A Partisan's Daughter Read Online Free PDF Page A

London at that time, I believe. My father had fun with the Cetniks to begin with. It was a big adventure, wading through mud, swinging on ropes, crawling through pipes, sticking bayonets in sandbags.
    The trouble was that he didn’t give a damn about the King, so it was difficult being a royalist. The Cetnik officers were all Hapsburgish aristocratic types, and they liked their drills and their polishing. Meanwhile, the men were getting into feuds with each other, like proper Balkan bandits, and the officers didn’t know how to keep discipline, and so one day he defected to the communist partisans because he was fed up with skulking in the forest with a bunch of disputatious royalists.
    There were plenty of people to fight. The place was crawling with Romanians, Bulgarians, Italians, Germans and Hungarians, and there were some Croatians who became Nazis too. If you want to speak insultingly about Croatians you just refer to them as Ustase. When they want to insult Serbs, they call them Cetniks.
    There was a lot of talk and rumour. People were saying that the Cetniks were colluding with the Nazis to wipe out the communists, and even collaborating with the Ustase. The Ustase liked to get rid of Serbs, Jews and Gypsies by drowning them. They had an extermination camp at Jasenovac that was even condemned by the Gestapo for its cruelty. I heard that 1.7 million Yugoslavs died in the war, and one million of the deaths were fratricide. We didn’t need Germans and Italians to come and kill us, because we could manage it on our own, thank you. Chris said, “Hey, Roza, I’m going to have to stay on your sweet side,” and I said, “Balkan girls have a big sweet side.”
    My father defected to the communists when he was supposed to be taking part in an attack on them. He made sure he was out on the edge of the flank, and when the column approached he slipped away and joined them, and told them about the impending attack. So they ambushed the ambushers, and my father helped to wipe out his former comrades. During the battle he got the tip of a bayonet in the eye, and so he had to learn to shoot left-handed. It was quite a romance.
    The communists were pretty successful as resistance fighters. They even set up schools, and rifle and cigarette factories. They were fighting not only the Italians and the Germans, but the other resistance groups as well, except that towards the end of the war enough Italians changed sides to form a whole battalion that fought for us.
    I knew a great deal about the Second World War in Yugoslavia. It was an area of expertise that I had, because of university, and I was quite clear about who was who and what was what, and when everything happened, but I’ve no doubt that Chris was having trouble following it. He said it was very interesting, and he said his wife had got puzzled by the reading matter at his bedside. Before he mostly used to read Louis L’Amour novels and DIY magazines, but now he had started reading the books about Tito and Fitzroy Maclean that I was lending him.
    It was fun telling Chris gory details, such as that my father once had to eat his own horse, and Tito’s life was once saved because his dog took all the force of a bomb that fell beside him, and that collaborators used to get thrown out of trucks with their first finger cut off at the first joint, the second finger at the second joint, and the third and fourth fingers cut off altogether. They’d sever the tendons of the thumb and staple their lips together, plus the other lips if they were women.
    He used to shudder and say how awful this was, but I didn’t see it. I thought they deserved it, and I said, “I hate people like that.” I have the attitudes of an Amazon, and maybe that made me even more wonderful for Chris.
    Chris said, “I don’t hate anyone. I couldn’t be bothered. I think my wife hates me, though.”
    I said, “I hate lots of people,” and when he raised his eyebrows in enquiry, I numbered them off on