Anna Maria Island, March 2, 1988
The Cracker remembers a Chetnik
By Gib Bergquist
The
Cracker was fortunate during his FBI days to spend a whole year immersed in the language
and culture of the Yugoslav people while attending the Defense Language Institute in
Monterey, California.
While certainly not in
support of the communist-backed government of present-day Yugoslavia, the Cracker
recognizes the tremendous contributions made to our own culture by the immigrants who came
to our shores from Serbia, Croatia, Dalmatia, Montenegro, Slovenia, Macedonia, Bosnia and
Hercegovina.
These countries were
lumped together after World War I to form Yugoslavia as we know it today.
The Cracker cherishes the
friendship of a former officer in the Yugoslav army during World War II.
The Germans invaded
Yugoslavia on April 6, 1941 and factored with overwhelming odds, the Yugoslav army
surrendered two weeks later. Many of the armed soldiers, including the Cracker’s
friend, kept their weapons and fled into the mountains to form a guerrilla army called
Chetniks.
This former Chetnik
related the following folk stories which gives one a little insight into the character of
the Yugoslav people and bears retelling.
During the occupation of
Yugoslavia by the Germans in World War II, a regiment of Nazi troops was headquartered in
a small Serbian village.
One morning the regimental
commander, a Nazi colonel, strutted down the village street, slapping the sides of his
polished boots with his swagger stick as he walked. He entered the village barbershop and
announced that he wanted a shave. The petrified barber quickly emptied the barber chair
and as the colonel sat down, the colonel drew his 9mm Luger pistol from his hip holster
and placed it on his lap.
“If you cut me,
I’ll kill you,” he announced to the barber who stood there quaking in his shoes
as he honed the straight razor on the leather strap. Skill overrode fear and the barber,
even with trembling hand and his heart in his throat, managed to shave the colonel without
any blood-letting. The next morning, the colonel again arrives for a shave but on this
occasion the barber’s apprentice is running the shop since his boss is at home in bed
with an acute attack of stomach ulcers.
As the colonel sits down
in the barber chair, he again draws his Luger and places it in his lap and repeats his
“I'll kill you if you cut me” ultimatum.
The apprentice shakes out
the barber cloth, nonchalantly tucks it around the colonel’s neck and adjusts the
chair into the prone shaving position. As he froths up the lather in the shaving mug and
slaps it on the colonel’s chin, he whistles a merry little Serbian folk tune as if he
didn’t have a care in the world.
“You did understand
what I said, boy?” asked the colonel.
“Yes sir,
colonel,” replied the apprentice. “If I cut you once, I’ll have to cut you
twice.”
As the story goes, a very
nervous colonel reholstered his Luger.
Then there was Uncle
Miroslav, a very sprightly octogenarian, who had outlived several wives.
He was teased unmercifully
by his Serbian friends when he took as his most recent bride an 18-year-old village
beauty.
“Well,” says
Uncle Miroslav, “It’s better to have a young chick to share with your friends
than to have an old hen all to yourself.”
From Cracker's Crumbs, ©1995 Gib Bergquist