 1941 created a more ardent memory forthe villagers in Szenttamas. Obviously, in the fall of 1944, mainly the latter one would be morevividly remembered by concerned families or relatives.According to the martial morals of the partisans, "the liberators of the people", therevenge could not have been avoided.Pal Suge is one of the few witnesses of the revenge who dared to verify his testimony bygiving his name. Obviously, since he fled to a Western country, he was not afraid that theretaliation could reach him. Therefore, he told the Serbian national secret. In 1944, Pal Suge was21, and at this most vulnerable age, he succeded in hiding away from the murderous Serbianguns in his native village."In October 1944, when the Hungarian and German army units evacuated Szenttamas,the Russian troops and Tito's partisans62marched in immediately. Then there were 18 thousand villagers, now only 15 thousand peoplelive here. Three thousand Hungarians were either killed or carried off. The partisans led thegroups of captured men to the old Serbian cemetery, where the victims were forced to dig theirown graves. Having finished working, they were shot dead while standing in their graves. Thesewere common graves. The following groups buried the dead, then they had to dig new graves forthemselves. The executions continued for four or five days, each night two or three groups wereexecuted. A group consisted of 150-200 people. The length of the graves was 15-20 m, the widthwas some 7 m. There are 4 or 5 mass graves like that. There are smaller common graves, with15-20 corpses in them.I can explain why they were massacred with the help of an example. My cousin's wife, in herseventh month of pregnancy, was carried off at night, then they beat her severely, and shot herdead in the cemetery together with the other victims. Her only guilt was that her husband was a