A Slave in My Family

 

Creative commons, author unknown

U tom stubu, kaže se, ima velika soba, mračna dvorana u kojoj živi crni Arapin.

In this pillar, it is said, there is a large room, a dark hall in which lives the black Arab.

from 'The Bridge on the Drina' by Ivo Andrić

Nobel Prize for Literature 1961

Ivo Andrić was a Bosnian Serb who wrote his prize-winning novel about the 16th century Turkish Bridge spanning the River Drina at Višegrad. From the moment I read it I needed to know, who was the mysterious Arab that lurked within a stone bridge and what was he doing in Bosnia? 

Amin al-Husseini, an Arab born in Jerusalem, was indicted for war crimes in Bosnia by the post-war Yugoslav government, but it wasn't him. Modern Arabs travel to Bosnia to reach a Muslim haven in the heart of Europe, but it's not them. Ivo Andrić's Black Arab was not even an Arab, he was African.

The knowledge that Africans may have lived in the Balkans snuck into my life the back way and like many alternative routes began with a subjective decision. 

I had my DNA tested. 

What a wealth of suffering that simple sentence has revealed! 

The genetic testing company 23andMe provided my DNA results in Confidence Levels on its Chromosome Painting page. The 50% Confidence Level is termed Speculative. (This is the one you see when you open the email.) At this level I have 0.3% Congolese and SE African genes. On the chromosomes themselves this is demonstrated by a tiny splodge of pink on chromosomes 2 and 3. At 60% Confidence the same splodges change to 0.3% Broadly Sub Saharan African. At 70, 80 and 90% confidence the splodges are still there but now they fall into a group termed ‘unassigned.’

0.3% is about one part in 250 or a 6X great grandparent. My great great grandfather Martin Mikatović was born in Tar in 1822, a village in the region of Istria in modern Croatia. A 2X great grandfather gives me 1/16 of my genes. A 6X great grandfather gives me 1/256 or 0.39%.

But which year is this?

Allowing 20 – 30 years per generation gives us 80 – 120 years before Martin's birth. My African relative, therefore, was most likely born between 1702 and 1742. That is a little over a century after the Mayflower sailed to America and Oliver Cromwell decapitated Charles 1. 

Not that long ago. 

If you were African in the 18th century and your DNA has turned up in a person whose ancestors came from a country within the Turkish Ottoman Empire, then you were a slave. And not a Pliny-the-Younger-type-well-looked-after-slave either. The Arabs sold black and white slaves but the black ones were on the lower rung and, like their brothers in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, frequently died as a result of cruel treatment. 'Some 10,000 slaves, black and white, were brought into the Ottoman Empire every year' and my relative most likely came from Kenya, Nigeria, Zanzibar or Sudan (1). In the mid-18th century, the demand for specifically black African slaves increased. (4)

The famous Turkish cotton industry required African slaves, and their descendants live in Turkey to this day. There they 'are often called “Arabs”... they also refer to themselves as Arabs...[and] this has led to a situation in which “Arab” means “black.” (1) 

It is significant then that a little less than one eighth of my family came from Montenegro, a country that had belonged to the Ottoman Empire for most of the 1500’s and 1600’s and was semi-autonomous until its liberation in 1878. In addition, I have the same amount of Greek Anatolian genes as I do African. Greece was part of the Ottoman Empire and it is an easy leap to say that in those days a country like Bosnia, that was also incorporated within the Ottoman's vast domain, might have seen African slaves, although it wouldn’t have been the peasants who owned them. The Ottoman Empire collapsed a few years after World War 1, having expanded, declined and fragmented over its 600-year history and made very few friends in Europe during that time.

The history of humanity is the history of slavery, and I use a literary device when I say that ‘for over a millennium’ there was a thriving Arab slave trade in the East that sold men, women and children to the Ottomans and any others with the money to pay, including Europeans. This reign of misery was certainly longer than a thousand years and it is probably not known exactly when the Arab slave trade started although most sources link it with the rapid spread of Islam from the seventh century. In a true human spirit of self-justification, arguments rage on the internet about which slavery was worse, European or Arab. No question here. All slavery is an obscenity or, in the words of the great Humphrey Bogart in Casablanca, ‘I don’t buy and sell human beings.’

Novigrad 2018 M Walker

 

‘See that wall? That’s to keep the Turks out.’ 

So said Silvana, my birth mother, pointing at my photograph of the 6m high Venetian wall in the port of Novigrad in Istria. 

She was born in nearby Tar in 1920, two years before the fall of the Ottoman Empire, near enough historically to grow up with stories of marauding Turkish pirates. ‘Slaves [were] brought by pirates’ (3). Silvana called them Turks but history calls them the Barbary Pirates and they worked for the Ottomans around the Mediterranean and the Adriatic. 

Silvana's family name, Mikatović, means the son of Saint Michael and is derived from the Greek for the Archangel Michael, Michali Taxiarhis, or Michael the Brigadier. The earliest reference to the name Mikatović I have been able to find was about 1720 in the Poreč area near Tar but there may easily be earlier ones. The church books from the seventeenth century that are displayed on FamilySearch.com are written with thick quills and ink in abbreviated Latin and, if I am in the wrong mood, scrolling through a hundred pages defeats me. 

I ought to try harder.

Politicians like Mussolini who tried to divide these old regions into modern political entities and to impose a single national language on them forgot that the residents had long memories. Greek, Turkish, Slavic, Austrian and Italian eras intermingle and are remembered in place names, family names and local dialects. As Silvana said to me, 'you only speak the same because you have television and radio. We didn't have any of that.' 

A case could easily be mounted that my African relative was a woman. More women were deprived of their freedom in the East than men whereas the reverse was true in the West (2). Perhaps she was a beautiful black concubine in an Istanbul harem or a nursemaid to a wealthy Turk. Perhaps she was a spinster, endlessly spinning cotton thread to weave the sails of the Ottoman fleet.

Although I am adopted, I have a lot of information about my birth family which helps makes sense of my genes but, having said that, a chronological issue remains. The academic papers relating to the settlement of Tar, my family’s village, state that the area was settled from Venice’s possessions in the south in the late 1500’s and 1600's, not the early 1700's when my African relative was born. These emigrants were mostly Slavs but not always. A whole range of ethnic groups from the south needed to escape from the marauding Turks at this time and Venice wanted to repopulate Istria which had been ravaged by the plague. 

How do I feel about all this?

I am inspired to compose the Romantic Version. That's how I feel.  

Around the year 1700 a baby girl called Mercy was born to a couple in Kenya. The baby was black and very beautiful and, as she grew towards young womanhood, she attracted attention wherever she went.

Mercy's village was close to the Indian Ocean and one tragic day when she was only twelve she was playing on the beach with other children when she caught the attention of a pirate ship. They captured Mercy, placed her aboard their reeking vessel and sailed her first to an Arab slave market in Aden, Yemen. From here she was transported to Cairo in Egypt in the belief that as a concubine she would fetch a high price. 

However, the ill treatment and privations of the voyage took a heavy toll on her beauty, and she was purchased instead by a Turkish cotton grower. He set her to work in his fields near the Anatolian coast irrigating the cotton in the hot summer months and harvesting the fluffy pods as they matured in the late autumn.

Separated from everything she loved, Mercy began to die of grief.

One day, the cotton grower looked at the beautiful girl properly for the first time and, moved by a strange compassion, asked her why she looked so sad. Mercy could not speak his language and was unable to reply but, seeing that she had dexterous hands and fine fingers, the cotton grower removed her from the harsh fields and brought her into the long rooms where dozens of women sat all day spinning thread on drop spindles.

Their kindness and affection nursed Mercy's wounded spirit and she did not die, yet death remained present in her eyes for she could see no other way to be restored to her family and her culture. She often dreamed that she would die, in the same way that other people look forward to a joyful event.

After several years, the owner's son chanced to visit the spinning rooms bringing with him his Greek friend Dimitri. At this time Turkey was a multi-ethnic country and many Greeks lived there. Dimitri saw the beautiful girl spinning her everlasting cotton thread. Mercy lifted her head and their eyes met.

Dimitri was smitten and that night he could not sleep. His heart pleaded for the opportunity to look upon Mercy a second time. His soul begged him to free her. 

But haggling over a price with the cotton grower was no easy matter and Dimitri, being a Christian in a Muslim state, did not have much money. However, that night the cotton grower had a dream in which he saw Dimitri and Mercy standing together with an angel by their side. He placed great store by dreams and was persuaded to agree on a lower price that was within Dimitri's limited means.

By now Mercy was sixteen, the age at which most girls married. When Dimitri explained that he wished to marry a black girl who had been a slave on a cotton farm, Dimitri's father was too shocked to reply. Dimitri remained defiant and, as he was over twenty-one, little could be done to stop the marriage. Nor would Dimitri lose his inheritance because Greeks who had not 'turned Turk', as converting to Islam was then called, were very poor.

In desperation, Dimitri's father paid a visit to the Turkish cotton grower who, realizing that he'd been manipulated out of a valuable slave by his own wayward emotions, was furious. He chased Dimitri and Mercy across the sea to the powerful city-state of Dubrovnik. He should have known better because not only were the magistrates of Dubrovnik rich they were also men-of-the-world and had managed alone out of all the countries in the Balkans to successfully bargain with the Ottomans to retain their independence. They simply stone-walled the unfortunate cotton-grower who left for his farm in a high temper vowing never to pay attention to his dreams again.

However, the Great Earthquake of 1667 had flattened the noble streets of Dubrovnik taking much of its fine architecture with it and, in the year of Mercy's birth, the city's magistrates had granted to the Ottomans a piece of coastal land only twenty kilometres to the north. By this means the Empire of Venice, that had for a long time looked on Dubrovnik with greedy eyes, would be forced to defeat the Ottomans before attempting to take it over in its weakened state. This was a very astute move by the magistrates, effectively guarding their city as it was being rebuilt, while simultaneously placating the Turks and frustrating the Venetians. Today the land still belongs to Bosnia. 

And so, amidst the scaffolding, Dimitri and Mercy were married, but they did not feel safe in Dubrovnik with the Ottomans a mere twenty kilometres away. They decided to migrate further north to the Istrian peninsula. This was an area of great ethnic diversity and considerable Greek influence. Here Dimitri met the influential Mikatović family who over a century before had travelled north from Montenegro, another country with a strong Greek background. He noticed immediately that they had a Greek/Slavic name. It was the beginning of a beautiful friendship and intermarriage between two families.

Sources and extra resources 

(1)    Turks with African ancestors want their existence to be felt (archive.org)

(2)   The Arab slave trade (ourhistory.org.uk)

(3)    Memory of Vanished African Community Lingers in Montenegrin Town | Balkan Insight

(4)    Only Memories and Emptiness Remain: The History of Ulcinj’s Afro-Albanian Community in Montenegro - Lefteast

(5)    The story of the black African families who lived in Montenegro, Bosnia and Herzegovina - Face2Face Africa

(6)   39321 LES CIUTATS MEDITERRANIES.indb (iec.cat)

HELL HATH NO FURY – the poetry of women Partisans in Yugoslavia 1941 – 1945

‘You who burned my house and killed my child, who shelters

beneath a foreign wing, a traitor who accepts a salary from the

enemy! Did you know that I carry a firearm now? I’ll get you!’ (1)

With the barrel of her gun up his nose, he pleads that he only did what he was ordered to do, but the feeble excuse doesn’t save him.

‘I have a gun always ready,’ she replies with the same mercy he showed her. ‘Aim that bullet into the disgusting fascist! We will obliterate the black blood of fascism forever.' (2) (3)

This female Partisan is well aware that her old mother is sitting at home worrying about her, yet the urge to fight is too strong to resist.

She writes, 'The struggle was difficult, bloody and angry. Everything is broken, falling apart, crumbling. Beside the narrow muddy path you still experience the smell of spilled blood. Yes, many young lives fell, young patriots, heroes. The struggle was an appalling Golgotha and those heroes, mother, were your children. I know that you worry, mother, but I can’t help you now. I still feel that the only place for me is in the brigade. Believe me, mother! The hour is near when I will return to your place for ever, and then surely your wounded heart will stop suffering.' (5)

Still concerned for her mother, she tries to explain how she feels, 'I am a woman fighter, a young partisan. I fight for my people as long as freedom does not prevail. I carry a rifle in my hand, I move boldly forward until the last village is free. Hurry everyone into the struggle, all those homes which are still reluctant to get involved, so that after this war you will experience no shame. When they ask you: "Where were you, comrade?" what will you say?' (6)

But here is a surprise! Her mother responds that she wishes she could be a Partisan nurse. The instant one young soldier recovers from his wound, she knows exactly what to tell him, 'And when his wound eased, I would say to him: “Go, comrade, and keep fighting! Avenge your other friends and don't let the enemy prevail. Don't complain about your young life while one of the bastards remains."' (4)

These women entered World War 2 without illusions. Their country was divided between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy and their allies, the Ustasha in Croatia, and Hungary. Owing to the widespread destruction of their villages, they often had no homes to return to. At first, they supported the men as nurses and typists, and continued the same domestic tasks as they had in the villages. Then, early in 1942, at their request, Tito allowed them to bear rifles. 

Many girls joined the Partisans to avenge brothers who had fallen in battle. One such was the Croatian poet Anđelka Martić who, after the war, became a well-known translator and children's author. She wrote to her brother, 'You are no more, but the place in the line of soldiers at which you waited is not empty. Your young sister gladly took your heavy rifle in her tender hands. Now I am walking where you would have been, by the mountain, stifling my pain for you in a blaze of colour. Dream quietly, brother, I know what you wanted. Until the end your faithful rifle will be heard.' (7)

This poem was written in 1943 when Anđelka was 19. Many girls were younger. The British liaison officer to the Partisans, Fitzroy Maclean records a twelve-year-old girl throwing a grenade into a bunker full of Germans, all of whom were killed. She may well have been the girl who wrote this,

'I am a little female partisan ready every hour, so that in the fight I can avenge my dead brothers. One brother still remains to me, and I would give him all of my little heart, although I fall too. I will give my life for our dear people, I am fighting for freedom against the Kraut forces. I will give my life to defend mother, and in this way I will say to my own dear Dad: "Don't, Dad, regret the lives of your darling children. We must all fight to destroy the devil.” Therefore, I go forward into the holy battle to avenge my brothers, because freedom is here, shining at the door.' (8)

Freedom is a constant theme in the women's poetry. Even when they waited by graves, they looked towards freedom, and everywhere they recorded their love of the countryside. To me this reads as if nature was in their hearts and souls, therefore it understood their struggle.  

 'On the graves of our comrades the cyclamens are without number. Their red is everywhere in the forests through which the fighters move. We twitch the gentle stems, we roll up the small flowerets and our thoughts lead us back into a warm childhood. Once we ran in the woods, gathering red cyclamen, our song filled the paths and tracks. But today the forests have become the graves of our fallen comrades, the sons of our land. The scent of cyclamen spreads everywhere. It announces our freedom, and these graves stand as a symbol of victory.' (9)

'A lonely grave in a pine forest. Silence everywhere, only the wind whistles, while with tearful eyes a mother weeps for her son. But the forest trembles! It is ardent, it is quiet. The branches are sobbing, too! Why does your wood disturb the silence on a peaceful day, forest? It is because the trees are telling the story of that dead partisan. The forest is whispering to his mother about our struggle, about our joy when the people win, and about how much her son’s grave is worth.' (10)

I have found no reference to communism in the women's poetry, although there is some hero worship of Tito. From the poems I learned much about the beauty of the land and the connection of its people to it. Basil Davison, another British officer who worked with the Yugoslav Partisans, wrote that they weren't interested in politics, they just wanted their land back.      

'Bend your ear to the ground and listen to the murmur. That it is not the murmur of the wind. It is neither waterfalls nor mountain rapids, nor the moaning in the dense forest of firs. Because it rumbles loudly, vigorously and terribly from the strong walk of the victorious.' (12)

Meanwhile, our Partisan blows the smoke from the barrel of her gun. At her feet, the Nazi lies dead.

'Oh, my rifle, I will never part with you! You will be with me at the end of my wrist until the last day.' (1) She turns to her comrades. 'Through fire and blood, through the persecution of these violent monsters, through concentration camps, harshness and humiliation, you are welcome, women, mothers, our daughters, to your new baptism of fire. You have found yourselves alone at a terrible price, but you have created a new and combative woman.' (11)

Illustration, Zlatko Prica

  

Note: The poems are written almost entirely in rhythmic, rhyming stanzas. To replicate this in an English translation, I would have had to rewrite the poems, which I decided not to do.             

For a complete account of these courageous women, I recommend Women and Yugoslav Partisans by Jelena Batinić, Cambridge University Press, 2015. 

THE POEMS

from PO ŠUMAMA I GORAMA  (Through Forests and Mountains)

Poems of the Fighters of the National War of Liberation, Zagreb 1952

1. A Woman Under Arms by Franjo Mraz

2. Female Partisan on Guard Duty by Slavica Havelka III ćeta I bataljan II brigade 33 rd division

3.The Female Partisan by Gabro Vidović-Buco 1941

4. The Conscientious Mother by Života Čitaković borac, IV batajon “S.O” II. Prolet. brigada

5. To Mother by Verica Gabor, Hospital company, II brigade, XXXIII div.

6. Young Partisan by Ana Langeneker, delegate 1st Brigade 32nd division

7. To My Fallen Brother by Anđelka Martić 1943

8. A Female Partizan by Micika Biškup II. Brig., XXXIII, div.

9. Cyclamen by Anđelka Martić XXI. NO brigada

10. The Lonely Grave by Anđelka Martić

 
11. You Have Arisen by Mileva Jorgić I batajon, XVII. Ud. Brig. XXVIII, div. 

12. Spring by Nada Valenčić 1944

JASENOVAC CONCENTRATION CAMP AND ISTRIA

Here is my photograph of the Partisan cenotaph in Tar, Istria, the village my mother was born in. Her family name was Mikatović. They had come up from the south coast in the sixteenth century and lived only in this area.

From the cenotaph and JASENOVAC RESEARCH INSTITUTE – Let the Truth Be Known!, I researched the men from Tar and the surrounding Istrian villages who had died at the notorious Jasenovac concentration camp run by the Ustasha during World War 2 on the northern border of Bosnia and Croatia .

In the table below are their names and places of birth:

Tar today has a population of about 900. Aside from Poreć, the other villages mentioned are smaller. If so many men from such small villages so far away, who were neither Serbian, nor Jewish, nor Gypsies, could be slaughtered at Jasenovac, then how much more would the numbers have been swelled by the real targets of the Ustasha: the Serbs, the Jews and the Roma? The extermination rate must have been enormous.

(I think there were probably more names than this because the search engine turned up names that weren’t on the cenotaph.)

I can’t tell you how very sad this knowledge has made me. Istria during World War 2 was a German operational zone. My mother often mentioned riding their bikes and having to get off the road quickly in order to avoid German tanks. Before this, Istria had a history of poverty and famine, yet here were these farmers (and farmer is the most common profession written in their church books) turning into patriots and fighting for their freedom. There was little food during the war. My mother said that all the food went to feeding the Italian army. Often, all they had to eat was potatoes, she said, and the Germans were very cruel.

