21.10.2015.
"Great School Class" held
Today, at the memorial park Sumarice, in the presence of Serbian President Tomislav Nikolic, prayer and commemorative peace event "Great School Class" was held to commemorate the 21 October 1941, when in that city thousands of citizens were executed.
The wreaths at the Monument to the executed pupils and teachers, in addition to President Nikolic, were laid by Defence Minister Bratislav Gasic, representatives of the National Assembly, the ambassadors of Germany, France, Slovakia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, China and Palestine, as well as representatives of the Embassy of the Russian Federation, Israel, Belarus and Romania.
Traditionally, wreaths were also laid at the Monument by the representatives of the First Kragujevac Grammar School, the City Management, religious communities, and veterans' associations.
The marking of the memory of the mass shooting of civilians was also attended by descendants of the killed, as well as a large number of pupils and the citizens of Kragujevac.
President Nikolic said in a statement to journalists that he was glad that a large number of citizens and pupils still come with reverence in Memorial Park Sumarice.
"The time has changed a bit and we used to be much more aggressive towards those that had done it to us. Now the time brings consolation and we turn to the future," Nikolic said and added that Serbia will always remember this day.
With the event "Great School Class", held since 1971, Kragujevac and Serbia every year send a message to the world that such a crime should repeat never and nowhere, as when the German occupying forces in one day executed thousands of civilians.
This event is one of the biggest crimes of the German army in World War II, and is one of the most tragic ones that happened on the territory of Serbia in the war.
This year, as part of the "Great School Class," a play titled "Between Heaven and Earth" was performed, based on the work "Nisci", by Kragujevac writer Vidosav Stevanovic, who also wrote the screenplay.
For the stag performance in which actors of Knjazevac-Serbian theatre participated, Stevanovic also wrote the screenplay, music was written by Zoran Hristic, and the director was Jano Canji.
Text of stage performance of "Between Heaven and Earth was offered as a whole in prose, in which the eight narrative fragments overlap and continue deepening the stories of individual fates of the executed to the general, universal meanings.
At the Nuremberg trials it has been accepted that about 7,000 civilians were shot in Kragujevac, while modern research show that 2,792 citizens were killed because there is personal data for this number of people - who they were, where they were born and when, what their profession was. Among the killed, there were 270 children, of whom the youngest one was 11 years old.
German occupiers executed the civilians in Kragujevac in retaliation, and the reason were the German losses in fighting with Partisan and Chetnik munities on 1 October on the road Kragujevac-Gornji Milanovac, where the Germans had 10 dead and 26 wounded soldiers.
The shooting consistently applied the command of then General Franz Böhme of 10 October 1941, in which he ordered the execution of 100 Serbs for each killed German and 50 Serbs for each wounded German soldier.
Tanjug
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