Of Woods
Dolores Klaich
I had the dream again last night. This time it was my mother’s niece running through winter woods; at other times, it’s my mother. Whoever she is, she wears a stylish black dress and only as the dream continues do I see that she is barefoot, her hair unkempt. She is thin, she is dirty, and she is terrified.
This morning, I sit in my wicker armchair looking out sliding glass doors to the gentle woods that border the rear of my newly acquired acre. It is chilly this early fall morning, shades of the New England winter to come. As I go to get my down vest to walk the woods, I think about having to run through them barefoot and terrified.
***
“I had the dream again last night.”
“And?”
“The same. That feeling of longing.”
“Mother again?”
“Is it really that simplistic?”
“Probably not. Family?”
“Hmm . . . Tell me how you’re doing.”
“Not so bad today.”
“Shall I come?”
Pat is the most important woman in my life; we were lovers for a number of years, then best friends, confidantes now. When her illness returned, furiously, after a hiatus of fourteen years, she asked if I would be with her at the end. Twice now I have gone, and both times she has rallied. When she is gone, who will I phone to obsess about my dream? I will need to tell the story anew.
***
When I was growing up in America’s Midwest, to which my parents had immigrated from Yugoslavia before World War II, there were no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no grandparents. So it is not surprising that years after that war, in 1960 when I was twenty-four, I went abroad in search of family. I found my mother’s niece, she of my dreams, in a town far south of where she had fled during the war to escape her family’s fate. She told me she was all that was left. She looked so much like my mother, the thick, dark hair, a certain hitch of the shoulder when she spoke, the intelligent dark eyes. When we hugged, I found that I didn’t want to let go.
At sixteen, my mother’s niece had somehow escaped the hangings in the town square and had spent the war years in the woods. When I met her, she was a grown woman, slim, sophisticated, with a young daughter. She and her husband, both schoolteachers, took me to visit a thirteenth-century monastery where two worldly old monks in sandals offered us very good wine from their carefully tended cellar. The monks and I spoke of Paris, and of Rome. I asked if they practiced their faith. They appeared startled by the question. No, they said, in unison. Then one said in a lowered voice: no, not much. It was obvious they were not in a comfortable part of the country’s secular post-war regime; nor, it appeared, were my mother's niece and her husband. They and their daughter lived quietly in two rooms in a town many kilometers from where her parents – my mother’s oldest sister and her husband – had been hanged. At the end of my visit, I found the courage to ask who had done the hangings. Aside from the country’s Nazi occupation, there had been a horrific civil war. My mother’s niece said she did not know. I did not believe her, but I did not press her. We spoke instead of her daughter's studies.
***
I have spent the week raking fall leaves and reading a biography of Alice Walker. The book led me to a collection of her early essays in one of which she wrote, “No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence.” And I immediately thought the unthinkable: Could my mother’s oldest sister and her husband – he an official in the government before and perhaps during the war – been hanged because they had been collaborators? In league with the occupiers? Is that why they were murdered? No, of course not. Never. That could not possibly be true.
I have often thought of finding the truth about that aspect of my family history. All week the recurring dream has been pushing at me. But there is no way I can go now. Pat is dying. I promised her I would be with her at the end.
***
On that trip, back in 1960, back when it was still Yugoslavia, where I had gone in search of what remained of the world of my parents’ youth, I learned that running to the woods during the war was a way of life for those living in the country. A girlhood friend of my mother's, who had left her bourgeois city life in Zagreb for what she hoped would be safety in the countryside, described it to me on that visit. She said she was always fleeing, running from any number of people – the Nazi occupiers, the Croatian Ustashe, the Serbian Chetniks, Tito's Communist partizans. After a while, she said she didn't care who was coming. People who came to warn began to say, simply, “Run!” And everyone ran, mostly not knowing from whom they were running. Everyone was fighting everyone: Tito's partizans against the Nazi occupiers, the Nazi occupiers against Tito’s partizans, the Croatian Ustashe, who were Nazi collaborators, against not only the partizans but against Serbian civilians, the royalist Serbian Chetniks against the Croatian Ustashe. "And the Catholic Church!" my mother’s friend said, “Please, do not get me started. The only thing to do was to run to the shelter of the woods.” The combination of Nazi occupation and centuries-deep ethnic and religious hatred had proved lethal.
Although on that trip I did not discover who had hanged my mother's oldest sister and brother-in- law, I did find out who was responsible for the murder of my father's parents.
My father had wanted to give his cousin eighteen hectares of family farmland he owned some twenty-five kilometers southwest of Zagreb in the tiny Serbian village where he had been born. He couldn’t bring himself to return to what was left of his village and commissioned me to carry out what needed to be done.
