Trafika Europe 7 - Ukrainian Prayer

Faruk Šehić

old shoes – to put laundry in the washing machine, or to go to Uncle Šeta’s room, where she would prop her elbows on the windowsill and watch the Unadžik for hours, looking even further, past the willows, through the avenue of aspens, all the way to the end of the aits, where the Una returns to one channel and continues on alone, without islands, towards Jasenovac. The husband who left her had been at the concentration camp there for two years. My Grandmother didn’t lose hope when her husband was interned at Jasenovac. On the contrary, she travelled by train to Zagreb, down the Una line that faithfully follows the river as far as Kostajnica, and tried to save him from the death camp. By plying several

collaborating with the enemy. My Grandmother’s whole family, without exception, were Partisan supporters. Grandmother herself, then a clerk at the local court, helped the resistance by carrying messages in her beige handbag, and her cooperation with the communists remained a deep secret. Therefore she derived no material benefit from it after the war. Many years later, only her cream- colouredshoeswith theblack, rounded ends reminded her of the time when she took messages from one prison cell to another in a miniskirt and with the handbag under her arm. That would happen when she climbed the steep wooden steps up to the attic – where she kept her

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