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Cultural Migration in Autobiography Grundtvig Partnerships 2009-2011

This project has been funded with support from the European Commission. This publication reflects the views only of the author, and the Commission cannot be held responsible for any use which may be made of the information contained therein.

e-mail: kszia@komesnet.com.pl http://cma.internetdsl.pl

47

A Memory Janez Travner

My cousin Janka was barely two years old at the time. She couldn’t walk yet.There was war. Her bones were probably a bit rachitic, and she did just fine with crawling. You had the impression she could be everywhere at the same time.

It was a grey wartorne morning. Our mothers were busy preparing the meals, you didn´t have to pay any special attention to the small children. Most of the time, they played with us older kids. The danger didn´t come from the farmyard. The stalls, long since plundered, stood empty and the horses had been taken from the fields. The few workmen in the village had become soldiers. Janka however didn´t completely trust this noisy tension laden idyll. Almost always, whenever something in the village changed, something invisible, the little girl not nervous and crawled off.

As for Janka´s clothes, there isn`t much to say. They consisted of a big diaper, a small diaper and some sort of homemade shirt over that. Feet as well as hands were naked. A baby hat decorated her head. The street which wove its way so mysteriously through our little village, was called the White Street by the villagers. Thanks to the white couds of dust that rose from it whenever any action occurred there. Not so on this otherwise promising, sunny day. I was busy with important things. Those of us older children were just now collecting “tinsel” scattered from the warplanes. Suddenly, it became unusually still around us. The tension mounted from one second to the next. Nobody could imagine what was going to happen. Something threatening hung over us all, the air vibrated. The roaring bombers could no longer be heard.

All the villagers` blood froze in their veins. No one was able to move, nobody knew to help, the fear was too over-powering. The first steely monster appeared, the earth trembled. On its heavy steel chains, as if controlled by magic, a tremendous mass of iron pushed itself onward, armed with man-killing equipment. Soldiers sat behind. They probably saw nothing; they had failed to see us, the little girl and me.