The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 33. THE CHAMPIONS To GET THE INFORMATION I wanted was not as difficult as I had expected. The noise these lively Italians made, their continuous chatter about the job in hand, and their gallantry towards women left little insurmountable secrecy. Also, one got the impression that their hearts weren't in it: their hearts were at home with their women, their vineyards, their fields, and their children. Their curiously baffled, unprofessional air seemed to say to the Germans: "You're the supermen, aren't you? You've shouted it often enough! It's your show; you seem to know all about it. Get on with it, then, and be damned to you!" Every evening on the crowded terrace the Italian officers would turn on the radio and calmly listen to the English news! Two reservists, Lieutenant A. and Dr. L. (I have no wish to injure them), professors of English at Italian schools, heard I was there, called punctiliously, and invited me to go for picnics and sight-seeing trips. Sitting on the warm sea wall and talking with these naive men of Fascist Italy, it was difficult not to bite my tongue when I heard such statements as: "Those miserable Serbs have no literature, absolutely no epics, or folklore even, of their own. They have stolen them all from the Croats." "Oh yes? Where did you learn this?" I asked politely, with some effort, the exact opposite being the truth. "I read it in a book translated from the Croatian which has been supplied to us." It reminded me of when my boy was twelve. I had promised to let him choose the make of our next motorcar. After careful study he decided on a certain quite unknown brand. Surprised, I asked why that particular one. "It is the best car made," he said positively. "Really? Where did you get that information?" "I read it in their advertisement!" Now a strange thing happened, a thing so strange that I hesitate to mention it. Yet I feel constrained to do so, whatever its interpretation. On the afternoon of May 18 I was sitting in my room hastily doing some much-needed mending. I remember the exact date because there had been a birthday in the hotel and I had picked flowers as a gift. As I sewed busily the large window beside me was wide open on the limitless, lovely view. The swifts, the fastest fliers of the bird world, were coming north along the Adriatic coast from their winter quarters far to the south in Libya. Intent upon my sewing, I cast few glances at the groups of birds, as they surged past, strong on their slim wings. Suddenly a flutter and one bird braked sharply in front of my window. It made an uncertain turn or two, then darted straight and purposefully at me and clung tightly to my shoulder. I had a violent spasm of the heart which mothers only know. My breath stopped, my breast constricted, and for no reason that I could conceive at that instant my sobs seemed to strangle me. I took the bird into my hands. It was neither frightened nor tired; its heart did not beat wildly. It just looked at me with its bright and gentle little eyes. I tried to give it water: it wanted none. Weeping, I went downstairs, where kind friends tried to comfort me. I raised the bird in my hand. It sat a moment. Then it sprang up, circled once around, and strongly flew away. In England there is an age-old belief-superstition, if you like- that the dying sometimes send messages by birds and that a bird entering the house signifies the death of a dear one. It takes about eight days for the swifts to reach the middle Adriatic from the African coast. My only son, John Lendrum van Breda, was killed flying at Merza Matruh in Libya on May 10. But I did not know it; fortunately I did not know it then. I soon composed myself so as not further to distress my friends. For they had plenty already to distress them. The hotel was full of Serbian Jewish refugees, including one large family with its in-laws, a particularly nice group of young people and children. Their aged parents had chosen to remain behind in the old family home, and their anxiety about the old couple as well as about their own future was desperate. All the hotels were full of such harassed Jewish people, most of whom had lost relatives, brothers or sisters or children, in their flight from German barbarity. And now an interesting secret traffic began. There was a regular system of searchers, fetchers, messengers who slipped away and, after anxious days, smilingly turned up again, like spaniels out of a marsh, with the game-relatives, valuables, or letters-in their mouths. They got, and earned, enormous pay, since the danger, once they were out of Italian jurisdiction, was great. The most successful as well as the most amusing of these gallant blockade runners was a buxom, blond Aryan who made no secret of the fact that she "carried on" with conductors, porters, etc., who hid her and expedited her on her way. She brought out the most amazing masses of luggage for my friends and also a letter from their parents. Then she plunged back again, this time set upon fetching the old folks out bodily. She was never heard of again. No doubt she had "carried on" just a little too far. The name of the family at my hotel was Farhi. Among them was a handsome, quiet woman with two nice children, a boy of seventeen and a girl of fifteen. She told me a remarkable and significant experience. When her first child was born she had her confinement in a small, primitive hospital in the heart of Serbia. The night after the boy was born she heard much hurrying about in the corridor and on inquiry learned that the expectant mother