Kragujevac Massacre/Bloody Fairytale
Today, October 21st, is the Day of Remembrance of the Serbian Victims of World War II in honor of the several thousand civillian victims who were executed by the Wehrmacht on this day in 1941, in reprisal for insurgent attacks in Gornji Milanovac.
Between 2,778 and 2,794 men and boys, ages ranging from 12 to 65, were shot in Kragujevac as retribution for 10 German soldiers killed and 26 more wounded by partisan forces. This was done in accordance with a ratio devised by the occupator where 100 hostages would be executed for every dead German soldier, and another 50 added to the body count for every soldier injured by guerillas.
The monument above, by sculptor Miodrag Živković, located in Šumarice Memorial Park, is dedicated in particular to the several hundred students and their teachers who lost their lives on that day. Entire classes of teenagers had their names called and marched from their classrooms to face a firing squad together.
Here’s how poet Desanka Maksimović described the event in a poem that’s an essential part of every Serbian school’s curriculum to this day:
A Bloody Fairytale
It came to pass in a land of peasants in the hills of the Balkans a martyr’s death was suffered by a troop of pupils in just twenty four hours.
They were all born in the same year their timetables were the same shape and size they were all taken to the same ceremonies ‘gainst the same maladies immunized and all died on the same day.
It came to pass in a land of peasants in the hills of the Balkans a martyr’s death was suffered by a troop of pupils in just twenty four hours.
And just fifty five minutes before the deathly toll the tiny troop was sitting at their desks in their rows wrestling with the brain exercises: from two stations leave two trains… and so it goes. Their thoughts were full of the same mysteries and senselessly scattered around the benches were A’s and D’s.
Handfuls of shared dreams and shared secrets patriotic and romantic were clenched tightly in their fists. And each imagined that for a long time, for a really long time they would run ‘neath the canopy blue ‘til all the exercises in the world were through.
It came to pass in a land of peasants in the hills of the Balkans a martyr’s death was suffered by a troop of pupils in just twenty four hours.
Entire rows of boys took each other by the hand and from the last class at school went calmly to their executions as if death was nothing. Entire rows of friends in the same instant rose to an eternal dwelling.
(Translated by Pavle Ninković)
Another monument to the student martyrs that still stands in October in Kragujevac Memorial Park / Šumarice Memorial Park is a stone engraved with a quote attributed to school principal Miloje Pavlović. His final words, said defiantly to his executioner, are remembered as being “Go ahead and shoot. I’m teaching my class as we speak.”
