“Goli” by Miroslav Mika Ristić

I spent my early childhood with my grandfather Miroslav Mika Ristić, Mika. The same year I was born, 1990, his father Sava died, and it was also the year of the beginning of the destruction of Yugoslavia. Hard years were about to come.

It was a childhood of war, bombing and destruction of the homeland, years of wild laws, of openly announced counter-revolution, full imperialist subjection and capitalist restoration.

I remember those years well, and in every image of those memories – there is Mika. Every morning we read newspapers together, and then played chess. We talked about literature, and he insisted that I go to the theatre. Theatre was his saviour – that is what the book is about. That story always inspired me, and today I am working as a professional film director.

Mika wrote “Goli” in 1999. It was some happening, at least in our house and locally. I remember the days when he wrote it all day long and when I first heard for the dark island – Goli Otok.

I don’t remember speaking with him about it. Later on I found out that there was not a single prisoner from Goli Otok who spoke about it with his family, or with anyone else. It was the dark secret of the drained people, left without a meaning. Because they were there, in the place where a friend is an enemy and a lie is the truth, where there is “neither God nor Stalin” – as Mika quoted a guard at the entrance to the island.

The life of an ex-prisoner from Goli Otok was hard. Nobody would easily come to their house. Everybody would be cautious with them, including themselves.

When people from the so-called Eastern bloc think of their “socialist past” – they think of a grey, dark, passive place. It was a revisionist hell. It was not like the Soviet Union and the communist movement in the days of Lenin and Stalin, with the bright colours of the revolution, 149

of active, mass, working people’s struggle – against the class enemies, against fascism, for socialist construction, for peace and a better life. No. It was the “cold war” spy network and police-military camp, full of explosives!

They want to make the image of Yugoslavia different from this picture. They try to add some “Coca-Cola” colours to this police terror state. But the truth is – Titoist “Yugoslavia” was the cradle of the revisionist snake – it was the first experiment and a model. It was the dark place – from where the revisionist catastrophe began.

The fine things that came from People’s Yugoslavia should be credited to its people only, to its history of the struggle, when our people learned from the Communist Party of Yugoslavia during the People’s Liberation War – how to fight and how to run and organize society. This experience is something which can never be taken from our fine people! We have done it before, and we will do it again – people’s victory is inevitable!

But thinking about Titoist “Socialist Yugoslavia” should always and without a hesitation start from “Goli Otok” – and end with it. Because Goli Otok had no end – as ex-prisoners testify. They were prisoners for life. All “Socialist Yugoslavia” was a Goli Otok for them! And for all the peoples of Yugoslavia. This capitalist state, with rare police and military features, this powder keg, ended up as was predicted – in a savage and bloody explosion of chauvinist war and slaughter that began in 1991.

Modern revisionism is not just a deviation from the solid Marxist-Leninist line. It is first and foremost – a crime. Led by fat gangsters with gangster hats which they saw in gangster movies.

The political spectres in the years of my growing-up were poor. Anti-Communism was spreading like a disease. There is still a fake liberal myth in Serbia and Yugoslavia, spread by revisionists of all kinds and colours – that Goli Otok was supposedly the crime of the communists. It is the well-known irritating story about “Stalinism” and its “crimes” – neither the first nor the last fascist crime against humanity and communists that is ascribed to the great teacher of humanity – the great Stalin. Sick revisionists know no boundaries – they would kill you in the most sadistic way and then blame you for it. The fake liberal myth insists that imprisoning people for supporting Stalin was “Stalinism”.

So, this was the story that they tried to sell me: grandfather “was against collective farming” and that was the reason why “the communists” got him! This sounded reasonable – being against communists would definitely mean being against their policies.

But I was getting older and involved myself more into social reality. My generation, the generation of capitalism, started to fight: on the streets, in the faculties. We started to think of communism as alternative worth discussing. We now all know that Goli Otok was not a product of “communist dictatorship”, but an anti-communist crime – a prison for communists. For the best communists and people’s partisans, there were 16,000 of them, the ones who led the revolutionary struggle and people’s uprising which liberated our people from fascist and capitalist oppression. Titoist headquarters with the support of imperialists gave guns to the enemies of the people, ex-chetniks and ustashas, who pointed them against 16,000 of the finest sons and daughters of our peoples!

With this in mind, I started to wonder – how could Mika be against collective farming if he was actually a communist, a respectable member of the Union of Communist Youth (SKOJ), as I later found-out, and not an anti-communist as they tried to sell me?

New Yugoslav People’s Democracy, established on the basis of the antifascist victory and people’s democratic revolution, had in front the task of agrarian reform on its way to the new stage of revolution – the socialist revolution.

The old “zadruga” was a traditional Serbian collective organisation of the peasants – for distribution and not for production. As a traditional peasant institution, it was similar to the Russian “obshchina”, which found the attention of Karl Marx (letter to Vera Zasulich). The new “zadruga” labour cooperatives played a significant role in the attempt at collectivisation of the peasantry.

Mika was from a peasant background himself, so this question must have been important for him.

Yugoslav cinematography is famous and well-known; it has its part in the world history of cinema. Its highest point can be found in the great name of Veljko Bulajić. His films drew international attention and his legendary “Battle of Neretva”, the partisan epic, was at the top of the nominations for an Oscar.

The filmography of Veljko Bulajić is one of the People’s Revolution. All the extraordinary moments of struggle of the new against the old, of people against the bloodsucker exploiters, can be found in his films – from the first to the last.

There are three of Bulajić’s films that deal specifically with a socialist revolution and its difficulties. The one that is important in this story is symbolically his last Yugoslav film. It is called “Obećana zemlja” – “The Promised Land”.

The main character is an angry communist who imposes the politics of collectivization. At the end of the film he is arrested and the peasants celebrate the end of the new “zadruga”. It is the last, melancholic shot of the last film of a biographer of Yugoslavia.

When Enver Hoxha flew to Moscow over Yugoslavia, with the similar melancholy he grieved: “Beautiful Yugoslav land that was never collectivised, never systematized”.

This was the melancholy of the tragedy that was approaching Yugoslavia. And at the heart of the problem lies – the question of the land.

To fully understand the Cominform Resolution was actually the main basis for understanding not only what happened to our dear Yugoslavia, but also what happened to my grandfather.

The main character of “Goli” – Stanko (the family name of the legendary People’s Hero of the city of Kruševac, the unforgettable Velizar Stanković Korčagin), Mika’s alter-ego – in prison a man approached who had come back from the Soviet Union, asking him: can there be collective farming without machine-tractors!?

In this particular part, we can find the Resolution of the Cominform in real life, in literature, as we can find it in Bulajić’s “Promised Land”. This is why, I think, this book can be of interest to the readers of Revolutionary Democracy.

“Goli” is significant testimony on the history of our socialist revolution, of counter-revolution and the monstrous revisionist fascist prison and the destiny of one soul through it.

We will avenge the martyrs of Goli Otok!

Kosta Ristić,
June 2020

Excerpt from “Goli”

For seven days and nights I was looking at the shit while not seeing it. On the eight day they put me into a regular prison.

My forearms are itching, I can’t hang on for long, but the tune of a pre-war city song, no, this is Šantic›s Once in the garden, that mourns from Dane’s violin. Now I need to be a little sad. Today is Saturday. On Saturdays I was always sad. Because, I guess, I always expected a lot and I wanted to get down, but the other person in me warned me: what about the agreement that feelings and pain do not command you – as if he whispered, and I reluctantly decided to raise myself on my arms a little longer.

Maybe my friends who often pass through here when they come back from the creek will invite me to come right now. The prison commander listened to me and asked me to recognize them by voice, and I pretended to be crazy as if I didn’t recognize anybody (I recognized Dragojl, the elder Zeka, Peru Budžu, even Topalović and Franjo, who never belonged to our circles). I like to see them, not just hear them, though it means a lot to me. I admit, without their voices, which they shout inarticulately, in order not to be recognized, it would not be the same. They shouted, as if they were yawning, and fled. I couldn’t get anywhere, either. They know that I recognize them and that I will not betray them. And I won’t, even if I never get out of here.

Oh, my forearms! No need to exaggerate, I’ll be charged and tomorrow night I won’t be able to hold on, like the other day, and this music!? Little butterflies by Zvonko Bogdan! They just found it for Saturday night.

I do not like the view from these bars. From solitary confinement I could see the clock on the bell tower of the church of St. Peter and Paul, the top floor of the Elementary School built by Delimir, Member of Parliament before the war which everyone called Delimir‘s School, which I went to, the rooftops of the Craftsman’s House and the Taušanović’s Palace, which with Nenković’s bookstore surround the Square. From here only the sheds, slums and a dirty, into a garbage dump converted the river of Belica.

I go down to the bare planks of an army bed, which takes up a third of this room. There are only two of us in it right now; according to political affiliation we should be angry opponents. I walk under his feet and lie on my side, opposite the bars.

Chetnik, “Nedićevac” (member of Nedić‘s quisling army) and a Cominformist.

– Wait – Plavac (I gave him that nickname, then I kept that name all the time he was in prison, and he didn’t get angry, he looked like he was pleased that I was polite to him ) – I know you! Near the end of the war you were at Sima Dordjević security. I’ve seen you in the city.

– Unfortunately for me, I was at Sima’s; I was being chased, they say from Belgrade. I hardly stuck my head out, and that is the reason why I’m here now. I was accused by some woman that I killed a guy called Rca. Come on, please, did I kill anyone? In 1944 they said that I was some kind of main link between the Chetniks and the Germans, so I spent three years in jail in Russia, Ukraine, Belorussia, near Minsk! After some time, they said that I was not the link, it was the president’s cousin and they told me to go home. After three years. My wife was very clever and went with the children as a settler to the Vojvodina region, to Bačka Palanka, and I had a place to return to. The land which they gave her, she made into a cooperative – it was someone else’s before, so is now – but at least I got a job. I keep the stable in the labour cooperatives, and she got pregnant... somehow we were alive. And the kids are also well, one girl married while I was there and the other goes to cooking school. What kind of school, for cooks, is that why girls go to school, for cooking, I asked my wife. Well, you were in the USSR, she says, they also go to school there. Going to school? It’s as if I were the Minister of Education there, and I know what schools they have. No, I did not see that, you head of a woman, except for the stables and wooden houses of those of the collective farms and Soviet state farms, nothing else. She thinks I was there for a vacation…

He was talking about that so much that I could not get a chance to ask him to tell me something specific, how it looks for him and what is done in our cooperatives and what and how people live in Russian collective farms.

– Wait! – I eagerly interrupt him, explain to him what I want, and, feeling that we have achieved a certain atmosphere of intimacy, I say:155

– I wanted to hear first hand information. Because of the working cooperatives I’ve been here for over four months. The fact that they added being a supporter of the Cominform to my opposition to collectivisation was the less important question to me. It is important to me whether I am right that without a tractor or combine harvester no productive cooperatives should be established, is that not so?

From a talkative man he suddenly turned into a man who can be very patient and silent. First he looked at me for a long time. His facial features were slowly becoming clearer. The expression of his colourless eyes is as concerning as he is confronted with a puzzle that must be solved quickly and honestly from both sides. He looked at his fingers for a long time, then between his legs and said good-naturedly but firmly:

– Both you and I want to get out of here; so do not ask what the other does not want.…

Uncle Zeka and I got eighteen months each. He didn’t know why, but I did because of the peasant labour cooperatives.

In the decision in my case it was written that I and Jovan Svetic were harassing the party and the state, the p was captioned and the s was not. So what about Jovan Svetic, I asked the one I was signing with; he is almost ten years older than I am and he has his freedom.

– Think little boy, it will be clear to you, and he tries to strike a blow to my head. I skilfully dodged, which caused laughter from both the guards and the convicts. Those emboldened by my gesture and the conciliation of the authorities embodied in this UDBA (Yugoslav State Security Organization) official, hoping that from now on it will be good, almost everyone asked, who is the one who screwed you up, betrayed you, reported on you. I’m embarrassed to say that it was my son-in-law, so I mumble – someone. What did you talk about, a peasant from Milosevo asks, and I note in my mind: he suspects that we are talking about the peasant labour cooperatives and I keep silent.

I say out loud – due to the cooperatives I got 18 months. The peasant from Milosevo thinks I asked him, so he says.

Yes! How do you know that you got so much?

Now, I laughed too.

For two days and nights, the train stopped several times for a longer or shorter period. As the windows on the wagon were closed, we never knew where we were or where we were being taken, which was just another drop in the sea of uncertainty. Only by the voices and steps beside the wagons could we conclude whether it was a regular change of conductor (we immediately recognized the Bosnians and Dalmatians by their speech) or whether it was the taking on of new groups of convicts, though this was done in parallel, sometimes, and so, often inaccurately and with suspicion, we could sense the direction of movement.

The exception was Ogulin, which I didn’t know where it was until then, it looks like no other place, where we succeeded, when the companion left us, to open, in fact turn the metal shutters where the air enters for the horses, and read on the small railway station - Kolodvor-Ogulin.

In his knowledge of geography, the best was a fat man with a distinct belly, a Muslim whose name I did not remember, and who always, regardless of the presence of companions, drew attention to himself, saying that he had confessed everything and that he hoped to work there on the yard as a secretary of the Committee in Novi Pazar, and that he gave an example to others in the investigation – to be able to help re-educate faster and be released as soon as possible.

And now when he had read the name of the station, he immediately used it to explain to us that Ogulin was on the railway line to the Sea and that he knew from the highest ranks of the UDBA, as a man who was to be believed, last year he heard that the supporters of the Informburo were sent to the island and that in a few hours we would be in Bakar, where they would put us on board a ship, and that the smartest thing would be if we say there that we had changed our minds. He finished:

There was grunting, swearing and spitting, and he just went retreated to the corner of the wagon and waited for Bakar.

When we stopped at that little station late at night, everything was different. At first, when the train came in, it sounded like a chorus of ahhhhh! and then more clearly – gang, gang, traitors! Uh, gang! Uh, traitors! Down with Stalin’s gang! Long live comrade Tito! Tito – Tito’s party, and when it stopped, that chant that seemed to come from the sea was suddenly replaced by footsteps beside the wagon. Someone commanded – For transfer! For the door! – and again steps toward the next wagon. And certainly to the locomotive, because it took, or at least, it seemed to me, a long time.

And then one could hear from the back of the train the wagons were opened, with shouts and loud noises, then the train started a few metres back, and again was opened with noise. Now I thought I heard a moan, distant and terrifying, and I froze; again the train started and finally, leaving the wagon again.

At the next stop, we all clearly heard beating and moans. Damljanovic from Batocina, who was the loudest in condemning the man from Pazar, as if he admitted to himself:

– After this there will be anything! – It seems to me that he is referring to fraud, but I’m not sure, and the man from Milosev who is accused, like me, in connection with labour cooperatives, asks: Why are they beating me? No one answers him. This one beats, someone says there, it looks like the one from Gruza, with one piece of consciousness I determine. It’s dark in the wagon so we don’t see each other. Perhaps it is better, we can easily hide the misery on our face.

I register everything both outside and inside the wagon. I hear my heart pounding and in the nape of my neck. I firmly clamp the pots and slip Zecevic’s hand into the handcuff which hangs on my right hand, so that it does not cause them to beat us. And it calms me down. I hear the beating in the next wagon. Now it’s our turn. Let them beat, I am the youngest and I will endure. The Pazar man feels sorry for me, he says that I am the child, as does Uncle Zeka, and they do not know that this is my advantage, I have courage. And they open the door.

Gang out! Get out, traitors, what are you looking at me for? Two by two, how you are tied! and with every instruction, every order, proving their hatred of us, command... I cannot determine what the foulwords mean to them, one blow with a bat or at least with the other hand. They strike, like when an upset sheep needs to be pushed into the corral.

The next man in the T-shirt pauses:

Wait, gang, where did you go! and one beats the left, the other the right, they need to get into the bowels of the ship before you. Here, see how it is done. And there on the deck of this log-carved ship, which looks more like a barge than a naval vessel, a dozen or more people in T-shirts shout “Oooooruk—” and several of them suddenly push two bound prisoners into the bowel of the ship. So will you – a sailor tells me, who has already grabbed me by my muscle. There’s nowhere to go!?

And the system of insertion into Punat is flowing. With beatings, insults and strife.

The Pazar man is especially beaten for being obese. The deck is illuminated, so everything can be seen. Everything hangs on him, belly, tits, ass. He tries to protect his head and yells: I am for you.

“You’re for everyone, fuck Stalin,” someone replies, beating him even harder. I can see that everyone is staring at him, as the main detail on the stage (my theatrical experience), so I pull Uncle Zeka by the arm, pull him vigorously toward the entrance, and when I see a steep wooden staircase, I run towards him. And while our companions gathered and followed us, I was already on the fifth and sixth step and raced unsteadily downwards, dragging old Zečević (is this Zeka’s nickname?) behind.

But someone from the stairs with the navy T-shirts managed to push Zečević towards the abyss with a pole, and together we flew into the abyss of the bowel of the ship between 4 and 5 metres deep. Uncle Zeka staggered up a few more steps, but his hand slipped out of the handcuffs and he fell from the height of three metres onto the bodies of other prisoners, with their moans and howls. I stayed on the stairs, but not on my feet, I slid down the stairs on my back and holding the pot in my left hand, feeling that it gave me strength and composure.

Broken noses, bloody foreheads, streams of blood from the mouth, bruises from hitting the cheeks or neck down in the ship, and from above the hatch – new victims fly out and increase the size of the crowd to twenty square feet flat on the bottom of this hellish cauldron. Rarely does a couple manage to get up after a fall and lean to the side, to the slope. Most of them fall down and the crowd grows and grows. It looks like a thick layer of hay made of human bodies. They struggle to slip out, but the handcuffs make it impossible. Everyone is looking to take them off, but they just pack better.

In collective suffering, everyone has his own bloody path and thinks only of himself. I was terrified by the thought that I could have found myself there, if Uncle Zeka hadn’t pulled his hand out of his handcuff, pressed against the bodies of others, and now I was suffering with them. Like this, I was just staring at the suffocation in front of me, fearing for Uncle Zeka.

The T-shirts played the role of thugs well, as the price for freedom. So well that they would be envied by every director of scenes in which the enslaved should be brought to naught, dehumanised beyond recognition. Everyone tried to be as ruthless and soulless as possible, thus showing that they had genuinely opted for the Party line. Individual opposition to their bestiality is real nonsense, and yet it is constantly repeated, so the militia and UDBA in civilian clothes (where they came from, when I was upstairs I had not noticed them), came to help them. Now, this seems to be the case. They all follow a physical and verbal duel. It is time to try get Uncle Zeka out. He doesn’t bother with the handcuffs; he can get out of the crowd.

You betrayed the people and the party to Vujosevic, where’s your cheek, fuck Stalin!

Shut up, pagan Chetniks, you betrayed Stanisic (and you talk about cheek), Tito’s nit!

Well, here you are, hero, here you are - and the bar hits, but it breaks, so others jump in to help.

Hit, Knezevic, hit the bound man, you’ve been hiding from free man, you bastard Montenegrin... it barely reaches my ears because I have already found Uncle Zeka and skipping over others I moved into the still uncrowded bow where, it seemed to me, it would be safer to observe our own fate. Once again the crowd grew well, and then the anchors were raised, the engine roared louder and the ship began to slowly shake.

At one moment there was no one on that flat plateau (there were no horrible crowds). It remained that way until the morning, and I wondered if someone had ordered it, or was it superstition or something else?

At dawn when someone turned off the lights, when 550 prisoners leaned their heads on the trough gutter, and silently tormented their thoughts, so they looked more theatrical than Shakespeare’s losers in Macbeth, not even on a flat plateau!? In relation to the overcrowded bodies all around it seemed icily desolate. Ice in the middle of summer, June 28? A shiver runs down my spine. Is there something here? Something is not clear here!

I took out the last pieces of meat of the pots and ate them, on which nan-Lenka poured fried fat. Uncle Zeka was amazed that I could eat, and I explained to him that one of my grandfathers, on the sideline, when Bulgarians put him in front of rifle barrels in the Jedrene, asked as fulfilment of his last wish to allow him to eat soldier’s bread. And he ate it.

I also ate the rest of my mother’s meat, but the empty surface still bothers me and I try to make it some kind of prophecy. And I failed.

It was all clear when Uncle Zeka and I were the last to leave the ship. Unlike us, crumpled and smeared with blood and vomit, two men in bright tropical pants and white shirts took off our handcuffs, which, like the people last night, made a heap, basically a metre wide. Our handcuffs somehow rolled off the top and reached a pool of blood. I looked away and the whole area was covered with many puddles, some already dry.

Those who handcuffed them didn’t mind. They got used to it. One gets used to everything. And outside the ship you can hear:

Gang, gang, gang!

If it wasn’t for a wave of threats - the gang! gang! and raised fists towards us, if we weren’t what we were, the milky whiteness of the Adriatic morning sun would surely lead us into the shade of the hotel’s outstretched tables (I saw Opatija, I only knew this city on the coast) to observe the game of refraction of water mirrors, which we saw next to Punat on the pier Goli Otok now.

What irony or fate that on the day of a religious holiday – when I was a junior high school student, and I received testimonies and participated in school festivals dedicated to the Kosovo battle – I find here, according to all that was heard, seen and perceived clearly, in a truly bloody way, which Plavac predicted to me so successfully in the cards. Somehow, by mere chance, I happily passed Punat, but one is not lucky every day. If teacher Milen’s prediction are correct, that we are just waiting here for a long and terrifying beating and that we need to calm down and avoid walking under the beating, then fuck Golgotha and the religious holiday and yourself and the meaning of everything. I guess I exist? If I have to sing songs, I don’t have to sing the right way! I can have my own sound of my voice, not capture the right tone and in that I survive with my own self. Let’s get used to it! I will not. How can I look Grandpa Costa in the eye later? Is there another way? Adjustment should be used by teacher Milen, it suits him. I will check myself both for the religious holiday and for them, so if it is the bloody way, let it be!

I am already on the quay, between two rows of people, facing each other; everyone is shouting: Gang! Traitors! – beating us with their fists, kicking us with their foot. On the right next to a fountain and a strange, huge barrel (I thought the Romans had erected a monument to wine, one can certainly raise grapes on this rocky ground, but it I am not sure) on the rocky slope, for a moment, I see a dozen people, solemnly looking, closely watching the struggle of us going through this machine and trying to protect our heads and those in the front rows who are just targeting it.

They are watching a real struggle for life and death, as in the arenas of Rome – something in me says.

Don’t guess, look how long the line is! At the exit from the quay it turns the right, it is more than two hundred metres.

Well, let them be, look at this: now they are hitting us on our shoulders and buttocks, shouting even more - their hands are raised as if they are going to crush us, and the blow is like Aunt Julka’s when she beats children? These thugs in soldier suits are behaving strangely?!

Army suits, don’t hit! Where did you get that? – something in me will say again.

Can’t you see the summer blouse short. It’s summer, that’s why they are in shorts. And you know you don’t exist anymore, now you found me staggering, I didn’t even see that we had crossed your two hundred metres.

Look to the left, everyone there strips naked, to the skin. Some are packing their suits, other are writing and they are all beating, like the ones on the quay!

What are you wondering about? Here, someone is solemnly observing them. Where is Uncle Zeka, the wretch, didn’t he already capitulate?

Stankovic! – a joyful person recognized me, and in an instant turned a joyful face to the executioner and cried out: Comrades, Jagosevac gang! – And to my surprise – Petrovic, fried and swallowed, clashed simultaneously in the air with the order: Let’s teach the gang to be a gang! And I had such an outburst of anger that I could feel the blow to my ribs and it felt like a blow to my brain and I knew that our people were beating us. Ours? What happened to us? What do I have to do with him? With them.

Undress, gang, what are you looking at? I was warned by a petty and miserable man, black like an African teacher named Djilas and with a pole he punched me in the ribs so that he immediately tore my shirt off and made such a cut to my ribs that the whole left side of my shirt was soaked in blood in a few seconds. Another teacher, called Era, came to his aid (I knew them all, Aleksic was there too – I think), and picking me up from behind by the shoulders of my shirt, he removed it at one stroke, I don’t see if it was ripped off, he did the same incredibly skilfully with the shirt, and threw it at Petrovic’s feet as well, and he began to collect them and put them in the same place.

Someone pushed me on to a sharp hollow stone, I kept my hands from falling on my back, but I felt a terrible pain in my palms and thighs so that it reached my scalp. When I turned aside to try to take out the thorn left in my flesh, the one who pushed me got into my face and ordered:

Take off everything! and pants, gang!

I don’t know this one, what’s wrong with him? and he grabbed my legs and wanted to take off the yellow sandals which I was wearing. I see he had some ugly shoes, so I understood that as a snatch and pushed him very energetically under the blows my back, neck and head, running away where everyone is naked.

There, on a sloping hill (to the left as I noticed some low buildings), a line of prisoners behind the wire was waiting for us.

Gang! Traitors! More loud voices in front of us. Where are you, Pravica, Professor, to see how your Aristotle and his laws of logic fall into the water.

These people in shorts with skinny legs without thighs and leaves, waving their hands without muscle or flesh and watching with inflamed eyes – they beat just as bitterly and as disdainfully as those ones before. Look at the bald man, he hits everybody with a board, after every blow he seeks support for his wrongdoing and he is angry that they do not hold the victim while he beats them, but they run away from him. They run away from Safa (like Safa is a plague)! Ha-ha! and he rushes out in front of me to wait for me. I guess he thought I’d be scared and stop for him to hit me with the board, but I figured it would be better for me if I tore at him, in a moment I did it. I really got a blow to the left temple and a good shot with the board, but not the way he planned, with his own hand; also I knocked him down with general laughter, which I heard behind me, because I was running further, fearing that someone would stop me for a misdemeanour and bring me back to that bandit.I felt the laughter was from those beside him for the revenge they had to admire him.

I ran further through many blows. They slapped me with fists on my chest, back, and butt. Each blow was a pain in itself that would have made a normal person wonder at other times: what did I do to him? that he should endure it or return it in the same measure? But now, all the blows were for me, at the same time the expectation of those who are wandering consciousness and carrying death, so like a wounded beast, I resolved to do everything. I opened my, searching, with my eyes and ears for special bandits who express their criminal nature with wooden objects. In difficult times, dangerous people appear – they whisper in my head and I shake my head with my hands and hear:

Well done Mostar, that’s how the gang hits, hit it, hold the gang!

I know that I have to see or else I will go from this hell to the abyss of death, from which there will be no return. I don’t know if I prayed to God, but I know I thought: God, give me my sight back! I began more energetically to resist with my elbows the bandits who tossed me like a ball from side to side. Actually, I know. The inner defiance restored my sight. Spite made me see. When I heard: people from Sarajevo here, no mercy! I realized that they were competing in their in humanity. Well, Njegos, Njegos, you well understand that they have changed their faith, as if I were responding, and this observation encouraged me..With such power and pace, I rushed forward, hoping for an end and a rescue, that every two metres I bypassed the other convicts and thus successfully avoided side blows.

I ran so fast that not everyone managed to hit me. Sometimes it was a direct hit from the front, as would be said in boxing, but most could only slap me on the back or put their hand on my shoulders. And so I reached the wire gate that was on a small hill in relation to the whole camp and the barracks in it. Suddenly, there was a path in front of me that I still needed to go through. The path of surprise and true Golgotha on the Religious Holiday.

From the gate of the Old Wire, as it was later commonly known, one can almost cover the entire camp with one glance. It will be replaced by a new, bigger one more able to accept the increasing influx of convicts. I am not sure what its dimensions are, because in the five to six months that I stayed in it until I moved to Draga, to a new camp at Goli, I never got a chance to visit it and confirm or correct my first estimate. I remember that I was scared when I saw the picture in front of me.

In the area to the left of the gate, where several thousand people could be lined up, a beating order was swirling and, as would be seen later, to prevent anyone from getting to their destination. He meandered by starting from the gate to the left of the entire width of the camp, from a makeshift stage (they were standing on it, I immediately understood, as on the honorary tribune of the UDBA officer) and went all the way to the first shack (as I saw later there was a kitchen and some common rooms) that was more than a hundred metres away, and again he went back and forth, which meant that every prisoner had to go about thirty times the width of the camp.

What a horror and hell was before my eyes, I can now better understand if I think of the 550 poor newcomers, in lines: In odd rows, for a moment I can see from the back already bloody and bumpy heads, naked as when they were born from their mother, back and ass, trying to protect their heads from blows and moving away from me. And in even rows (every other) mutilated faces, bloody naked and white breasts, with relentless blows on the already wounded body as they move towards me.

If, besides being bloodied and beaten up, I saw several thousand hands raised to ward off the blows and heard from the throats a deafening yell and shriek, then one can more fully understand the panic and loss of bearing of each of us. With my own eyes, more precisely one eye, the other was already swollen, I couldn’t believe it. Intermittent thoughts came at me. Well this is a gathering of nudity, a spectacle of bloody bodies for demons!!!Can they enjoy blood and terror?! It turns out that everything was exactly as bad and evil as Milen said!

How could one survive? How? My grandfather Costa prayed for help to God and St. Nicholas. Saint Nicholas? I remembered how, at the last celebration of St. Nicholas, I brought not just the whole SKOJ group, but the whole class, so my neighbour Mika gave them a pot of twenty kilos to drink and I prayed in my mind, and He answered me from the picture in the guest room, from the east corner, where He always stood. Defend yourself a little, defend yourself! I staggered (as one of the 550 newcomers, to go through the blows like any of them) assisted by St. Nicholas and resolved to seek, with all my might and power, the possibility of preserving, rescuing, extending (not the right word to my mind) a fucking, naked life.

I relied on the fitness I maintained by running around the Jagosevac prison, the endurance of a village child and my grandfather’s perseverance, which I must not fail today to celebrate a Religious Celebration. He would never forgive me.

In my head I constantly had that picture of the agony of suffering in the even and odd rows. I realized. Almost everyone from Punat, white and bloody, was within that square kilometre. Between the barracks and if the hose was winding there, hardly any of us newcomers arrived. It was clear to me that the ranks of the victims were thinned above, that it was difficult to get there on one’s own feet. I did not want to believe that a large number were behaving as teacher Milen has planned, and what is happening to me and the ones that I manage to get past, I concluded that people were beaten, knocked unconscious or killed. And indeed, after going a few rows from right to left and vice versa, looking backward, I noticed the bloody and motionless bodies of the beaten, unconscious, or dead side by side, God only knows.

And the more rows I passed through, a lot of people were thrown out of this bloody orgy, and fewer who were probably just like me hoping to somehow manage to at least keep on their feet to the end. I wanted to run that bloody marathon, to bring my cross of innocence through this stonemason, as the righteous did according to biblical tradition at Golgotha. Some things only happen once.

I very successfully passed through the groups that beat me heartlessly. I had already elaborated tactics of breaking through. I increasingly used my observation of what was happening to the person in front of me. I forgot that I could only see through one eye and I believed that I could endure hundreds and thousands of ordinary slaps and clapping, if only I could save myself from being hit straight in the head or kicked in the testicles. That’s why my right hand was always in front of my head and my left was always down. At the turns, more and more lined up, mostly on their backs, out of order.

When I crossed the half-turn and thinning at my feet were ten, fifteen or twenty metres apart, recognizing the groups who were unacceptably beaten was easier, somehow clearer, so it gave me hope that I would be able to get to the end of the queue and I ran even faster. But maybe my attention also weakened, or those I had managed to push away in the previous row were waiting for me in the next row, in the row where I was now running; I suddenly got such a fist in the arcade of the remaining eye that I turned to the left completely dazed, wanting to get away; I went back.

Someone grabbed my hair, cursed my bandit mother, turned me to the left circle again, and with a kick in the butt (actually how I was at a gap, in the intimate part, hooking my left testicle), I fell on a rock. But, though completely stunned by the blow to the head, though terrified by the unbearable pain in my groin and thinking that the fire coming from there and radiating in my brain was the way to compare me to those on the turns, the path to nothingness and death, or the terrible fear that it would happen if I did not resist, a new strength was born in me and a desire not to give up and to endure; I jumped up and started shouting with all my might: I can, let me go, I want to run, I want to run! I intuitively felt that I should not say: I will not die.

I do not know how I looked or how those who beat me looked, because blood poured into my other eye, but at one point I felt that they had withdrawn, that no one was touching me, and that it was only up to me whether I could do without my eyes and continue to run through the line. I reached out and began to grope now completely in a dark tunnel. Shout noise – traitors gang, gang! It was still unbearable and prevented me from navigating by touch. It made me panic so much that I ran to left, to right, and the bandits started hitting and pushing me in the required direction of movement until I fell again, that is, I hit a bandit with my head and he collapsed, with my hands on a broken stone. And immediately he got up again.

That third fall made my hands bleed even more, but for a moment it partially improved the sight in my right eye, because I wiped the blood that flowed over my eyes in jets. It covered not only the eye and the entire right side of my face, but also dripped down to my chest and knees, more precisely, I wiped my eye with a blow to the head on the shirt of someone in the row and I hoped that I would be able to regain my previous control over happening among the thugs and find at least an eye of light for salvation in this killing tunnel. My hope was short, because my blood, my blood, had completely closed my eye. I started, lost, to squeeze the wounds and bruises all over my eye, but I could not even partially open it, and the prisoners howled, howled and pushed me forward. However, with my thumb and forefinger I parted the swelling above and below the eye, the blood was flowing and I could not do it. Finally the idea came to me to try to separate the swelling in my left eye, where there seemed to be no more blood.

I don’t know how long that continued. Maybe for a few moments? Maybe for half an hour? It seemed like an eternity to me! I couldn’t tell what was scarier: the flames in my eyes, head and body, the noise and blows on my shoulders, chest, arms, and my whole body, or the hot June sun that burned bare wounds, bathed in sweat and blood. They burned and bit just like the slave life I was going through.

As soon as the blows to my body became the dominant pain, fearful of those excruciating and uncontrollable ones, I again touched my right eye and I was scared by the size of the swelling, then felt the left one and found that my head had swelled incredibly. Fortunately, I thought, they were no longer beating me on the head. The blows landed mostly on the shoulders and buttocks. I try again with my right eye, I could not touch my left one anymore. I also wiped it with a bloody hand and made an opening, probably like a needle stitch, through which I could see ten metres a metre wide.

My sight was blurry, but it allowed me to keep my direction; the crowd didn’t toss me around like a ball. For now, I could only manage to run and thus reduce the effects of the blows. At least I could, I participated in the last high school marathon. I felt myself moving uphill. At the same time, I noticed that I have not overtaken anyone for a long time and if I ran as fast as I could, there was no 180-degree turn. I realized that I had crossed the moving snakes on a large plateau in front of the stage and I was moving between the barracks, at the end of the camp. I tried to register it with my one metre field of vision, but in vain. Suddenly they started shouting:

Look, the gang is still on its feet! Hit the gang! You won’t! Stop the gang!

Neither will you! I said to myself, when I got here, I would reach those hundred, two hundred metres, and run fast, my legs were good and I went to the finish of the race as if I had the most dangerous competitor behind me. And I could already see a barrack in front of me and I realised that it is the last barrack in the camp, but I also saw how as before a wire, there was a group of bandits in front of me like a wall and to block my path:

You come? He asked first.

So how did you get there, gang? Who smuggled you in here? answered the other.

Did you see? Let the gang come here, go through the whole line and get on their feet!! said someone behind my back.

He can’t do it! That’s why we’re here! the first one said and surrounded me, going in a circle around me and asked what traitor it was who endured several thousand blows and got on his feet. True, I was bloody and swollen, but I was on my feet in this kind of heat, at the bottom and over 50 degrees. They walked around me waiting for someone to strike first, then to classify me among the others, all stacked around like dead bodies.

Come on, political flyovers, who’s going first? asked one in a white coat and I noticed that half of them were in white, like paramedics.

You know who starts and who ends – answered another white coat.

At that moment, a middle-aged, self-styled man in a white coat appeared at the door of the barrack and asked:

What’s in there?

Doctor, he arrived on his feet, responded the one that I first noticed was in a white coat.

Got this far? That is strange. Don’t touch him! After all, he is yours to heal. Come on, break up!

What about me? Released as if in a terrible judgment, I lay down on a broken stone, content to be alive, to endure, and to know about the Religious Holiday. No matter that I couldn’t see. I’ll get it back, I guess. When? We’ll see.

A hot stone burned me, my wounds burned, my head was like a pumpkin, but I was mostly thirsty.

At the moment when I collapsed (because of such a sudden happy ending), there was such a gathering of old convicts around me, that I was scared that someone would stab at any of my wounds and stood up to join the naked ones, the newcomers. I was looking for them with my field of vision of one metre, but I was cut by the incredible density of these blackened and thin people, and I didn’t see them. I saw the rendering of the unconscious. Those who beat and fainted were now wearing them, pushing the consecrated ones in front of them with a shout and a curse:

Follow me! He’s in front, I’m behind him, and the two behind me, as if I’m being escorted. I thought in the barrack. When we arrived at the space of six in front of the compared patients about twenty metres away, my leader turned to me and threatened with commands:

Bow your head, gang! Unable to understand what he wanted from me, he again commanded:

Get your head down! He grabbed my hair with his hand, and the two of them at the back joined him in this kind of humiliation with both a shout and a hand pulling my hair down. The chasm was so sudden and I didn’t understand what they were doing.

Keep your head down! Even lower, gang!

When they showed me that they thought it was good, still holding my hair, they said:

Don’t move! and they went off, I looked toward the first patient with my head bowed. One grabbed him by the legs, the other by the arms and the third by the waist. They threw him over my bulging and swollen shoulders, and again that guide ordered:

Follow me, gang! The gang is carrying a gang! Forward gang!

My wounds burned to a fury, but I knew I would endure. Opposition was impossible. I would suffer and bear it. It’s better to carry other people than for them to carry me. So three or four times, and next time at Seven – breaking through the crowd and following my commanders, I saw Uncle Zeka, sitting in line with the other newcomers, bending their heads all the way between their legs. I knew him by his forehead and nose, and just in case, I paused beside him, and with my narrow field of view, like through binoculars drawn to his right hand, and saw that it was Uncle Zeka. He didn’t have half a hand and a thumb.

What are they doing to them? Several old prisoners went behind the back of the newcomers, where Uncle Zeka was, grabbing the recruits by the nape of the neck, and with all their power they pressed their head against their dick, shouting:

Lower your head, gang! Lower, gang! Even lower!

One of these hooligans, Uncle Zeka’s neighbour, was pressing, as if he wanted to break his neck, and shouted:

Get your ass up, get your ass up, gang, you gotta watch! You betrayed Tito, you betrayed the country, gang!

I realized the danger that was threatening Uncle Zeka; he was too old to endure this, and no matter how much my pursuers were rushing me, I used their rush and timed the fall between Uncle Zeka and the torment of torture, to divert the torturer’s attention to the unconscious person whom I was carrying and to myself, hoping that my pursuers were less evil than the one I saw threatening Uncle Zeka and that their mistreatment would only be in words. So I simulated the fall. The unconscious one fell over the tormentor and the tortured, and I fell on Uncle Zeka. Given the crowd that was outside naked in a sitting position with bowed heads, the fall seemed logical. The old convicts sought (I realized much later) those whom they hoped would have to come to the Naked Island, Goli Otok, whether they betrayed them or feared for their fate for other reasons. Most of the old convicts actually feared that the newcomer’s confessions would complicate their own position on the island, so, acting with contempt and hatred, they went around the barracks to check among the newcomers whether there was a danger to them. So they helped me realize the plan.

I was not aware, I was afraid that they did not read me. I started shouting, while I was in decline, I overcame the noise of this terrifying fair:

I am blind! I began to shout, it was an expression of pain, despair, longing, fear, inner heat and thirst, revolt, rebellion, supplication, longing, sadness and everything else. I had to persuade my companions, but more to report to Uncle Zeka, and through him, I felt, crying out to my father, my mother, mine, I had to speak because I exploded. I had achieved nothing. My companions, the leader of the troika who walked forward as I, beaten by a rock under a load of seventy kilos, ordered in the same tone:

Stay there! when you’re blind! Blind! You didn’t watch?

That torturer, I knew him by voice, briefly ordered:

Sit here!

And when I sat down next to Uncle Zeka, I easily touched his ribs with my elbow and whispered:

Are you there Uncle Zeka?

He answered me with a question:

And who are you? I do not know you. And he again bent his head between his legs...

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