My father’s cousin, who had spent the war years in a Nazi forced labor camp in Bavaria, had returned to his village where he and my father had grown up to find most of it destroyed. Of my paternal grandfather's house only the stone foundation remained. It had been burned to the ground on a spring day when the partizans warning to the Serbian villagers to flee to the woods had come too late for the elderly like my grandparents. They were captured on the hillside approaching the woods and were herded into the largest house in the village, my grandfather's house, which, at dusk, was set on fire. So, too, was the village's small Serbian Orthodox Church.
Among my snapshots of that trip is one of my father’s cousin and me sitting on the stone foundation of my grandparents’ house eating barbecued lamb that had turned on a spit for hours in honor of my visit. The foundation had been untouched since the war, a sort of memorial, overgrown with weeds, taking up valuable land. All that was left of the church was its bell, which was housed in rough wood scaffolding that stood on a slight rise in a wheat field. On the road as one enters the village is an official stone marker commemorating the death of one of my relatives, Milenka Klajic, age 16, Narodna heroja, national heroine, a much honored teenage partizanka who had learned to plant dynamite.
My father’s cousin told me that when he returned from Bavaria and saw the remains of my grandfather's house, he turned to his one surviving sister and asked, “Fascista?” Yes, she told him. Ustashe. Croatians. Collaborators.
Croatians. My mother’s people. But my mother’s family?
Unlike my mother’s Croatian family who had perished during the war save for the one niece, a number of the younger members of my father's Serbian family had survived the war. They had made it to the woods the day of the fire. But unlike my mother's niece they hadn't wandered or hid. They had joined the partizan movement, Marshal Tito's Communist guerrilla network, and had emerged from the war to positions of power in Tito's regime of the country. On my visit I found a Serbian second cousin of my father's and her Croatian husband, officials in Tito's government. At night, from a bed in a room next to theirs, I could hear their unsettling coughs. Winters in the woods had been brutal. In the last days, to survive, they had killed and eaten their few horses. After the war as Party officials they lived comfortably. Their house in Zagreb was roomy; there was a summer place, primitive and wonderful, on an Adriatic island. An automobile was expected, as was a television set. They had never met my mother's niece, although they knew exactly where she was living. They also had heard that my mother's family had been hanged during the war. They said they did not know the circumstances. I did not believe them.
So, who hanged my mother’s family? In my worst fantasy, they were killed by Tito’s partizans for being, I shudder, Nazi collaborators, followers of the brutal Croatian Ustashe. No, please, not that. In my best moral fantasy, I see my mother's family as having been denounced as partizan sympathizers and their murder a Nazi showcase hanging of prominent civilians. And on the grayest of days, I envision that the anti-Nazi sabotage that may have led to the executions had been carried out by partizan members of my father’s family.
***
Pat is dying. It won’t be long now. She is only fifty-four. She is family. And soon she will be gone. I find myself obsessed with finding out the truth, all the truth, of my birth family history. But I think, it’s all so long ago. And considering the recent upheaval in what was once Yugoslavia and now is several countries, it would surely be a complicated search. More likely I think: Am I afraid of what I might find? Instead . . . I think of my father, that handsome Serb, pinning a gardenia to his suit lapel, and my mother, that graceful Croatian, winding her music box to listen to a Verdi aria during those Lackawanna, New York, days when they were wildly in love, having crossed ethnic, religious, and class borders to be together, feuding progenitors be damned. At times like that, I push aside scenes of public hangings in Croatian town squares and visions of Serbian farmhouses full of villagers set on fire at dusk, and I see my parents young . . . they are running through spring woods, but in no way are they terrified. They are holding hands and they cannot stop looking at each other.
I had the dream again last night. This time it was my mother’s niece running through winter woods; at other times, it’s my mother. Whoever she is, she wears a stylish black dress and only as the dream continues do I see that she is barefoot, her hair unkempt. She is thin, she is dirty, and she is terrified.
This morning, I sit in my wicker armchair looking out sliding glass doors to the gentle woods that border the rear of my newly acquired acre. It is chilly this early fall morning, shades of the New England winter to come. As I go to get my down vest to walk the woods, I think about having to run through them barefoot and terrified.
***
“I had the dream again last night.”
“And?”
“The same. That feeling of longing.”
“Mother again?”
“Is it really that simplistic?”
“Probably not. Family?”
“Hmm . . . Tell me how you’re doing.”
“Not so bad today.”
“Shall I come?”
