Fatima O. BALTA 

FATIMA BALTA, daughter of OSMAN, born in Mostar on October 5, 1922. Housewife. Member of the League of Communist Youth (SKOJ) since 1940. Party member and underground operative. Arrested by the Ustasha on March 23, 1944, in Mostar. According to a Ustasha document, she was described as “the daughter of Osman and Hatidža, unmarried, housewife, sent to the camp upon the recommendation of the Z.R.O. in Mostar for a period of 18 months; as a member of the communist organization A.F.Ž., she maintained contact with deserters and received printing materials for leaflet production.” She was taken to the Stara Gradiška camp and then to the Jasenovac concentration camp, where she was killed in early 1945.

From the testimony of a fellow prisoner:

“We, the women in the tailoring workshop who were still alive, were transferred to Lepoglava along with the workshop. The two months in Lepoglava were difficult. The executioners who had disappeared from Stara Gradiška earlier had found themselves there on a new task. Every night, they slaughtered people in the ground-floor cells. The nights were long, terrifying, and sleepless for us. The Ustasha men and women openly spoke in front of us about killing partisans, but there were many ‘partisans’ among us. Under the name ‘partisan,’ all our comrades who happened to be in that prison were killed. Dika Hađžić and Fatima Balta from Mostar were killed there, along with many others whose names I do not remember.”

Mostarac Omer Šaput, brat ubijenog Safeta Šaputa je nakon rata, 19. oktobra 1945. dao izjavu, objavljenu kao  „Zapisnik Gradske komisije za ispitivanje ratnih zločina okupatora i njihovih pomagača“ o bratovom hapšenju. U toj izjavi se spominje i Fatima Balta. Svi uhapšeni su prošli sličnu golgotu:

“On March 24, 1944, in Mostar, there was a Ustasha protective police force from Sarajevo that, in cooperation with the Mostar police, carried out a series of arrests. (…) These arrests were carried out by agents, including the chief of the protective police force in Sarajevo, Jakupović, agent Hafizović, Sušić Pavo (illegible), and agent Cvitanović from the Mostar police. Particularly malicious was Sušić Pavo, as well as the others to a lesser extent. I believe that all the agents are now in hiding. In Mostar, they kept several detainees in prison for another month, where they subjected them to terrifying suffering and terror. They tormented them with three days of hunger, gave them salt, beat them with fists, feet, and batons, put them in the so-called ‘tram,’ and after a month, they were sent to Stara Gradiška, a large penitentiary. In that group, there were 12 men and 4 women from Mostar. Among them were Professor Mustafa Alikalfić, Zajko Mehić, Omer Mesihović, Lazo Radišić, Arif Sabitage Hadžiselimović, Dušan Čulajević, Mahmut Bučuk, Osman Novo, my brother Safet. I cannot recall the other names at the moment. Among the women were Fatima Balta, Fahira Ćišić, Hadžić, and Bera Ćemalović (…)”