The cenotaph in the photograph was established in 1953 to honour the anti-fascist Partisans, both Italian and Croatian, and is inscribed in both languages. The historian at nearby Novigrad told me that Mussolini’s dictatorship polarized the village. One side of the street would consider themselves Italian and the other Croatian. Yet after the collapse of Fascist Italy, they fought the Germans together, only for some to perish in a Croatian death camp.

                                       

WINTER BATTLES: BOSNIA 1941

December 1941: Fleeing the German destruction of Užice in Serbia,
Tito and the Partisans crossed the River Drina in winter,

climbed the mountains of Bosnia on the other side, 

and walked through the forests.    

Bosnia Herzegovina is a very mountainous country. In winter it is snow bound.

As someone who has actually driven through Bosnia in the snow, I have difficulty understanding why the Nazis thought that they could successfully invade the country. Even today, the roads seem to be a collection of mule tracks up and down the formidable Dinaric Alps with the addition of a few optimistic motorways. In Eastern Approaches (Jonathon Cape pub. 1949) Fitzroy Maclean writes, 'the Germans, with an elusive enemy, with unreliable allies, and without enough troops of their own to occupy the country effectively, could do little more than garrison the large towns and try to guard the lines of communication between them'.

However, during the war they needed bauxite from the mines near Mostar, the mediaeval capital of Herzegovina, for use in the construction of aeroplanes. Bosnia Herzegovina is also rich in coal, iron ore, zinc and lead. There were two ways to transport coal and ore to Germany. One was along the system of Bosnian narrow-gauge railways built by the Austrians which was extended between the wars to connect the coast to Belgrade, and the other was by sea to Trieste. The railways ran the gauntlet of demolition by the Partisans, and ships in the Adriatic risked being sunk by the Allies. 

The Partisans needed Bosnia to connect with their operational zones in Croatia, Dalmatia, Slovenia and Montenegro. The Nazis waged a series of offensives against them. They were assisted in this by the Italians, the Croatian Ustasha and the Chetniks. The Partisans held up to twenty-eight German divisions in Bosnia Herzegovina, Croatia and Montenegro which suited Churchill as the Allied Invasion of Sicily approached.

To understand the creation of the Partisans from a motley collection of local fighters engaged over the centuries in battling Turks, we must go to Bosnia in December 1941.

'Tito and his staff had formed a conception of Partisan warfare which deviated from past Soviet practice...where a Partisan unit was an auxiliary weapon of a regular army...To the Yugoslavs the Partisan units were the army, organized in mobile formations and in territorial defense units.'

from The Embattled Mountain, FWD Deakin, Oxford University Press, 1971.

Between December 1941 and May 1942 Tito formed five Proletarian Brigades of up to 1000 fighters each, as a military striking force under his direct command. By November they had increased to 28.

 Deakin continues, 

'The immediate task of the First Proletarian Brigade [in December 1941] was in ensure the hold of the Partisans over the key strategic areas of East Bosnia.'

The chief difference between these forces and the old local fighters was their mobility. They no longer defended only their home territories. 

'Long before the Allies, the Germans and Italians came to realize that the Partisans constituted a military factor of first rate importance against which a modern army was in many respects powerless.,,During each of [their seven] offensives, the extensive troop movements involved exposed [them] more than ever to the attacks and ambushes of the Partisans.'   

from Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy Maclean  

The contrast between the Partisans and the Germans was striking. The Germans in Bosnia were an efficient modern army, often using Alpine troops, with field kitchens and heavy artillery, 'lumbering, snail-like'. The Partisans were organized into small, mobile, lightly armed units who were familiar with the terrain. Much of the reason for the failure of the Germans to subdue the Partisans was their inability to embrace change. Tito told Deakin that the Germans 'had missed the lesson of creating mobile units with special anti-Partisan training. German forward units were always pressing behind the Yugoslavs and could never move with speed in self-contained columns to attack the Partisan forces from the rear. By not winning every grim race for each mountain crest, the German operation failed in its central purpose of annihilating the Yugoslav main operational group.' 

