DECLARATION BY THE ITALIAN GENERAL The picture shows General Alexandro Luzano standing over a slaughtered Serbian kid in front of a school in Prebilovci.

 DECLARATION BY THE ITALIAN GENERAL The picture shows General Alexandro Luzano standing over a slaughtered Serbian kid in front of a school in Prebilovci.

 General Alexandro Luzano writes to Mussolini:

 Dear Duce,

 My boundless loyalty to you, I hope, gives me the right to depart from a strict military protocol in something.  That is why I am in a hurry to describe to you an event that I have personally attended over the last three weeks.

 Visiting the towns of Stolac, Capljina and Ljubinje (between 60 and 130 km north of Dubrovnik) - I learn from our intelligence officers that the previous day, Pavelic's Ustashas had committed a crime in one village (Prebilovci), and that when it was read  , the surrounding Serbs get upset again.

 I miss words to describe what I found there.  In a large school classroom, I found a slaughtered teacher and 120 of her students!  No child was over 12 years old!  Crime is a wordless and naive word.  It went beyond any madness!

 Many were cut off their heads and sorted by students' benches.  

The Ustashas pulled the hoses out of the broken bowels and, like New Year's ribbons, spread them under the ceiling and nailed them into the walls!  The swarm of flies and the unbearable stench did not allow us to linger.  

I spotted a bag of salt in a corner and was startled to find that they were being slaughtered slowly, breaking their necks!  And just as we were leaving, there was a baby croaking in the back bench. 

I send two soldiers to see what it is.  They took out one student, he was still in his life, breathing with a half-cut larynx!  With my car, I take that poor kid to our military hospital, bring him back to consciousness and learn the full truth about the tragedy.

 The criminals first raped a Serbian teacher (her name is Stana Arnautovic) and then killed her in front of the children.  They also raped girls as young as eight.  During all that time he sang a forcefully brought gypsy orchestra and hit the tambourines!

 To the eternal shame of our Roman church and one man of God, one pastor, he participated in all of this!  The boy we rescued quickly recovered.  And as soon as the wound healed, by our carelessness he fled the hospital and went to his village to seek relatives.  

We sent a patrol after him, but in vain;  they found him on the doorstep of a house slaughtered!  Out of a thousand and a few souls, there is no one else in the village!  The same day, we found out later, when a crime was committed at the school, the Ustashas captured another 800 inhabitants of the village of Prebilovci and threw them all into the pit or killed them in an animal way.  

Only about 300 men were rescued.  Only they managed to break through the Ustasha hoops around the village and escape to the mountain!  Those 300 survivors are stronger than Pavelic's most elite division.  All they had to lose they lost!  Children, wives, mothers, sisters, homes, property.  

Even the fear of death is set free.  The meaning of their life is only in revenge, in terrible revenge they are, in a way, and ashamed that they survived!  And such villages as Prebilovci are full of Herzegovina, Bosnia, Lika, Dalmatia.

 The massacres of the Serbs reached such proportions that many water sources were also polluted in these regions.  A red water broke out from a well in Popovo Polje, not far from a cave into which 4,000 Serbs were thrown, and I personally became convinced of that!  The conscience of Italy and our culture will suffer an indelible stain if, while it is time, we do not distance ourselves from the Ustasha and prevent us from being credited with supporting the foolish!

 NOTE:

 After these events, the Italian army stands for the protection of the Serbs and expels the Ustasha from Istria and Dalmatia.