in the next room was causing the doctor serious alarm. Next morning the feeblest of feeble baby cries announced that the new life had arrived. She was told that the baby, also a boy, was well made but was so weak as to be unlikely to live, and that the mother, in a high fever, was despaired of. Artificial feeding being there unknown, she asked if there was not a foster mother. Being told that none could be found, she gladly offered to feed the child herself: she had abundant milk. The poor little half-dead baby was brought in and laid beside her own son at her other breast. And thus five times a day she fed it. Her husband had been called away and, to avoid housekeeping, she had arranged to remain three weeks at the hospital. The little strange boy throve wonderfully. He was beautiful, with blue eyes and golden curls. She told me that she loved him, with his little pushing fists and eager sucking lips, as if he had been her own. At the end of three weeks he was as bonny as any normal child,. and the mother too was saved and recovering. On the day before she was to leave a message was brought asking if the mother, who, it appeared, was a Russian princess, might visit her. (She gave me the name of the princess, which I unfortunately did not write down and have forgotten.) She agreed, and there appeared at her door the most beautiful creature she had ever seen: fragile, dressed in lace, and heavily jeweled. The princess was hardly able to express her thanks to my friend for saving the life of her baby, the heir to her title. He was all she had now in the world, said the Russian woman, since she had been driven from her home and great estates, her parents killed by the Bolsheviks. Soon she launched into a violently bitter tirade against "that scourge of the earth, the Jews." She lived, she said, only for revenge upon the evil Jews. My friend looked at her with wide-eyed horror and pity for the blow about to fall. "Perhaps," she said diffidently, "perhaps you won't feel that way now any more-now that your boy has become the milk brother of my boy, nurtured at the same breast." "You," said the Russian princess, hardly able to speak, "you are a Serb ---" "No," said my friend gently, "I am a pure-blooded Jewess." That night the child was not brought in and cried inconsolably, his cry a good hearty yell now. Next morning he returned, accompanied by the gift of a handsome set of emerald earrings and bracelet; my friend, not being wealthy, thought them magnificent. She refused them and left the hospital. For another three weeks after that the baby was brought to her three times a day by a liveried chauffeur, and she bathed and fed him. Then he was gone and she missed him sadly. For ten years, always at Christmas, she received a card from the mother from different parts of the world. Then the cards ceased. That boy must now be nineteen. I wonder where he is. Preparing to fight on the side of his foster mother, I hope. If he sucked in character with that mother's milk he will be a kindly and brave fellow. After a time the outlook for the Jewish refugees in Dubrovnik became threatening: we heard the Gestapo were coming. My friends, including Mr. A., whose wife was afterwards in prison with me, and the Farhis, got permits to proceed northwards to Italy en route for Spain. Angelo Farhi and O.S., a friend of his from Belgrade, anxiously urged me to come too. They drew attractive pictures of how we three should slowly travel up the coast, away from all the horror. It was a very alluring thought but, of course, impossible just because of those horrors. For now I began to get news from Croatia that told of a slowly rising tide of murders, of atrocities unrepeatable, of massacres of defenseless Serbs by berserk-mad Croatians and by Moslems in Bosnian Croatia. In the little back parlors of trusty men the tales were whispered. I could not believe a quarter of them. Unfortunately, I was soon to know that they were a weak understatement of the truth. Men were soon to arrive in Dubrovnik itself, hung with strings of Serbian tongues and with bowls of Serbian eyes for sale. There were more volunteer recruits to the sinister Croat murder organization, the Ustashi, than they could accept. The Dalmatians as a whole were horrified by the appalling developments and only cheered up when occasional bits of news came through that seemed to counterbalance the horrors. Thus we heard (in these early days before the massacres got well under way) that all Serbs in Zagreb, the capital of the new Independent State, had been ordered to wear a white armband, as the Jews in Dubrovnik, as everywhere under the Germans, had to wear yellow. But so many decent-minded Croats had immediately also donned the white armbands in protest that the order had to be hastily rescinded. Unhappily, as the violence increased those loyal Croats were killed too. We heard that Orthodox Serbs-hundreds of thousands of them- had been given the choice of changing their religion or of losing all their possessions or their lives; that a frantic exodus of starving Serbs was choking the roads to Belgrade, their children dying by the roadside. The news grew steadily more fiendish. But Machek, I thought, the vaunted "enlightened" Croat leader, with unquestioned power over all his people-surely he could exert that power now to stop these fearful crimes. What was Machek doing? Machek, we heard to our bitter amazement, was doing absolutely nothing-not even faintly protesting. Quite the reverse, he had on the radio ordered his followers to "co-operate." Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel