European Resistance Archive/European Resistance Archive (ERA)

These men paid reverence to the Slovene literary word, song, Gregorcic, Presern…

It was constantly recited, and we all carried miniature books of Presern and Gregorcic.

They were all too ready to protect me and keep me safe, while they went into action.

Half of them had already fallen within a year.

They were consciously prepared to risk their lives to protect me.

They would fall, while I, the poet, and I wasn’t much of a poet back then, would only write poems.

Such comradeship, such ethics as I experienced then… Mind you, I’ve mentioned one mere example…

I never before, nor ever thereafter came across such again.

So, during the actual fighting, Partisan ethics were at their heroic apex; they were pure.

Things happened after the war.

Once it’s all over, when you finally feel that all the bad is over and done with,

that’s when uncontrollable human passions surface;

and of course already the first political reckonings, settlements and everything bad.

That’s why I, even today, while history is revised, always say that it was a clean and pure fight for liberation.

Especially with the Slovenes, in contrast to the French, the Czechs or whoever,

who fought for the uniting of Slovenes into one community. It was pure and ethical.

Later the passion began. It’s when some get weapons into their hands

and also deem themselves as having the power to decide who is the enemy and who to take revenge upon.

Of course things then happen which cause a shadow to fall over even those few ideal

and idealistic aspects of anti-fascism, across everything that occurred between 1941 and 1945.