Kragujevac, Šumarice: how to read 21 October 1941

In Kragujevac, Šumarice isn't visited as a monument but as a sum that doesn't add up. For the losses of 14 to 16 October 1941, a German order fixed a figure of 2,300 people to be shot in advance; the list kept by the 21 October Museum holds 2,794 names. Knowing where that gap comes from is also knowing why you go to the museum first and the park second.

The arithmetic of an order

On 10 October 1941 General Franz Böhme ordered that a hundred civilians, prisoners or hostages be shot for every German soldier killed, and fifty for every one wounded. In fighting on the Kragujevac–Gornji Milanovac road between 14 and 16 October the German army lost ten dead and twenty-six wounded. Ten times a hundred plus twenty-six times fifty makes 2,300 — a number that existed before anyone had been arrested.

The quota was filled over three days. On 19 October 415 people were shot in the villages around the town; that was not enough, so the same evening the town was sealed off, and the next day several thousand people were arrested, among them several hundred pupils from Kragujevac's schools, on the lie that identity cards were being replaced. They were held in four gun sheds on the outskirts. On 21 October, from seven in the morning to two in the afternoon, 2,264 people were shot. Across the three days the dead included 261 youths of secondary-school age and forty children aged eleven to fifteen; after Serbs, the largest group were Roma, at least two hundred, and 39 were Jews.

The difference between those led out and those shot is the people who survived the shooting. Figures: the Kragujevac October Memorial Park.

The Kragujevac October Memorial Park, which everyone calls Šumarice, was laid out in 1953 on the execution ground itself, in the valleys of the Erdoglija and Sušica streams. It holds thirty mass graves, ten of them shaped into monuments — which is why the monuments stand not on viewpoints but where the shooting happened. The best known, Miodrag Živković's monument to the executed pupils and teachers from 1963, two white concrete wings also called 'Interrupted Flight', has become the emblem of the whole town.

Why the museum before the park

The order isn't a matter of taste. The 21 October Museum stands at the entrance to the park and keeps what the park doesn't have: the list by name and forty-two last messages that people held in the gun sheds wrote to their families. Without that, the graves are grassy mounds in a town park; with it, each one is a group of people led out at a particular hour that morning.

The museum is open on Mondays too. From 15 April to 31 October it opens Monday to Saturday 8am to 6pm, and Sundays and public holidays 9am to 4pm; from 1 November to 14 April, weekdays 8am to 4pm and weekends 9am to 4pm. It closes only on 1 and 7 January, and last arrival is 45 minutes before closing. Individual visitors can use an audio guide in Serbian and five other languages, and the museum asks visitors to book ahead.

21 October at 11

One day a year the park looks different. On the anniversary the Great School Lesson (Veliki školski čas) is held at the monument to the pupils and teachers: an event under that name was first held in 1944, on the site itself in 1957, and since 1964 it has begun at 11am and lasted forty-five minutes. Several thousand people and the country's leaders attend, and Serbian public television broadcasts it. If you want to see how the town remembers, come that day; if you want to walk the park alone and in quiet, pick any other.

GuideThe rest of the town — the first capital, Milošev Venac and the factory:Kragujevac →

One note on tone, because it is easily got wrong. The park is both the town's walking ground and a burial place, and here the two don't cancel each other out — children cycle between the mounds, which is probably the best an execution ground can become. The museum, though, isn't something to pass through on the way: after a list of 2,794 names it is better to sit down than to move on to the next item.