A Serbian boy remembers Nazi occupation and Communist "liberation" by Miodrag BELJAKOVIC

This is a testimony to the terrible time in which the Serbian nation was being destroyed by two ruthless enemies - fascism and communism. At eleven, the age of the author when World War II began, he was old enough to experience and remember its horrors. He was writing this book more than 30 years ago and he did not know whether he will ever be able to see a free Serbia.

We must never forget what people have experienced from the fascists and communists and must learn lessons that will prevent similar calamities in the future. The author hoped the book would come into the hands of as large a number of readers as possible and thus contribute to the further disclosure of the communist evil that has aggrieved the Serbian people.

It depicts life in two different worlds - the world of occupation and the world of communism, a system whose effects we could not evade. The author hopes that books like this that expose the reality of fascism and communism will be the required reading one day in free Serbian schools.

Highlights of ‘A SERBIAN BOY REMEMBERS’ include:

• The description of the ordinary society in Yugoslavia as a Kingdom on the eve of WWII
• A narrative of occupation and one of the still unpunished Nazi war crimes in Serbia where 2,300 Serbian civilians, including author’s father, were murdered in October 1941 in a few days.
• Concrete cases in a Serbian city showing how the communist regime established its power after WW2 in Yugoslavia.

Miodrag Beljakovic(1929-2018) was born in Kragujevac, Serbia (then in Kingdom of Yugoslavia). His father Petar, a schoolteacher, was executed in the great massacre of Kragujevac by the Nazis in October 1941. His hobby was sharpshooting. After military service in the Yugoslav army he was expelled from the Reserve Officers' School and found himself without any means to continue university studies. He finally enrolled in Teacher's College in Kragujevac and graduated in 1954. Having declined to join the Communist Party, he was transferred away from Kragujevac. Realizing that he would soon be a target of the regime, he took advantage of being a national team level sharpshooter to obtain a passport to attend the World Fair in Brussels in 1958 and did not return. After seeking political asylum in July 1959, he immigrated to the United States, where he continued history studies and graduated from Columbia University in 1968. He subsequently obtained a degree from the highly regarded School of Banking of the University of Wisconsin in Madison, in 1973. He worked as a senior banking officer at Bank of America and the Swiss Bank Corporation in New York.

He’s also the author, among others, of:
Yugoslavia at the Crossroads (1983)
American Policy Toward Yugoslavia (1985)
Kosovo, the Principal Destabilizing Factor in Yugoslavia (1989)

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This book can also be ordered in bookshops in all English-speaking countries (but the price might be higher), and for exemple in France at FNAC