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

Mutilation of the hands or feet with large circular saws was an example of murder with long andexcruciating pain. Once the guiltless owner of the sawmill stayed home with all of his family.The troop, punishing without formal sentence, bound all the family to the sawing-bench, andstarted the machine that cut the man, the woman and the children into two.Here we should stop to rest after enumerating these horrors, but we must mention anothermethod of killing, the medieval or even older tradition of impalement. The last recorded instanceof impalement took place in 1907 in Rumania. That is how Rumanian royal law punished theleaders of the peasant's uprising. Serbia was the only place that still had some "experts" in the arteven in 1944. These experts were impaling executioners who preserved the "tradition" of theform of execution causing the greatest possible suffering, as described below:A pale more than three meters long must be peeled smooth. It must have an iron tip and itshould be made slippery with grease. The victim is laid flat on his belly and his torturers step onhis shoulders and his bottom so that he would not be able to move. They put a loop on both ofhis ankles and the two executioner's assistants pull his legs in opposite directions. The chiefexecutioner cuts the trousers on the thighs with his sharp knife, not sparing live flesh. Then hefits the tip of the pale covered with iron into the anus, paying attention to set it in a way that thepale goes along the spine, not touching the heart, so that the victim will suffer long enough. Thenhe takes a club and hammers the pale in the marked direction, while his aids pull the body ontothe pale by the ankles. The tip of the pale should come out behind the clavicle. At this moment,they put the paled man into the formerly dug ditch and it is the triumph of the executioner andthe delighted audience if the man groans on the pale for several hours...12HISTORICAL ANTECEDENTSThe Hungarians occupied the Carpathian basin at the end of the 9th century. At thattime, the territory of the present Vojvodina was settled sparsely by Bulgarians, but they soonmerged with the Hungarian population. The immigration of Serbians started in the 15th century.As a consequence of the more and more threatening attacks of the Turks, the Hungarian kingSigismund signed a contract in 1426 with Istvan Lazarevic, the Serbian vojvode, declaring theSerb his vassal. The southern Hungarian population started to move northward, fleeing fromTurkish attacks, and fleeing Serbians took this territory. In a mere four years, between 1479 and