European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

Killing, even in the name of great ideals, will ultimately come back to you later in form of a trauma.

The prayer book anecdote; teacher in the partisan school

In the two years that I was with the Partisans, I came quite close to death several times.

I somehow had to get used to death becoming a part of Partisan life.

For each fight there was the success or failure of the encounter.

It was determined almost exclusively on the basis of the number dead.

If we fought with the Germans and then figured that five Partisans had fallen,

so as to find pleasure in the result of the encounter.

We had to convince ourselves, regardless of how true it was, that we had lost five Partisans while the enemy had lost twenty.

You had the feeling that the death that swallowed up your colleagues was not in vain.

Rather it was a mini-contribution towards liberation and the persecution of the occupying enemy,

freedom and everything we imagined was to be after the war ended.

I myself was lucky.

I was an informer, the Germans caught me three times and three times they let me go; all because I wore this…

I’m an agnostic. I’m not a believing man. But my mother was extremely religious.

When I joined the Partisans she said to me: Son, I know you don’t pray, but… here, take this little rosary.

And she put it in my pocket. She was a peasant girl.

Out of respect to my mother I carried that rosary in my pocket at all times.

When the Germans first captured me and searched me and emptied my pockets, they pulled out my rosary.

They were in the habit of believing that all Partisans kill priests and burn churches.