Serbian Holocaust
Leksa Lončarski, June 12, 2012, Čurug
Our interviewee, Aleksija-Leksa Lončarski was a fourteen year old girl living in Čurug when Hungarian soldiers took her father away and detained him, with hundreds of locals in a village warehouse on January 5th, 1942. The same night shots were heard from the warehouse. Next morning the neighbours whispered that soldiers requisitioned their horses and carts ordering them to leave the wehicles in front of a local adminisdtration house. All the shot civilians, some of them still alive, were then transported by horse-driven carts to the Tisa River bank and thrown under the ice.
The bereaved family learned soon after that in a nearby village of Žabalj the entire families Čurin and Jurišin, along with others, were also killed when the Hungarian soldiers arrived. Leksa’s mother Katica, who had just became a widow, lost her father Rada there, the two brothers Joca and Bogdan together with their wives Milosava and Jelena, and their seven children. It was the Čurin family.
In the same day, in the same place the Jurisin family was shot.They were the closest relatives from Leksa’s future husband ’s side. Her mother lost her father Rada, her brother Sava and his wife Jagica, together with their son and daughter. Only the youngest son survived from this branch of Leksa’s extended family as he was on his way to Novi Sad at that moment. Listen to the survivor Rada Jurišin
Leksa is still wondering who was more bereaved – her mother or her mother- in-law, but she knows that both of them were in grief to the last days of their lives.
Interviewer: Nada Ljubić | Camera: Dušan Gavrilović | Editing: Nada Ljubić, Dušan Gavrilović | English intro: Nada Ljubić | Webmastering: Dusan Gavrilović
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