Yugoslav Killing Fields: A Grisly Secret Comes Out : Atrocity: Communists executed thousands after the war. Those who revealed it hope the message is heard.

The war was over, but for weeks shots resounded from a rocky knoll above the garden that Jela Smiciklas tended in the desperate poverty of vanquished Croatia in 1945.

Each day, thousands of wounded soldiers and Nazi collaborators, packed into truck beds like livestock, passed her field en route to the remote hilltop. A few minutes later the trucks rumbled back, empty but for a few bundles of clothes. Day and night the wooded hills reverberated with screams.

“Where the trucks stopped, there were pictures and mementos on the ground. It seemed to be there that they realized what was going to happen to them,” recalled 80-year-old Smiciklas, still living a stone’s throw from the hilltop cavern known as Jazovka.

“It was too horrible,” she said, covering her face with calloused hands. “After 14 days, I couldn’t go to the field anymore.”

For 45 years, the residents of this tiny village were frightened into silence about the Communist atrocity committed in the hills above their homes.

Now, roused by democracy’s demand for a fresh accounting of the past, the ghosts of Sosice have risen to haunt Yugoslavia.

Disclosure of the hilltop mass grave has confronted those who lived through the last war with a shocking reminder of the human costs of indulging nationalist zeal.

Those who brought the atrocity to public light hoped to warn younger generations of the danger they court by fanning the ethnic fires that again threaten to consume Yugoslavia. But many fear that the disclosure has reopened old wounds unlikely to heal in the current atmosphere of hostility between Serbs and Croats.

The underground cavern in Sosice’s hills where the victims were dumped like so much refuse lies more than 100 feet below the surface. Jazovka, which means “badger’s hole,” is said to contain the remains of as many as 40,000 people.

The victims were mainly Ustashas, the fanatical, SS-like Croatian nationalists who sided with the Germans. They are believed to have killed hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies during the ethnic fratricide that raged in concert with World War II.

When the war was over, the victorious Communists settled the score. But for fear of arrest during the last four decades of Communist dictatorship, no one here dared mention the killings outside family and trusted friends.

A conscripted driver’s heavy conscience and the reassessment of history prompted by a turn toward democracy brought disclosure of the secret of Sosice this year.

Only weeks after Croatia ended Communist rule in multi-party elections last spring, Branko Mulic, a 79-year-old former partisan, told of collecting captured Ustashas from hospitals and prisons and driving them deep into the Zumberak hills to Sosice, about 40 miles west of Zagreb.

At Sosice, an area controlled by the Ustashas until the last days of the war, the captives were forced at gunpoint to climb the hillside and kneel at the cavern opening, where they received a bullet to the back of the head. Later, when ammunition ran short, the partisans resorted to blows with a sledgehammer.

Smiciklas and other villagers say that at the end there were hardly any gunshots, but the screaming intensified.

“We were disturbed by the discovery, but many people here are actually relieved that what happened has finally come out in the open,” said Nikola Hranilovic, administrator for this village of 300.

“We’ve always known about the pit. I learned about it in elementary school from an old woman,” he said. “It was always very confusing for me because we were taught that the partisans were the army of the people. Everyone knew what they had done here, but it was all kept quiet.”

In villages like Sosice, nearly everyone was involved in the orgy of violence that pitted Yugoslav against Yugoslav over race, religion or politics. Many here still refuse to talk about the past.

Smiciklas’ husband was a soldier in the prewar Domobranci force that served the Ustashas in the fight against communism. The Roman Catholic mother of six said villagers kept the atrocity at Sosice secret out of fear of further reprisals.

“Until a few months ago, nobody dared talk about it,” she said. “Anyone who said something against the Communist authorities could disappear overnight.”

Hido Biscevic, the respected editor of Vjesnik, Zagreb’s main daily newspaper, noted that authorities in the republic and federal government also had to have known of the Sosice killings. “That several hundred people in Zagreb probably knew about this for 45 years is very disturbing,” Biscevic said. “And the village is only 300 meters from the pit. I don’t understand the psychological machinery that kept it secret for 45 years.”

