"In a camp, you die a hundred times a day": Ante Tomić's testimony about Keraterm, Omarska and Trnopolje

A miner from Ljubija

Ante Tomić, a native of Ljubija, worked in the Omarska mine before the war. According to his own testimony, he was at the mine from the preparations for its opening: first as an interpreter for German engineers, and later in the separation plant. The mine compound where he had worked for years became, in the summer of 1992, a camp in which he himself was detained.

Arrest and Keraterm

In early June 1992, Tomić was arrested while he was asleep. He was first detained in the Keraterm camp, and on 4 July 1992 he was transferred to Omarska.

Everyday life in Omarska

Tomić describes a day in Omarska through the meal. According to him, detainees had about 240 seconds to eat, including waiting in line and running to the canteen. They received a thin soup and five-day-old bread, and the guards beat them both when they went in and when they came out.

According to Tomić's testimony, on one scorching day, when there were about 500 detainees on the "pista" (the runway), a detainee named Rizo answered back to a guard. Because of that reply, five to six guards beat him and carried him behind the "bijela kuća" (the white house). Tomić says that Rizo was killed then. Rizo's surname is not given in the testimony.

Tomić also remembers the Prijedor physician Dr. Esad Sadiković. According to his testimony, Dr. Sadiković was himself a detainee, but he helped other detainees until he was killed. In July 1992, as Tomić states, the detainees found on the concrete one of the four Dalton brothers from Ljubija, whom they called "Glumac" (the Actor). Dr. Sadiković treated his infected arm and he recovered.

Of that time Tomić says: "In a camp, you die a hundred times a day. Every day." With these words he describes the fear and suffering of everyday life in the camp.

The night of pain

Tomić calls the hardest experience "the night of pain". According to his testimony, on his last night in Omarska, the younger brother of the camp commander Miroslav Kvočka began to beat him in the toilet, and other guards joined in. Tomić lost his teeth and suffered internal injuries. He also spoke about that night before the Hague Tribunal, where he testified in 2001.

Miroslav Kvočka, the camp commander, was finally convicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and sentenced to seven years in prison.

Trnopolje

On 6 August 1992, Tomić was transferred from Omarska to the Trnopolje camp.

Life after the camp

According to an article in which he spoke about his experience, Tomić lives in Hamburg after the war and works in construction. The same article names him as executive director of the non-governmental organization "Građanski monitoring" (Civil Monitoring) for Southeast Europe. He has written more than a hundred short stories about the camps and dedicated them to fellow detainees who did not survive.