Yet the Germans were supported from the air, as we read in the poem The Bombed Forest by Josip Cazi, a Partisan Political Commissar. Papuk is a mountain in Slavonija in Croatia.

'This morning over Papuk a reconnaissance plane is searching, an ominous buzzard in that dreary first light...Death comes from the air, seeking with fiery claws the heart of the Partisans.'

The forest burns all day. Frightened animals run from the wildfire. 

'But at sunset Partisan songs sweep through it like an inexhaustible fountain. Along the slopes the column of soldiers moves out into the lowlands. They will go into action at night – the cycle of history is still turning. Above Papuk the fires die in the evening.' 

The typical enemy tactic was encirclement, and getting out of the ring was the Partisan aim, as we read in A Partisan Letter by Josip Cazi,

Yesterday, with a fiery partisan sledgehammer, we fought the fascist regiment on Mt Psunj, so hurriedly that I didn’t send you the letter I had written. We penetrated the ring by a stormy impact, blasting the fiery chain in a bloody assault. And while to you, my orphan, I write this letter, our columns on the September roads are singing of victory in the morning sun.

'The ring' is a constant observation in British eyewitness accounts. For example, from Partisan Picture' by Basil Davison (Bedford Books, 1946) at the Battle of the Neretva River, from January to March 1943,

To hold the ring the German Command then made an arrangement with 12,000 of Mihaylovitch's chetniks, commanded by Col. Stanisitch and General Djukanovitch and others, by which the latter would attempt to seal off any further partisan retreat by taking up positions along the left bank of the River Neretva. [The fourth offensive.]

The fifth offensive ended with the breaking of the ring in Montenegro and the escape of Tito and the main formations into Eastern Bosnia. That was in mid-June 1943 [the Battle of the Sutjeska].

An account of the same battle from The Heretic by Fitzroy Maclean (Harper and Brother, NY, 1957), 

'"Now that the ring is completely closed," ran a captured German operation order, "the communists will try to break through. You will ensure that no able-bodied man leaves the ring alive."' 

 'If guerillas are to survive in conditions comparable to those in which the Partisans were fighting,' wrote Fitzroy Maclean in Eastern Approaches, 'they must...deny the enemy a target.' The Partisans did this by 'extricating themselves, fading away, reappearing elsewhere and attacking the enemy where he least expected it.' They did not stand and fight to the last man. We see this 'escape in defeat' in the poem The Battle at Twenty Below Zero. Having sown the seeds of dissent among the local population, they returned later to the same area from which the enemy had driven them out. No author is given, but it was evidently written by one of the brigades in 1945. Gradina is in northwest Bosnia.  

The sun itself is flaming on these clouds,
and on their serene heights, a grey aspect,
but on the people and villages, snows are falling.

The hoarfrost is silent, the chirp of the birds dies.
Until the middle of November its sting has dug in.
But the heart of the people beats like a burning spark.

The column of soldiers steps into the blizzard, the angry ice,
on callused feet, by swift, firm steps.
The bold ones focus on the view in the distance where autumns produce bloody fruits.
In their hearts they carry spring blossoms and their deadly rifles are loaded with freedom.

Hurry! It will be an onslaught in Gradina,
Because Tito’s heart has won the battle of the cold,
An irresistible heart for freedom.

Shh! The soldiers creep on, still on track,
What leads to the bunker? The stone tower?
The shots…the cheers… and the escape in defeat?

Five dead Nazis and three frozen traitors,
Because the stiffs in uniform have no heart.
The thermometer says: twenty below zero.

 In a further post, I will comment on the poems written by and about female Yugoslav Partisans. To close, here is a small sample.   

From A Woman Under Arms by Franjo Mraz

Oh my rifle, I will never part with you!
You will be with me at the end of my wrist until the last day
To protect the paths of freedom along which the conquered are moving.
Tremble, look, listen to the woman warrior, the woman Partisan!

                                                                                     

(Images M Walker 2023. The first three images were taken driving from Belgrade over the Drina to Sarajevo and the last on the motorway from Sarajevo towards the Neretva River and Mostar.)