Pat is the most important woman in my life; we were lovers for a number of years, then best friends, confidantes now. When her illness returned, furiously, after a hiatus of fourteen years, she asked if I would be with her at the end. Twice now I have gone, and both times she has rallied. When she is gone, who will I phone to obsess about my dream? I will need to tell the story anew.
***
When I was growing up in America’s Midwest, to which my parents had immigrated from Yugoslavia before World War II, there were no aunts, no uncles, no cousins, no grandparents. So it is not surprising that years after that war, in 1960 when I was twenty-four, I went abroad in search of family. I found my mother’s niece, she of my dreams, in a town far south of where she had fled during the war to escape her family’s fate. She told me she was all that was left. She looked so much like my mother, the thick, dark hair, a certain hitch of the shoulder when she spoke, the intelligent dark eyes. When we hugged, I found that I didn’t want to let go.
At sixteen, my mother’s niece had somehow escaped the hangings in the town square and had spent the war years in the woods. When I met her, she was a grown woman, slim, sophisticated, with a young daughter. She and her husband, both schoolteachers, took me to visit a thirteenth-century monastery where two worldly old monks in sandals offered us very good wine from their carefully tended cellar. The monks and I spoke of Paris, and of Rome. I asked if they practiced their faith. They appeared startled by the question. No, they said, in unison. Then one said in a lowered voice: no, not much. It was obvious they were not in a comfortable part of the country’s secular post-war regime; nor, it appeared, were my mother's niece and her husband. They and their daughter lived quietly in two rooms in a town many kilometers from where her parents – my mother’s oldest sister and her husband – had been hanged. At the end of my visit, I found the courage to ask who had done the hangings. Aside from the country’s Nazi occupation, there had been a horrific civil war. My mother’s niece said she did not know. I did not believe her, but I did not press her. We spoke instead of her daughter's studies.
***
I have spent the week raking fall leaves and reading a biography of Alice Walker. The book led me to a collection of her early essays in one of which she wrote, “No person is your friend (or kin) who demands your silence.” And I immediately thought the unthinkable: Could my mother’s oldest sister and her husband – he an official in the government before and perhaps during the war – been hanged because they had been collaborators? In league with the occupiers? Is that why they were murdered? No, of course not. Never. That could not possibly be true.
I have often thought of finding the truth about that aspect of my family history. All week the recurring dream has been pushing at me. But there is no way I can go now. Pat is dying. I promised her I would be with her at the end.
***
On that trip, back in 1960, back when it was still Yugoslavia, where I had gone in search of what remained of the world of my parents’ youth, I learned that running to the woods during the war was a way of life for those living in the country. A girlhood friend of my mother's, who had left her bourgeois city life in Zagreb for what she hoped would be safety in the countryside, described it to me on that visit. She said she was always fleeing, running from any number of people – the Nazi occupiers, the Croatian Ustashe, the Serbian Chetniks, Tito's Communist partizans. After a while, she said she didn't care who was coming. People who came to warn began to say, simply, “Run!” And everyone ran, mostly not knowing from whom they were running. Everyone was fighting everyone: Tito's partizans against the Nazi occupiers, the Nazi occupiers against Tito’s partizans, the Croatian Ustashe, who were Nazi collaborators, against not only the partizans but against Serbian civilians, the royalist Serbian Chetniks against the Croatian Ustashe. "And the Catholic Church!" my mother’s friend said, “Please, do not get me started. The only thing to do was to run to the shelter of the woods.” The combination of Nazi occupation and centuries-deep ethnic and religious hatred had proved lethal.
Although on that trip I did not discover who had hanged my mother's oldest sister and brother-in- law, I did find out who was responsible for the murder of my father's parents.
My father had wanted to give his cousin eighteen hectares of family farmland he owned some twenty-five kilometers southwest of Zagreb in the tiny Serbian village where he had been born. He couldn’t bring himself to return to what was left of his village and commissioned me to carry out what needed to be done.
My father’s cousin, who had spent the war years in a Nazi forced labor camp in Bavaria, had returned to his village where he and my father had grown up to find most of it destroyed. Of my paternal grandfather's house only the stone foundation remained. It had been burned to the ground on a spring day when the partizans warning to the Serbian villagers to flee to the woods had come too late for the elderly like my grandparents. They were captured on the hillside approaching the woods and were herded into the largest house in the village, my grandfather's house, which, at dusk, was set on fire. So, too, was the village's small Serbian Orthodox Church.
