European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

And characteristic for this time was that we had a teacher who was a real bully.

When the lesson was about to start, first two or three pupils were given a good thrashing, with the cane.

Maybe another thing: I was malnourished and was given 'Quaker feeding'.

That was from the United States, from the Quaker association

and there I got half a litre of milk soup and a bread roll.

You have to see that this was 1920/21, where a lot of problems occurred in this post-war period.

Post war period – deserting the army

They wanted to keep me in the army when the war ended.

I had some sort of Partisan rank,

something like second lieutenant, but I had no intention of building a military career.

I deserted the army in September 1945.

I wanted to study and I believed that I fought for that too, for my own personal freedom, for the right to decide for myself what I would do.

I didn’t want anybody else deciding for me.

I wanted to study Slovene; as I had never attended Slovene schools, my knowledge of the language was deficient, and I was a poet.

That was all just retold rather harshly, but they understood. There were no charges brought against me.

I had deserted in September and it was December before I received my certificate of discharge.

For three months I had been de facto, and I might very well have been charged with desertion before a military court.

It was another of my crazy maneuvers that had simply worked out well.

They had understood this powerful desire of mine to study

and they turned a blind eye towards the fact that I had broken the law, that I had deserted the unit without anyone’s permission.