This photo shows Italian General Alexandro Luzano standing above a slaughtered Serbian child in front of a school in Prebilovci. The letter he sent to Mussolini after this crime has been preserved in the military archives:

“Dear Duce,

My boundless devotion to you, I hope, entitles me to deviate in some way from strict military protocol. That is why I hasten to describe to you an event that I personally attended three weeks ago.

While visiting the districts of Stolac, Capljina and Ljubinje (between 60 and 130 km north of Dubrovnik) – I learned from our intelligence officers that Pavelic’s Ustashas had committed a crime in a village (Prebilovci) the day before, and that when it became known , the surrounding Serbs to be upset again.

I miss the words to describe what I found there. In the big school classroom, I found a slaughtered teacher and 120 of her students! No children were older than 12! Crime is an inappropriate and naive word. It overcame any madness!

Many had their heads cut off and lined up on school desks. The Ustashas pulled out the hoses from the torn entrails and, like New Year’s ribbons, stretched them under the ceiling and drove them into the walls with nails! The swarm of flies and the unbearable stench did not allow us to stay there longer. I noticed a torn bag of salt in the corner and was shocked to find that they were slaughtering them slowly, salting their necks! And just as we were leaving, a child’s grunt was heard in the back seat. I send two soldiers to see what it is. They took out one student, he was still alive, he was breathing with his throat cut in half! I take that poor child to our military hospital in my car, bring him back to consciousness and learn the full truth about the tragedy from him.

The criminals first, in turn, raped a Serbian teacher (her name is Stana Arnautovic) and then killed her in front of the children. They also raped eight-year-old girls. During all that time, a gypsy orchestra brought by force sang and hit the tambourines!

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

We sent a patrol after him, but in vain; they found him on the doorstep of the slaughtered house! Out of a thousand or so souls, there is no one left in the village! On the same day, we discovered that 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 a pit or killed them in an animal way on the way to the pit.

Only about 300 men were saved. Only they managed to break through the Ustasha ring around the village and escape to the mountains! Those 300 survivors are stronger than Pavelic’s most elite division. Everything they had to lose they lost! Children, women, mothers, sisters, houses, property. Even the fear of death is freed.

The meaning of their life is only in revenge, in the terrible revenge of them is, in a way, the shame that they survived! And Herzegovina, Bosnia, Lika, Dalmatia are full of such villages as Prebilovci.

The massacres of Serbs have reached such proportions that many water sources have been polluted in those areas. From a spring in Popovo Polje, not far from the pit into which 4,000 Serbs were thrown, reddish water erupted, I was personally convinced of that! An indelible stain will fall on the conscience of Italy and our culture, if, while the time is right, we do not distance ourselves from the Ustashas and prevent it from being attributed to us for supporting insanity! “