Balkan

        Balkan  1944

With Greece so much in the news I keep thinking about  our return trip through the Balkan in the early fall of ’44. I must confess, I didn’t know much about the Balkans other than that the Archduke had been murdered at Sarajevo and that Belgrade was the capital of Serbia. Neither did I pay much attention to anything concerning the Balkans until the U.S, and Western countries decided to “save” the region. To me the Balkans were  the weeks of the end of my trip out of Greece. The world was steadily collapsing around me and I somehow lived in my coccoon  of blissful ignorance.

Our train left  early in the morning from Salonika. During the evening someone had sent a messenger  into town to get the two guards with whom we had chatted through the night on the way to Athens a few months ago. It is a total mystery to me to remember  about what we talked, but talk we did. Finally the night was over  and it was time to leave. Slowly the train  began to move. We girls  were relieved to be on our way and waved a cheerful  “Good by” to the two soldiers who clung to the steps at the end of our carriage until it was almost too late for them to jump  off. It seemed a bit strange the way they clung  to the train but then, life was anything but normal.

Much of the way I stood in the aisle  outside our compartment looking at the peaceful and sundrenched landscape. Next to me sat a peasant on his haunches, every once in a while smiling at me.  At one point he opened his sack and pulled out a huge loaf of bread  of which  he started to carve a slice with a huge  knife. With a big smile he offered me a slice which I accepted smiling back at him.Now he pulled out a slab of bacon and started to carve off  a slice which in turn he offered to me. I knew about trichinosis but decided to throw caution to the wind and accepted a slice of the fat.Somehow it seemed more important to me to bask in the friendly atmosphere in a strange land than worrying about future health.

All of a sudden the train stopped at a small local station with a small station house and a pump in the yard and we were told to get out.A rather pompous officer shouted somehting about enemy planes as we tried to hide under trees nearby, Sure enough, all of a sudden two little planes came swooping down from the back of the train and as they neared the engine they shot ferociously at it but hit nothing. We ended up sitting at that station all day long.I had decided to join two soldiers who hunkered very cheerfully in a dugout nearby chewing on green  corn. One of them was able to identify the origin of any plane by the sound of the engine. Very often the pompous officer was wrong when he shouted “enemy plane”.From this soldier I also learned that last nights train had been hit and many people were killed inside the compartments. This is what the boys in Salonika knew and why they were so reluctant to see us go.

We stayed several days in that village until it was finally safe enough to continue  until we had to cross a small river  without a bridge. A train, this time a cattle car, was waiting for us on the other shore and  we were ordered to take our belongings  and  negogiate ourselves  across  a narrow but rather wild river on  pontoons which were anything but steady. Half way acoss a helping hand reached out to me and pulled me ashore.