The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 58. MY SISTER ZORA ON JULY 26 Zora B. was brought in. Zora was a Serbian girl not quite seventeen, delicately bred, a skilled violinist, dainty and really beautiful, with a heart-shaped face and curly brown hair. Her large, gray-brown eyes had that confiding, modest, open look that brings out all the protective instincts, all the chivalry, in decent men. She and the young man to whom she was engaged were trusted members of the Serbian Underground. From a window in the town she had watched the German Headquarters' mail car arrive each day. Carefully she had observed the habits of the drivers and armed guards. They always got out and went into the building, coming out again with the men who unlocked the car and unloaded the bags. While her lover was away organizing sabotage, she received the information that on a certain day orders for mass executions of Serbs were to arrive with lists of certain men to he killer nil over Serbia. If there could be a delay of just a few days these men could be warned to get away. On that morning, the 24th of July, with market basket on her arm, she passed at exactly the right instant. In the minute while the men went inside, she took from her basket a large bottle and, walking round the car, splashed it with gasoline. Quickly and calmly she set matches to it. The truck blazed up and burned to the frame. Yells and a wild volley of firing pursued her as she ran down the street. The heavy Prussian boots were no match for her fleet young legs. She darted round a corner. The cook of one of the ladies then in our cell was coming out of the back gate of a house. Seeing the fleeing girl, whom she had known from childhood, she seized her, dragged her in, and slammed the gate. The uproar of pursuit passed and died away in the distance. The bloodhounds would soon be back, however, and would certainly search the whole district. Rather than forfeit the lives of people in the house, Zora insisted on going over another back fence and creeping away. Calmly she started out of town, hoping-only hoping-to see her lover just once again. Towards morning, on the outskirts, she was caught. She could and did expect nothing better than to be shot. But, a mere shooting of a young girl-patriot was much too kindly for the Germans. They determined to force her to tell where her lover had gone and with whom he was working. That should be easy, they thought, with such a delicate, gentle little girl. So first they tried every sort of mental pressure, working on her fear for herself and for her family. She looked at them gently and smiled. Then they began knocking her about and, when still not one word could be forced out of her, they resorted to whipping; then fierce beating. They were systematic about it. Every night, in those dark hours when the human spirit is at its lowest ebb, they took her out, stripped and beat and questioned, beat and questioned her. Two hours every night for eight nights she was taken out from our prison to be beaten. In vain: Zora, her face black and blue, her eyes wide with agony, was silent. Her whole back swelled up and burst into a jellied mass of blood. She could not sit or lie down except on her face. She had high wound fever. But calmly every day she walked, each day more painfully, round the yard with us at daily exercise or lay quietly, silently, holding the hand of one of us. We too were silent, stunned with helpless agony. One day Richter came while I was out of the cell. There were now three Englishwomen there on their way to internment. He struck Zora savagely across the ear to break the eardrum. Olga Pearson, a very brave Serbian woman once married to an Englishman, instantly sprang between them and cried fiercely: "You can't do that in our presence-we're British!" Richter screamed at her: "Do you think we like beating little girls? It's England that's forcing us to do it. John Bull sits back and smokes his pipe and lets children do his dirty work for him." They dragged Zora out to beat her. All this proving useless, one day they took little Zora back to her home. They let her stand in her own dining room amid her dear familiar things which spoke of love, of childhood happiness, of her mother, her father, and her little sister, who had fled. "See," they said, these monsters, "see, you shall be free, back again in your beautiful home, safe and free. No more beatings, no more pain: you will have freedom and safety with your family. Your friends cannot help you now-and they will die in any case, be sure of that. But you shall live to be happy, to marry and have children of your own. Only tell us what we want to know." Zora smiled her gentle smile. Conditions in the prison and in the country were getting steadily more fearful. As an American, I was seeing too much for the comfort of my jailers. In any case, at seven-thirty on the morning of August 3, I was told that I would be transported within an hour to Germany. As I was herded out with other prisoners Zora broke through the guards. She threw her arms round my neck with a frantic, con vulsive hug of love-the only moment in all those eight days when her emotion was too strong for her. She whispered in my ear: "My sister." Whether she meant to express the warm love between us or to remind me that she was leaving her small sister to my care, I do not know. To me she remains-my sister, Zora. They seized her roughly and dragged her away, not back to her cell, but towards the gate. That should have warned me. Never shall I forget the faces of the women, each one of whom I had kissed farewell, as they crowded together at the crack under the wooden screen on the windows, trying to give me a last signal of courage and affection. Tears, tears-the tears I had forbidden and always tried to dry when I was there.... Who now would tell them the endless stories of ancient heroes with which, as in the Thoasand and One Nights, I had tried to help them pass the dark, miserable hours ? Where are you now, my splendid Serbian women? Where are you, my dear, dear Katitsa? Your long, slim fingers were the last thing I saw before the great prison gate shut behind me and I set my face towards whatever fate was now to bring. We were put into a covered truck without seats. A quick glance round gave me my last view of ruined Belgrade. Men gathered across the street to watch us being carted off. I could tell, from the stern, steady way in which they tried to catch my eye, how they felt. They stood without movement as we drove off. At the wrecked station we were marched to the train and put into an ordinary third-class carriage. (Not until we crossed the frontier into Germany did we meet the famous black, suffocating German prison trains, so common there as hardly to draw notice. Such Kultur necessities were still unknown in the "primitive" Balkans.) The Gestapo transport officer was a nice-looking fellow, the kind of man one would have invited to dinner in the old days, whose children would have played with one's own. We conversed a little, and I tried to sound him out on some of the milder German phenomena. As he showed faint signs of reasonable ness I thought it might conceivably be possible to arouse some shame in him, to persuade him to use some influence in favor of Zora on his return to Belgrade. "Just a little girl," I said, "only sixteen, really lovely and gently bred, who loves her country as your own daughter would love hers. Yet she is being systematically tortured to death. Can one helpless child be so dangerous to the great German Reich as to justify-that?" "Oh," he said calmly but with a kind of leering cynicism impossible to describe. "You mean the pretty Zora." He looked at his gold wrist watch. "Well, you needn't worry any more. She won't be beaten again. You see, just-yes, just an hour and a half ago-she was hanged." My little sister Zora, so simply unafraid of all that the most evil men could do, who feared only one thing: disloyalty! Sleep sweetly in your nameless grave, my lovely sister Zora. In our hearts remains your everlasting epitaph: Heroine of Serbia. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel