Gradiska
on the right bank of the river Sava. The length of this area was 60 km. The
width of the camp was on average 2 km on the left and 2 km on the right side
of the rivers Una and Sava. Jasenovac was not unintentionally chosen as a site
for Ustasha's concentration camp. It lies in the centre of Serbian countries
and as such it was chosen to be a central point for destruction of Serbs.The whole Jasenovac region is surrounded by the rivers Sava, Una and Veliki Strug, in the middle of the marshy Lonja field which made the escape from the camp impossible.
There is inaccessible and floodable area of Donja Gradina on the other bank
of the Sava river (Gradina is the most prominent north-west part of Kozarska
Dubica plain), it was far from people's eyes and ears and because of this fact
that place was ideal for mass murders. Concentration camp
Jasenovac was established in August 1941 on the model of Nazi camps in Germany.
It was the biggest place of torture and execution that had ever existed on the
territory of the former Yugoslavia..
It has no equal in the human history in the view of the horror of the Ustasha's
torture and brutality and it is on the third place among the concentration camps
in occupied Europe during the war years 1941-1945 considering the dimension
of the crime. There was industrialized genocide in German camps while in Jasenovac
men, women and children were killed in the most obscene way which had not be
recorded in the human history.
About
700 thousand of innocent men, women and children were killed there in horrible
sufferings regardless thier religion and nation but most of them were Serbs,
Jews, Gypsies and opponents of fascist regime. There were 366 thousand people
out of the total number killed in Donja Gradina (source: Memorial place Donja
Gradina regulation programme Town planning institute SR BiH, Sarajevo, March
1977). Pupulation of municipality Kozarska (Bosanska) Dubica was 33,550 before the World War II. Out of that number 18,495 people were killed and thousands of them were killed in concentration camp Jasenovac (most of them were from Knezpolje).