Katherine and Alice dejectedly traipsed up the steep main street of Herceg Novi in the company of the other British refugees to await capture by enemy troops. They dragged their few possessions into the abandoned Hotel Boka and laid claim to a corner. Late that afternoon, as they all sat wearily on the wisteria-covered terrace, the drivers of four motorcycles equipped with machine guns raced through the main street, looked up at the British party in amazement and drove on. They were wearing the green uniforms and plumed helmets of the Italian army.47 “[We were] only thankful it was not the Germans,” said Katherine in relief. The next morning, 18th April, a motorized unit arrived at the hotel to take them prisoner.48
For days the Italians imprisoned them within the confines of the hotel. Although they became increasingly “emboldened and arrogant” as their numbers in the town rose, by and large they did not mistreat their prisoners, thanks partly to the efforts of David Edge, an opera singer among the British. His Italian arias delighted their captors. “Edge will always sing us out of trouble,” commented the Minister.49 But suddenly, in the middle of their tenth night in captivity, they were wakened abruptly. “Pack your things,” the Italians ordered impatiently. “We’re taking you to Durazzo.” At noon thirteen buses pulled up outside the hotel to take them to the Albanian port where, a quarter of a century before, the starving remnants of the Serbian army had gathered.50
On the evening of 25th April the bus carrying Katherine and Alice finally pulled up outside the Albergo dei Dogi, the swankiest hotel in Durazzo. The semicircular building was relatively new. It had real beds. It also had running water and baths – at least for two days, until the water supply gave out. From one side of its flat roof the British prisoners could look over the town, whose Ottoman-style architecture was swathed with Italian slogans and posters depicting the slightly comical features of Mussolini. From the other, they could look across to the Adriatic where, only fifty yards away, the town’s main drain pumped effluent into the sea. “Added to this horror,” shuddered Flavia, “the inhabitants of the place, through force of suggestion… used that spot quite openly as a public convenience.” As the wind blew the contaminated air back at them, they would dash downstairs to the lounge with handkerchiefs across their mouths, only for “clouds” of flies to descend upon them. When, after a week, news arrived that they were to be taken to Italy, it came as a relief to all. Katherine was only too pleased to escape the town of “little water, hot weather, flies, mud flats and smells”, for whatever awaited her there.51
With unambiguous menace, the green-grey uniformed Gestapo reached the capital shortly after the Wehrmacht. “The first thing [they] did was to hang three men from lamp posts on the Terrazia, the main street, one Sunday morning,” said Flora. “They advertised their intention [to terrorize the Serbs], so that all could see.” They set up their headquarters on the Terazije and a prison just off it, and began rounding up those they designated as enemies, including communists, intellectuals, Jews, Gypsies, Serbian politicians, criminals and those with links to the Allies. “The Gestapo by now were arresting people right and left; even taking them from their beds at night,” she added. “These people simply disappeared, and one heard no more of them.”52
On 24th June Flora went about her business as usual, still reeling from the news that Germany had declared war on the Soviet Union two days earlier, an event she considered important enough to record in capital letters in her diary. She had much weighing heavily on her mind. They were nearly out of wood for the fire, the price of food was soaring and she had had to visit Karl Rankin – the American legation’s commercial attaché – for what she called the “dole”. More worrying still, Yurie’s health had taken a turn for the worse. That morning she sat to write a long letter to her sister Fanny in England, which she then had smuggled out of the country. “I am very well,” she told her,
and I wish I could say the same of Yurie, but he is really very ill, very high blood pressure, which affects his heart and lungs, and doesn’t sleep well, at least not consecutively, though a good deal off and on and in the daytime… He has his bed in the sitting room, which is lighter and more cheery, and he can get up and sit on the porch and wander about a bit, but is too weak to walk far. He has been like this before and got quite well apparently last month, and used to go down town and all, and then it all came back again, but I hope and trust it will pass off again soon. He won’t hear of going into a clinic, and really they did him more harm than good last time as he was starved. He is quite cheerful, and lies and reads most of the day.53
That evening, Flora had tucked him up in bed, as usual, in the sitting room. The streets had emptied when dusk fell, as the inhabitants rushed indoors to comply with the curfew. Only the occasional barking of dogs or the crack of a rifle could be heard to break the silence.54 The day had been hot and humid and it promised to be an equally warm night, so she prepared to sleep on the porch where, at least, a breeze would reach her. Around ten o’clock, just as she was climbing into bed, the doorbell rang. Startled, she leapt up and ran to answer it. “Who’s there?” she demanded. “Never mind who’s here, open the gate,” barked the reply. “I certainly won’t, unless you tell me who you are. Besides, my dog will fly at you,” exclaimed Flora as she struggled to hold on to Pat, who was growling ferociously. “Gestapo,” answered the abrupt voice.
She pulled open the gate to two officers. “We’re going to search the house,” they informed her. “What’s going on?” asked Yurie when he saw them. “Gestapo,” she said simply. They walked from room to room, turned out her desk and confiscated a suitcase full of old letters and papers. Then they waited patiently while Flora dressed in the bathroom. “Come with us,” they ordered them both. “They had been so correct and polite that it never dawned on me that they were taking my husband and myself to prison,” recalled Flora. “So we took nothing with us, not even a blanket. I protested that my husband was very ill, but I suppose they didn’t believe it. They would not hear of taking me only. We certainly must have been the most naive pair they had ever arrested. When we were in their car I said I hoped we would not have to walk back as my husband had a very bad heart and could not walk far. The officer looked at me queerly and said no, we would not have to walk back.”55
Flora and Yurie were driven to the centre of town, past the shadowy ruins of numerous buildings. At the Terazije the car turned off onto Bulevar Kralja Aleksandra and through a dark archway. It came to a stop in a small courtyard. In the dim light Flora and Yurie were escorted to a thick iron door, set in a featureless wall. They waited momentarily while, on the other side, they could hear the rattle of keys and the sudden heavy shot of a bolt. Fully expecting to be beaten mercilessly as soon as the door clanged shut behind them, Flora was momentarily relieved when they were instead led across an enclosed, cobbled yard, through another door, into a stone passage, past a cell, and up a short flight of steps. There they were directed into an office that contained two beds pushed up against a wall, some filing cabinets, a washbasin and a central desk.56 They sat while officials checked their details before ordering them to empty their pockets and Flora her handbag. Their money was counted out before them and placed with the rest of their possessions in two large envelopes, which were then sealed. Then two “grinning” guards stepped forward and gestured Flora and Yurie to stand. They patted down Yurie half-heartedly before leading them out. One took Yurie up another flight of stairs to a cell, while the other took Flora back to the cell that they had passed on the way to the office, unlocked it and shoved her in.
Even before the first incarnation of the Yugoslav experiment had emerged from the wreckage of post-1918 Europe, the signs had been there that all would not end well. “The Serbs are denying flatly the Croatian right to a name, a history and even a language,” declared a Croatian spokesman before the international press in 1916. “[They] expect and are working through the diplomatic channels of the Entente powers to create a Greater Serbia. If they succeed, peace in that section of Europe
will never be permanent; for the Serbs are not likely to diminish or quench the flames of their religious or national fanaticism.”57 Twenty-five years later, Serbian heavy-handedness and fanatical Croat nationalism had converted such brooding resentment into unbridled fury. The German invasion allowed them to unleash it on the two million Serbs living within the borders of the fascist “Independent State of Croatia”.58
Two days after the State had been declared under the leadership of Ante Pavelić, the Ustaše began putting their plans into action to end Serb hegemony once and for all. In a campaign that combined genocide, forced conversions to Catholicism and ethnic cleansing, the Ustaše, with the assistance of units of equally merciless Bosnian Muslims, threw Serbs into concentration camps, burned their villages, massacred the inhabitants, destroyed churches and executed the Orthodox clergy. In an orgy of violence they conducted a campaign so savage that even the Germans stepped in to try to restrain them, in the knowledge that they were driving recruits into the resistance movements that were forming as a result of the German invasion.59 According to the Simon Wiesenthal Center half a million Serbs were killed during this period. History would repeat itself half a century later. The names of the towns and villages where the Ustaše round-ups and atrocities occurred – such as Sarajevo, Vukovar, Banja Luka and Mostar – would appear in the press once again, but in the context of the Serbs acting as equally savage perpetrators. The victims had again become the aggressors.
There were two routes of escape for the Serbs. They could “go to the hills” to join the resistance movements or find sanctuary in the Italian-occupied zones. The Italians who twenty-five years previously had allowed them to die of neglect on the Albanian coast, now tried to come to their rescue. “The Italians again and again tried to intervene to save the defenceless Serbs and often succeeded,” commented an American observer.60 They also allowed them to travel north towards Split, a port that was solely under Italian control. Other targets of fascist hatred, including Jews, also found refuge in the Italian zones. The Jewish population of Split, three hundred before the war, expanded almost overnight to three thousand. Almost all survived the war. In another region, where the Italians shared authority with the Ustaše, the Italian commander refused them permission to round up the Jews. To do so would have been “incompatible with the honour of the Italian Army”, he is reputed to have said.61
The Jews of Serbia had no such route of escape. In “the most comprehensive campaign of annihilation throughout Axis-occupied Europe”, the Germans were assisted by the Volksdeutsche and the supporters of the Zbor, the Serbian fascist party, although their anti-Semitism reflected no widespread local prejudice.62 The men were rounded up in the summer of 1941. Most were shot by soldiers of the Wehrmacht, the German regular army. In December six thousand women and children were interned in the Exhibition Grounds in Zemun, along the Sava River. They were housed in buildings of glass and concrete, where they died of starvation and exposure. One of the victims was Ruža Vinaver, who had befriended Flora and Emily in Valjevo in early 1915.63 Those who survived such imprisonment were murdered in the early incarnations of gas chambers. In late 1942, having completed their genocidal mission in Serbia, the Germans closed their “Jewish Section” office in Belgrade.64
War crimes of staggering enormity were also carried out by the Germans against the Serbs in reaction to their insurrection. Fuelled by a tradition of armed uprising and the fierce, proud nationalism of the heroic sort that led to their victory in the First World War, only the Serbs – of all the peoples in Europe to suffer German occupation – rose up against their oppressors from the very beginning.65 They flocked to two organizations – the royalist Četniks, who were led by a former Serbian Colonel, Draža Mihailović, and the communist Partisans, headed by Josip Broz, known as “Tito”. In a remarkable campaign in August and September 1941 they liberated large areas of Serbian territory from German occupation.
The armed opposition took the Germans by surprise. In the belief that his motorized forces had cowed the recalcitrant Serbs, Hitler had quickly redeployed the forces that he had used to defeat their army for the invasion of Russia. To compensate for his deficiency of manpower he issued the infamous edict that for the death of every German one hundred Serbs would be killed, and for each German wounded fifty would die. The full horror of this decree was put into play in October when, in retaliation for an attack in a nearby village that left ten dead and a number wounded, the Germans marched into Kragujevac, the town where Flora and Emily had worked in the autumn of 1914. By the end of the day they had executed 2,324 men, among them boys from the upper year of the high school.66 To underline their intention to pursue this policy to its full extent, the Germans took prominent men from towns and villages across Serbia hostage, including Vasa “Mac” Srdić, Katherine’s half-Serbian, half-Scottish partner. They announced that, if they were attacked, the men would be killed.
At first the Četniks and Partisans had collaborated uneasily in their pitched battles against the Germans. However, their long-term goal, to take over the reins of government at the end of the war, put them on a collision course with each other. The impact of Hitler’s edict – one that even he had not foreseen – was to turn growing tensions between them into outright civil war. The Partisans held that individual lives were of little account against their goal of replacing the old system with one based on the Soviet model. The more savage the Germans, they reasoned, the more recruits they could win, and they were accordingly willing to provoke attacks against civilians. In stark contrast, Hitler’s order had paralysed the Četniks’ operations. Those of Mihailović’s generation remembered all too vividly the horrific losses that the Serbians had suffered during the First World War. In the belief that the cost in lives of attacking the Germans was too high to justify any short-term advantages, they planned instead to build up their power to fight them when they could be assured of long-term success and Allied help. Not only did they see the behaviour of the Partisans as a threat to innocent civilians, the Četniks also believed that they posed their greatest challenge to re-establishing the old royalist order. In some instances these beliefs drove them into the murky waters of appeasement and collaboration with Germans with whom they now shared a joint enemy.67
Mac Srdić did not survive. He was executed as a hostage by the Germans in 1942.68
Reeling from the shock of her arrest, Flora paused for a moment just beyond the wide, low door to the cell as it slammed shut behind her. In front of her, on two long rows of mouldy straw mattresses, lay thirteen women under ragged blankets who stirred and looked over curiously at the new arrival. With the exception of two narrow cots, the room was otherwise empty of all furniture.69 Although it was relatively large, at fifteen by twenty feet, it felt claustrophobic. Its two small, glassless windows, above head height, were heavily barred and covered with wooden screens. In one corner was an odorous “night bucket”, while the stagnant, foul air buzzed with flies. The bottom half of the walls was painted dark brown, above which they were white. They were otherwise undecorated, the drab expanse broken only by clothes hanging from a handful of crooked nails and the smudged remains of flies. Strung from one wall to another was a washing line on which grey towels were hung. As Flora stood taking stock, several of the women stood up to greet her warmly. They handed her a spare blanket and squeezed up further on the straw mattresses to make room for her.70
The women were mixed in terms of both nationality and class.71 “There were also streetwalkers,” Flora commented, “but we were bound together by our common misfortunes and became astonishingly good comrades.” Among them, fifty-three-year-old Ruth Mitchell from Milwaukee cut an incongruous figure. She had joined the Četniks the month before the German invasion. A journalist for the Associated Press had encountered her before she had been arrested. “It seemed to me that Miss Mitchell was just looking for some à la Hollywood adventure,” he wrote. “Well, I thought, she’ll probably get all she wants and more before long.”72 The American w
oman Četnik was awed by the veteran Englishwoman soldier. She was a “really magnificent old lady of sixty-seven, stocky, weather-beaten, with short-cropped white hair,” Mitchell wrote admiringly.73
Each morning, after an armed guard threw open the door at seven o’clock and bellowed the order “Aufstehen!” (“Get up!”), the women would jump up and queue at the door. In pairs they were led down to the “ladies’ room” at the end of the stone passage. When Flora’s turn came she splashed across the wet floor to wash at one of the two taps, both cold. There was one toilet in the passage, the sole facility to serve between thirty and forty women, while the contents of the night bucket were poured down the urinal in the cobbled yard.
The women spent the mornings doing the “housework”. They swept and scrubbed the floor of their room, the passage, the office and guardroom. They shook their blankets to rid them of dust and the latest generation of bedbugs, aired their straw mattresses and polished the boots of the prison warders. And once a week they were assigned the laundry for the prison. “The clothes were sometimes exceedingly dirty and often – how often! covered with blood,” wrote Ruth.74 But the work at least broke the monotony of the day, gave them some exercise and allowed them out of the confines of the cell into the yard. “This yard was a hot, cobblestoned place enclosed by a high wall, but it might have been the Garden of Eden, we were so keen to get into it,” recalled Flora.75 At twelve thirty they were handed their only food of the day, a plate of beans and a slice of maize bread. The women’s relatives were allowed to drop off food for them at the gates, but much was stolen by the guards.76
A Fine Brother: The Life of Captain Flora Sandes Page 35