Through the Eyes of the Handschar: The Zvonimir Bernwald Chronicles, Part II
Continuing the Muslim Nazis prologue
Zvonimir Bernwald was only seventeen when he saw the inside of the infamous Jasenovac death camp. He wasn't a prisoner there. In fact, being a multi-lingual Volksdeutsche, he was acting as a translator for an officer in the Wehrmacht that was conducting an inspection of the Ustashe's facilities in the new Independent State of Croatia. Zvonimir had known of Jasenovac before going, hearing talk of it from his parents in hushed tones, but knew little of its brutal reputation. The violence caused by the Ustashe was not unknown to him by the time he visited the camp—as he recalled, the year before, during the initial explosion of violence after the Ustashe takeover, he and his friends would often see “dozens of corpses” floating down the Sava during floods, often likely exacerbated by the corpses damming up various parts of the current further upriver until they were dislodged by simple physics or perhaps laborers using various sticks and implements. It was no mystery to Zvonimir why he knew so many people—his brother Nikola included—would join Tito's Partisans to fight against such barbarism, but he also knew that the chances of these Partisans' families being killed and tossed into the Sava by the Ustashe had no doubt increased. As he saw it, there was plenty of reason for him to attach himself to Croatia's new German allies. Which was how he ended up visiting the notorious Jasenovac, also known as the Balkan Auschwitz, in the summer of 1942. As Zvonimir himself recalled: