PART TWO UNDER THE PITCH While the partisans plucked Belgraders from their homes, Russians kept Germans in a nearby school building, according to Petrovic. "When everything was over, several trucks came and poured a few tons of earth in the hole at the foot of the ravine," he reminisces. The ravine, believed to hide the remains of several thousand German soldiers and Belgraders, was partially leveled in the 1950s in order to build a football stadium. One of the clubs using the stadium nowadays as its home ground is Obilic. The club was funded and owned by Zeljko "Arkan" Raznatovic, the notorious gangster and paramilitary leader gunned down in a Belgrade hotel last year. The other side of the unmarked burial site now borders the yard of a school named after the famous Serbian poet, Vojislav Ilic. Petrovic recalls that several years ago, while a new building was being built for Obilic, some bones were found, but no one ever bothered to officially establish whom they belonged to. "Whenever I see that a game is being played there, I ask myself how the spectators would react if they knew that the game was being played on top of a mass grave." Many elder Belgraders remember that another mass grave was dug in a park at the Autokomanda Square, not too faraway from another football stadium, that of the leading Belgrade club, Red Star. It is believed that several hundred soldiers died there while trying to stop Russian advances. They were buried in a grave of a long linear shape, stretching across the park. Another German unit was ambushed and destroyed by the Soviets in the hillside picnic ground Avala on the outskirts of Belgrade. Traces of this episode are still prominent on the nearby granite Tomb of the Unknown Soldier from World War I. The killed Germans are said to be buried in a mass grave located in the foothill of Avala. A dried-out creek in the vicinity of Tito's long-time residence, the White Palace, is often mentioned as another mass grave location. The tempestuous history of Belgrade shows, however, that enemies can indeed be treated in a more dignified manner. The largest Belgrade park, Kosutnjak, harbors a field covered with grass and surrounded by woods and private farms. In the field stands a monument erected by German Field Marshal August von Mackensen during the first world war. The monument was dedicated to his soldiers who had fallen in the big offensive on Belgrade in 1915. At the same time, Mackensen ordered that another, smaller tombstone be erected some ten meters away. "Here lie Serbian heroes," reads the epitaph written in German. Those buried there were Serbian soldiers who had defended the city from the Field Marshal's advancing army. But most Belgraders wouldn't have a clue that when they walk through this field they, in fact, are walking over graves. All other signs indicating that this once was a graveyard were removed shortly after the communists consolidated their grip on power. The valiant act of the German Field Marshal has thus remained an isolated gesture. END Branimir Gajic and Milorad Ivanovic are members of Media Focus, a Belgrade-based NGO dedicated to investigative journalism |