Ponikve, Pelješac / Croatia
Photo: Wikimedia Commons February 2014
THE RIGHT TO KILL
Who gave you the right to kill?
Who gave you the right to enter my mother's home and slit the throats of six old women and a sixteen-year-old boy, just after you butchered my great grandfather in front of the shed?
Who gave you the right to kill all the people in our village? And why all those children who never even knew that they were Serbian or what being Serbian was, or had parents who didn't understand that they prayed to a different God.
If it was God who gave you the right to kill, I will accept your God.
When you can answer these questions with the grace of God, I will accept the fate of my family. I too will wish for all Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies to be eradicated by the grace of God.
I will spare you and kill myself if I can develop the courage. If not, I will, with free will, allow you to kill me.
But until that time, I will believe that I'm a Christian with the same God, and I’m just as worthy as you in the eyes of God, maybe even worthier because I didn't kill, nor do I celebrate those who have killed, nor could I kill you or anyone else.
I will be worthy because I do not have blood on my hands. I am worthy because I have pure thoughts. I am worthy because I believe in a Christian God. I am worthy because I see us all as human beings, and I accept that others may pray to their own God. I am worthy because I do not hate anyone.
If I could change one thing, it would be that you would have killed the victims without emotion, without the butchery and gruesome torture that I heard through the stories told by my parents and other surviving villagers.
I cannot erase the images of the babies who were hurled into the air and impaled with knives.
May God have mercy on all of us. And if it was your God and a God who wanted to purify Croatian lands, may he have mercy on Franjo Mance, Alojz Troha, and other Ustashe who committed atrocities in the name of God in the village of Ponikve and all other Serbian villages.
- A message from a descendant of the surviving victims, Bosko Ivkovic, to all those who were killers in my village and their descendants.
Canada
February 2017
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If you would like to get in touch with me, Aleksandra, please feel free to contact me at ravnagora@hotmail.com
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