Among my snapshots of that trip is one of my father’s cousin and me sitting on the stone foundation of my grandparents’ house eating barbecued lamb that had turned on a spit for hours in honor of my visit. The foundation had been untouched since the war, a sort of memorial, overgrown with weeds, taking up valuable land. All that was left of the church was its bell, which was housed in rough wood scaffolding that stood on a slight rise in a wheat field. On the road as one enters the village is an official stone marker commemorating the death of one of my relatives, Milenka Klajic, age 16, Narodna heroja, national heroine, a much honored teenage partizanka who had learned to plant dynamite.
My father’s cousin told me that when he returned from Bavaria and saw the remains of my grandfather's house, he turned to his one surviving sister and asked, “Fascista?” Yes, she told him. Ustashe. Croatians. Collaborators.
Croatians. My mother’s people. But my mother’s family?
Unlike my mother’s Croatian family who had perished during the war save for the one niece, a number of the younger members of my father's Serbian family had survived the war. They had made it to the woods the day of the fire. But unlike my mother's niece they hadn't wandered or hid. They had joined the partizan movement, Marshal Tito's Communist guerrilla network, and had emerged from the war to positions of power in Tito's regime of the country. On my visit I found a Serbian second cousin of my father's and her Croatian husband, officials in Tito's government. At night, from a bed in a room next to theirs, I could hear their unsettling coughs. Winters in the woods had been brutal. In the last days, to survive, they had killed and eaten their few horses. After the war as Party officials they lived comfortably. Their house in Zagreb was roomy; there was a summer place, primitive and wonderful, on an Adriatic island. An automobile was expected, as was a television set. They had never met my mother's niece, although they knew exactly where she was living. They also had heard that my mother's family had been hanged during the war. They said they did not know the circumstances. I did not believe them.
So, who hanged my mother’s family? In my worst fantasy, they were killed by Tito’s partizans for being, I shudder, Nazi collaborators, followers of the brutal Croatian Ustashe. No, please, not that. In my best moral fantasy, I see my mother's family as having been denounced as partizan sympathizers and their murder a Nazi showcase hanging of prominent civilians. And on the grayest of days, I envision that the anti-Nazi sabotage that may have led to the executions had been carried out by partizan members of my father’s family.
***
Pat is dying. It won’t be long now. She is only fifty-four. She is family. And soon she will be gone. I find myself obsessed with finding out the truth, all the truth, of my birth family history. But I think, it’s all so long ago. And considering the recent upheaval in what was once Yugoslavia and now is several countries, it would surely be a complicated search. More likely I think: Am I afraid of what I might find? Instead . . . I think of my father, that handsome Serb, pinning a gardenia to his suit lapel, and my mother, that graceful Croatian, winding her music box to listen to a Verdi aria during those Lackawanna, New York, days when they were wildly in love, having crossed ethnic, religious, and class borders to be together, feuding progenitors be damned. At times like that, I push aside scenes of public hangings in Croatian town squares and visions of Serbian farmhouses full of villagers set on fire at dusk, and I see my parents young . . . they are running through spring woods, but in no way are they terrified. They are holding hands and they cannot stop looking at each other.
Working notes
“Of Woods” is a piece I wrote when I was stuck in the middle of writing a section of a memoir about my birth family’s tragic war-time deaths. As I wrote this standalone piece, I found myself weaving in the much-too-early, present-day cancer death of a member of one of my chosen families. Sections of this piece will appear in the memoir in somewhat different form.
About the author
Dolores Klaich is a lesbian feminist author and activist. Her books include a social history of lesbianism, Woman Plus Woman: Attitudes Toward Lesbianism, a spoof of a mystery about internalized heterosexism, Heavy Gilt, which was a Lambda Literary Award finalist, and many essays, articles, and short fiction, including a magical piece in Trivia #5 called “Waiting for Sappho.”
Cited in the recent book, Feminists Who Have Changed America 1963-1975 and Who’sWho of American Women, she served as an openly lesbian delegate to the 1977 National Women’s Conference, was a three term co-chair of The East End Gay Organization for Human Rights (EEGO) of Southampton, NY, and has participated in numerous gay/lesbian/feminist conferences as a keynote speaker and panel moderator.
These days she lives on a quiet country road in southern Vermont next to a wonderful ancient graveyard.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.
Cited in the recent book, Feminists Who Have Changed America 1963-1975 and Who’sWho of American Women, she served as an openly lesbian delegate to the 1977 National Women’s Conference, was a three term co-chair of The East End Gay Organization for Human Rights (EEGO) of Southampton, NY, and has participated in numerous gay/lesbian/feminist conferences as a keynote speaker and panel moderator.
These days she lives on a quiet country road in southern Vermont next to a wonderful ancient graveyard.
For an updated list of works published in TRIVIA, please see this author's contributor page.