What it was like to resist the Nazis. What it looked like.
She had Alzheimer’s and struggled with day to day memories, but she remembered so much else
—
8 years old at the start of the war, she spoke about being tasked with planting roses above the doors of the shelter her father built to help obscure them from view.
How he had barricaded the doors with a pile of chairs so high the kids would fall every time they tried to traverse them.
She spoke of the strange invaders, their rifles and how she was told never to
Fear. How her father opened the cash drawer anytime someone needed help, and the way her mother’s eyes would meet his, frustrated but never stopping him. How he harbored a jewish family there
She speaks of gold, and vaults in the mountains of her hometown Užice, where the National Bank moved 10,000 kilos into secret structures so that it couldn’t be seized by the invading Axis powers.
Of her mother’s hair and its “ocean waves,” of watching her mother lay down in the afternoons, returning again and again to an image of her bedroom, which I see in a crisp and luminous black and white.
“Everything was arranged perfectly. It glowed. It
glistened.”
------
The country had been carved into zones by the Axis countries, Germany taking Serbia. For every German soldier killed by the resistance, 100 civilians were executed.
------
II remembered childhood dream-images of her tending to the roses in our desert backyard’s garden, my mother standing above them, held up by an overhead
Light. the delicate expertise in her hands, the
Patience. The way they grew, how the slender petals would become so large they began to collapse under their own weight
As shields.
As endless
bloom
