In The Shade of The Bubanj Memorial Fists, Nis, Serbia

(Part Two of a more detailed account of my time in Nis, Serbia)

Welcome to the dark side of the moon.

The three stone fists of the Bubanj Memorial Park stretch defiantly skyward.  They jut unnaturally out of the featureless, flat grassy field like alien-made monoliths on the surface of a far away planet.  Or as one of my friends so eloquently put it, "Dude, it looks like the cover of a Pink Floyd album."

It was still scorching hot.  I sat in the shade of the largest fist in deep, melancholy thought.  My thought process was a depressing continuation of that from Crvni Krist Concentration Camp where I had just came from.  Although Bubanj Memorial Park is located several kilometers from Nis and requires a 30 minute walk uphill, it is intimately connected to the camp.  The prisoners of Crveni Krst were executed at Bubanj Hill.

The three fists are different sizes to show that men, women and children were all killed and buried here.  Since bodies were buried with bulldozers and many were burned to cover up evidence, the number of dead can only be vaguely placed at somewhere between 10,000 and 15,000.  At one point between February 16th and 17th, 1942 over 1,400 prisoners were executed on the hill.

Bubanj Memorial was as lonely that day as Crveni Krst.  I sat under the largest fist for nearly an hour and not a soul came to interrupt my peace.  Once again there were no signs to explain the history nor tourist-friendly lights to illuminate the stones.  The only signs of human interaction with the monuments were squiggles of blue graffiti.  The wide, grassy field was overgrown and unkempt.  Amazingly the loneliness here felt more crushing than in the camp.  Dying in a concentration camp is horrifying enough, but being brought to die on an extremely isolated, unidentified hill in the middle of a forest seems far more frightening.

This sculpture has no explanation

The sun was setting and the moment was over.  I am not some heroic backpacker who independently desires to learn of the history and suffering of the Serbian people by visiting such an unfamiliar place.  The reality is that a Serbian friend told me about it and I thought, "That sounds like a good idea."  She was kind enough to let me explore the field and monoliths on my own as she slept by the path that lead to the desolate area.  If not for her, perhaps I never would have translated the Cyrillic message on a stone I saw at the memorial before we descended the long hill back to Nis:

  “From the blood of communists and patriots fists were born: fists of revolt and warning, fists of the revolution, fists of liberty. We were shot, but never killed, never subdued. We crushed the darkness and paved the way for the Sun.”    
                                                                                                                      --Ivan Vuckovic