During the war, my parents spent a year and a half in a concentration camp in Yugoslavia. They were separated, naturally. Like in a respectable highschool, men and women were kept apart by barbed wire. Since my father does not like to think about this period, let alone talk about it, most of the stories about their life there I have heard from my mother. Even she began to open up only two decades after the War. One of her stories I like best. I heard it more than ten years ago. I have already told it to practically all my friends and acquaintances.

In the winter of 1943, which has been remembered as very harsh, the camp guards installed a small cannon in front of the building where my mother was. Occasionally the guards fired aimlessly at the nearby mountain, which they knew was infested with the increasingly successful Partisans. After the first few shots the windows on the building were gone, never to be replaced. The cold was unbearable. Many women died from pneumonia, etc. Now, the point is that this particular cannon was know among the women as—“He.” Delightful, isn’t it?

Addendum (September 23, 2016)

It has taken me many a decade to discover a glaring mistake in this piece of writing. And in the very first sentence! Namely, the concentration camp in question was not in Yugoslavia, but in Croatia. Actually, the Independent State of Croatia—a World War II puppet state of Germany and Italy. My parents were in Stara Gradiška, one of the most notorious camps of the time, just a notch below the Jasenovac concentration camp nearby. And the guards were firing across the Sava River, where Kozara Mountain towers prominently in Bosnia. As for the town of Stara Gradiška, it was in Yugoslavia both before and after the great war, but now it is in Croatia once again. Phew!