Since the Jazovka pit’s existence was disclosed, relatives of the victims have come by the hundreds, marking the grave with a giant wooden cross and draping it with wreaths, rosaries and the Croatian national colors.

Croatian editors said they published reports on the wartime tragedy at Sosice in the hopes that it would wake up readers to the risks of succumbing to the centuries-old conflict between Serbs and Croats.

Although Ustashas and the Serbian royalist Chetniks both fought against Communist partisans during World War II, the two rival ethnic groups also waged war on each other. It is the specter of that deadly conflict that continues to haunt many Yugoslavs today.

Despite the intent, reports on Jazovka appear to have inflamed ethnic passions and pushed Yugoslavia ever closer to civil war.

To counter the roused emotions in Croatia, state-controlled media in neighboring Serbia have resurrected photographs and other evidence of mass graves holding Serbs killed by the Ustashas.

Of the 1.7 million Yugoslavs who lost their lives during World War II, more than half are thought to have fallen victim to ethnic violence and revenge killings.

“This case has not been exploited in Croatia, but in Serbia,” argued Mario Nobilo, aide and spokesman for Croatian President Franjo Tudjman. “They accuse Croats of being a genocidal nation.”

Asked if the leadership sees a contemporary lesson in the Jazovka tragedy, Nobilo replied: “What we have insisted is that Croats forget the past and turn to the future.”

Biscevic, editor of Vjesnik, said the Jazovka discovery has been exploited by politicians on both sides.

Rather than giving Yugoslavs pause to reflect on the price of extremism, Jazovka has resulted in “disgusting exchanges” over which wartime killings were justified, Biscevic said.

Jazovka is thought to be only one of numerous burial sites for those slain in retaliation for well-documented Ustasha atrocities.

Vecernji List, the Zagreb newspaper that first reported on the Jazovka grave in July, originally estimated that it contained the remains of about 6,000 people. Yet villagers reported daily arrivals of more than 1,000 people for four to six weeks after the war ended.

Hranilovic, the village leader, believes he has found a second cave at Sosice, which witnesses told him was sealed with concrete after being filled with execution victims. He demonstrates for visitors how the ground texture varies at a broad clearing in the forest.

Despite his conviction that Sosice’s hills hold further evidence of Stalinist crime, Croatian officials have declined to order a search for the second cave or exhumation of the bones in Jazovka, Hranilovic said.

The Croatian journalist who first reported on Sosice’s secret says that Zagreb authorities are avoiding a thorough probe.

“Now there is silence on this again,” says Miroslav Ambrus-Kis of Vecernji List. “The fear is that there could be repercussions for some people in the leadership.”

One minister in Croatia’s new democratic leadership formerly commanded a concentration camp near Karlovac, according to Ambrus-Kis.

An alpinist and mountain rescue volunteer, Ambrus-Kis used spelunking gear to lower himself into Jazovka to examine the bones that have settled to form a gruesome carpet of unknown depth in the cave that is about 12 feet in diameter.

The pit’s opening in wartime was nearly as wide as the cave, villagers said. The entrance narrowed because they threw dirt and lime into the hole to cover the stench of decay.

Contrary to Croatian government claims that women and children were summarily executed along with the wounded soldiers and captured officials, Ambrus-Kis said he saw only male skeletons in the human rubble.

“The condition of textiles was like a spider’s web. When you touched it, it disappeared in your hand. There were belts and uniforms that could be recognized, but most of the victims were executed naked, because people needed the clothes,” he said. “What I saw was a lot of wire, wrapped around wrists to tie their hands back.”

If all Yugoslavs could see the cavern’s grisly contents, Ambrus-Kis says, they might be cured of romantic notions of nationalist pride. But he said he fears the message of Sosice has been lost on most Croats, who for centuries were reared to be warriors for the Austro-Hungarian empire against rival Turkey, which controlled Serbia.

“In civilized countries, when the war ends, people put down their weapons,” said Ambrus-Kis. “Here that wasn’t the case. History has always told the Balkans that it is winner-take-all.”

Carol Williams, The Times’ bureau chief in Budapest, was recently on assignment in Yugoslavia.