Partisan Quotes

I hate the indifferent. I believe that living means taking sides. Those who really live cannot help being a citizen and a partisan. Indifference and apathy are parasitism, perversion, not life. That is why I hate the indifferent. The indifference is the deadweight of history. The indifference operates with great power on history. The indifference operates passively, but it operates. It is fate, that which cannot be counted on. It twists programs and ruins the best-conceived plans. It is the raw material that ruins intelligence. That what happens, the evil that weighs upon all, happens because the human mass abdicates to their will; allows laws to be promulgated that only the revolt could nullify, and leaves men that only a mutiny will be able to overthrow to achieve the power. The mass ignores because it is careless and then it seems like it is the product of fate that runs over everything and everyone: the one who consents as well as the one who dissents; the one who knew as well as the one who didn’t know; the active as well as the indifferent. Some whimper piously, others curse obscenely, but nobody, or very few ask themselves: If I had tried to impose my will, would this have happened? I also hate the indifferent because of that: because their whimpering of eternally innocent ones annoys me. I make each one liable: how they have tackled with the task that life has given and gives them every day, what have they done, and especially, what they have not done. And I feel I have the right to be inexorable and not squander my compassion, of not sharing my tears with them. I am a partisan, I am alive, I feel the pulse of the activity of the future city that those on my side are building is alive in their conscience. And in it, the social chain does not rest on a few; nothing of what happens in it is a matter of luck, nor the product of fate, but the intelligent work of the citizens. Nobody in it is looking from the window of the sacrifice and the drain of a few. Alive, I am a partisan. That is why I hate the ones that don’t take sides, I hate the indifferent.

Alexandra Malkovic woke out of the nightmare that had bedevilled her sleep for days. She sat up, shivering, her heart thumping. For a few seconds she could not recognise her surroundings, then the outlines of the sparse furnishings of the room solidified in the faint moonlight coming through a gap in the curtains. This was her room in the house they had commandeered in Bihac, the city Tito’s Partisans had captured after a bitter battle a few weeks before Christmas – a battle in which she had played an important part. This was safety, an end to the long weeks on the march, sleeping on the hard ground, alert always to the sound of movement in the surrounding forest and the distant howling of wolves. So why could she not sleep in peace?

The captain saluted and left, and Alix heard him shouting orders to men to form a firing squad and then orders for the prisoners to be brought out and lined up. There seemed to be some kind of altercation going on. Someone was protesting vocally. ‘I am a British airman and I demand to be treated as a prisoner of war!’ The sound of the voice struck her somewhere in the middle of her chest and she jumped to her feet and ran out of the house. A ragged line of prisoners was drawn up on the far side of the clearing with a dozen Partisans carrying rifles facing them. Her eyes went along the line. Every face was heavily bearded, unrecognisable at a distance, but then a difference in the way the men were dressed struck her. All wore tunics that had some suggestion of a uniform but on one man the trousers that protruded below it, though ragged and faded, were unmistakably Air Force blue. ‘Ready!’ shouted the captain. ‘Take aim.’ ‘No!’ Alix tore across the clearing and flung herself between the firing line and the prisoners. ‘No! I know this man! He is an American, but with the British RAF. He is not an enemy.’ ‘Not an enemy?’ the captain queried. ‘Then what is he doing fighting alongside the Chetniks?’ ‘I don’t know,’ Alix said breathlessly. ‘But you can’t shoot him without finding out. If you shoot a British serviceman you could jeopardise any help we might get.’ The captain looked uneasy. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’ll let Comrade Tito decide about this.’ He called to one of the men guarding the prisoners. ‘Bring that man over here. The one who’s been causing all the trouble.’ The man in the blue trousers was shoved roughly forward. ‘Alix!’ he gasped hoarsely. ‘Thank god!’ She caught hold of his arm. ‘Steve? It is you, isn’t it?’ ‘What’s left of him,’ he responded, with an effort at a smile.