Vukasin of Klepci (Vukasin Mandrapa) is venerated in the Serbian Orthodox Church as a New Martyr of the Second World War. By the traditional account he was a Serbian Orthodox layman, a farmer and merchant, from the village of Klepci in Herzegovina. In 1942 he was arrested by forces of the Ustasha regime of the Independent State of Croatia and taken, with other Serbs of the region, to the Jasenovac concentration camp, targeted both for his Serbian ethnicity and for his refusal to abandon Orthodox Christianity for Roman Catholicism.
His commemoration rests on a single recorded narrative of his death. The Serbian neuropsychiatrist Nedeljko (Nedo) Zec, held at Jasenovac as a so-called free prisoner, set down testimony he attributed to one of the camp's executioners describing the killing of an elderly Serb said to be Vukasin. In that account, dated to January 1943, the guard offered to spare the prisoner if he would shout in praise of the Ustasha leader Ante Pavelic; the old man instead answered, again and again through escalating mutilation, with the same quiet words, variously remembered as 'Just do your work, child' or 'Child, you just do your job.' The tradition relates that the executioner cut off his ears and nose and disfigured him before killing him, and that the guard was afterward broken in mind by what he had done.
The Holy Assembly of Bishops of the Serbian Orthodox Church entered Vukasin among the saints in 1998, and he is commemorated as a martyr on May 16. He is also numbered among the New Martyrs of Jasenovac, who are remembered collectively on a shared commemoration. Because the narrative descends through this single testimony, much of the surrounding detail is traditional rather than independently documented, and some historians have questioned how much can be established about him with certainty.
