The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel 50. THE MINUET OF DEATH MANY OLD ACQUAINTANCES OF MINE were in the prison, but we were careful to give no sign of recognition. Can you imagine what it felt like to see charming friends, who in days of happiness had sent you flowers, taken you out to little merry, intimate dinners, now walking slowly round the prison yard, in lock step, sometimes chained, thin. dirty, looking a nameless death in the face? Your own kindly friends, whose only crime was love of their country or of God! (The finding of any Masonic symbol in a house was a sentence of death.) I can only say that often I would feel my very soul hardening to a stone of grim determination: somehow I must stick it out and live- for the one purpose of someday helping to bring retribution. First and always our one thought was: "No sign-no sign of breaking down! That is what they want-we must not give the beasts that satisfaction." One day I felt faint and sat down on a bench over a cellar air hole. The women, as usual, quickly gathered round, and the guard, shrugging his shoulders disgustedly, walked up the yard. Suddenly something-it may have been a broom handle-struck me on the leg. I bent and looked down the cellar hole. There, in the dim light looking up at me from the condemned cell, I could just see the gaunt, drawn face of Simonovich. I had known him and his charming English wife, who had managed the Anglo-American Club, a long time. I knew that she had managed to escape to England. "Tell her," he whispered frantically, as loud as he dared without drawing the attention of the guard at his door, "tell Mary I held her in my heart to the end. Tell her I died with her name on my lips." I felt as if a hand had reached into my breast and squeezed my heart. Try as I could to control myself, the tears gushed from my eyes. There was a single water tap in the yard where the condemned men were allowed to wet their heads sometimes in the heat. Just then a man, with leg chains so heavy he had to hold them up with his hands, was bending down under the tap. He caught sight of my face. Quick as a flash he shuffled over and seized my hands, balled in my effort at control. "Ruhe, Ruhe [Calm, calm]," he hissed fiercely in German. "Sie mussen Sich zusammen nehmen [You must control yourself]. Only no sign, no breakdown. The others depend on you." It was the right word. Slowly I raised my eyes from his rusty chains. Then I saw, tattooed on his breast, the most extraordinary scene: mountains with the sun rising behind them, pine trees, and in the foreground an antlered deer poking out its head, all in bright colors. I was so startled by this vision that the surprise steadied me. I squeezed his hand. He sprang back just before the guard turned. Somehow resolution came back. I rose, and slowly we went again upon our rounds, calmly looking the guard in the eye. At the turn near the garbage cans we slipped aside, quickly lit a cigarette, and on the next round flipped it down to Simonovich. It was all that we could do for him. Tony, the dear boy who carried, painted on his breast, the mountain scene, all he loved best in life, was a forest ranger who loved freedom as the eagle loves the high crags. He was a marvelous fellow, impertinent, always laughing into the face of certain death, a pet even of the guards. He boasted openly that no prison bars could hold him. And, sure enough, he did actually get away-the only one, I believe, who ever did escape from our prison. But he was shot dead before he reached safety in the forests he loved so dearly. That cellar dungeon! An icy trickle still goes down my back when I think of it, for I too was in it for a time. It was exactly like what you read about in the old stories: the sweating walls, the little pile of damp straw on which you lie-alone -while slowly the dim ray of light from the far, high air hole in the thick wall passes round the ceiling to mark the passage of interminable hours. Everlasting twilight, everlasting silence, except for the dull, eerie clank-clank-clank of heavily chained feet slowly stumbling past the door. No sternest resolution can quite prevent a chill of terror from creeping into the marrow of one's bones. Soon the cellar was overcrowded, packed with "hostages," men of high position, cabinet ministers, judges, lawyers, professors, businessmen, taken from all parts of Serbia with the threat that they would be slaughtered if the people of their homes should dare to resist the invader. Each day they grew gaunter, grayer, and, yes, grimmer- praying, as we knew well they did in their hearts, that their friends would not for a moment consider them. All in turn, those good men died. There was a prison across the town-we heard many reports of it- filled with nothing but such "hostages." But these were all women- women whose husbands, brothers, fathers, or sons had "gone to the mountains" to join Draja Mihailovich and my Chetniks. The helpless women were taken by the German kidnapers in the hope of forcing their men to give themselves up. The conditions in that prison were fearful beyond belief. Packed in so tight that there was hardly room to sit, none at all to lie down, they leaned against the walls and against each other-starving. And so they died, praying to an outraged God that their menfolk would not be weak enough or loving enough to deliver themselves into German hands to save them. Serbian mothers, Serbian wives, gentle Serbian girls, they died. In hundreds they died. From the memory of their martyrdom into the youth of Serbia for uncounted generations will flow strength. Among our own hostages was the old, dignified, and much admired Judge Stokich. Very ceremonious in his manners, with always a cheerful, whispered word in passing, he always had a twinkle in his eye for the ladies. His sweeping mustachios in the old Serbian style were to Us an invigorating sight. In his calmly humorous way he did much to put steadiness into us. His job was to pour disinfectant each morning into the toilets and night pails in the cells. Giving him this assignment was the German idea of fun. One morning, when Lidia and I were scrubbing the floor of the toilet, he came in. Just at that moment the office radio was playing a Mozart minuet. They met, the exquisite society woman and the courtly judge: in her hand a scrubbing brush, in his a battered can of stink stuff. Then, to the tinkle of that old familiar tune blaring across all the prison noise, they silently clasped hands. And sweetly, with an Old World grace, they tripped a little minuet. Upon the very verge of a darkly yawning grave, they curtseyed, bowed a pirouette, and gently danced a last-a long-last-minuet. Not many days after he too was among the thousands that sank before the "culture-bringing" guns into a nameless trench. He was the hostage for Smederevo, a huge ancient fortress on the Danube sixty miles from Belgrade, which the Germans had made into their biggest ammunition dump. It blew up, and the effect was so terrific that the whole German garrison was killed and most of the town destroyed. And so our dear old Judge Stokich had to die. Young and old, great and small, they died and died and died. Previous Chapter | Content | Next Chapter The Serbs Chose War, Ruth Mitchel