—
She is one with the grass.
The blood that ran through her, deemed impure.
—
It stood three metres tall.
Stretching 1350 metres to the sunrise,
and chased the sun down for 290.
—
It was south-west of the lake,
where God’s eyes wept,
and even death’s heart broke.
She followed her mother’s feet,
for all the fathers and brothers had left.
She cried for him,
to place her on his shoulders,
so her blistered feet could rest.
She held onto her mothers torn pyjamas as she entered the gates.
—
It didn’t take long before her mother was gone,
her hand ripped from her mothers shirt, she was shoved to the mud.
The crowd, her mother included, thrown into boats.
On that crisp autumns day, the Sava bled red.
“She will be back”, one woman assured her,
But as nightfall fell on those three metre gates,
All that returned was a soldier and a mace.
—
She was hidden in the attic with the other young souls,
some as young as fourteen, some as innocent as four.
Feed by her neighbours with the very little that they had,
it was four hundred children to a few loaves of bread.
—
They called themselves the Ustasa.
Although she did not know the extent of the evil that surrounded her,
she knew God was not in their presence when they wore clothes made of rubber.
It was one muddy morning, from a crack in the attic,
she watched a man made of skin and bones carry his brother,
as he staggered through the dirt, she watched his legs quake.
But the slim-figured crack did not cover the horror,
a man, no longer a man, his skull collapsed onto his brain,
her soul so repulsed, her eyes turned away.
—
The attic made time move slower.
Where she spent, not days not weeks but months.
The men dressed in rubber had found them,
but they lived to see another day.
They made teachers out of the prisoners,
she read, she wrote, she sang.
For a moment in time, a slither of normality began.
—
It was one sinister morning in 1942,
all the children were herded out of the classrooms.
Lined up one by one,
she was striped of her clothes,
and with the stroke of a knife, she become one with the earth.
—
It’s where Una and Sava meet, stands a single flower made of stone and an old steam train.
Now, only to be remembered by those who know,
those very few, who knew of the smoke,
and the sounds of maces, knives and bloody blows.
Where the ground is stained and nothing grows,
she was one of nearly a million,
among those Gypsies, Serbs and Jews,
of the top three, and no one knew.
–
—
T