The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 43. TRUDI TRUDI WAS A RICH Little GIRL who came into the prison wearing exquisite underwear which the women loved to examine. She had big blue eyes and golden hair which we took turns combing. Trudi fell quite desperately in love with the most attractive boy in the prison. He was a dark, handsome Czech student who was lodged on the third floor. Since he was considered likely to attempt to escape, he was never allowed down into the yard except to wash in the morning under guard. They fell in love at first sight, and both were so nice that we all took a thrilled interest in encouraging the affair. So by a system of watchers, as we swept or scrubbed the corridor, we used to arrange that Trudi would emerge with blankets to shake just as he was coming down the stairs. They walked the few steps into the yard "by accident" side by side. And in her pile of blankets notes slipped back and forth while long looks of passion were exchanged, and little muttered words of love. For a few minutes while she shook the blankets (ordinarily we did it in twos and made them crack to shoot out the bugs) and he brushed his teeth, they would continue to gaze with passion. If that sounds very unromantic to you, you don't understand the magic of romance. Her days were filled with composing long, gracefully worded letters in the smallest writing on scraps of any kind of paper I could steal from the guardroom. She used my pathetic stub of a pencil- the same pencil with which, each evening at dusk, I stood in the gathering gloom below the window and wrote my notes. (Sewed up in the pleats of my skirt, although in Germany I was several times searched to the skin, I got them all out, every one. They were on smooth toilet paper, carefully saved from before my arrest. There was none in the Belgrade prison.) Sometimes Trudi read parts of his letters to her special intimates, among whom I was lucky to be included. They were in French. He told how he was caught trying to find his mother in Serbia. He had failed. He dreamed of what someday they two would do together. "Libres," he wrote, "nous serons libres, libres et ensemble, nous deux. If it is in the summer, we will go to one of the little islands on the Adriatic coast and all day long, alone, we two, we'll swim and talk on the golden sands. And in the warm nights . . . If it is in winter that we are free again, we'll go to the mountains and on our skis we'll whiz down the snowy slopes-when we are free again...." Always he ended: "Je vous admire, je vous respecte, je vous aime, je vous adore!" Little Trudi lived in a world apart, a rosy dream, wrapped away from our common miseries. A spy became suspicious, perhaps because the boy looked so happy. Though her letters were not found and she was not suspected, the boy was beaten until his eyes were black and blue. His fine head of hair was shaved. Trudi was dissolved in misery. It did not stop them; but we were all even more careful than before. One day a "trusty," an opera singer who sometimes worked in the office, whispered to her quite innocently that he had seen the boy's name on a list for execution. Trudi fainted. It was a genuine heart attack. At once I put every signal system in motion-you may be sure we had plenty-and got hold of the man near the garbage cans. I was simply furious at his thoughtlessness. Even a minute of misery saved was worth any trouble. Time enough to endure disaster when it had really happened! I told him he had to tell her he had seen the list again and found he had mistaken the first name: that it was a different man altogether. I told him he had to make it sound convincing. He did it well, and our lovely little Trudi was all tremulous relief and hope and smiles again. But the information proved only too true. That gentle, fiery lover now molders under a brown blanket which all Trudi's love can never shake. And she, the little beauty-she was transported to Germany- to what infamous fate . . . Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel