Desanka Maksimovic - A bloody fairytale

It happened in a peasant's land

In the hilly Balkans,

A troop of students

Died a martyr's death

In one day.

They were all born

The same year,

Their school days went by the same,

They were taken together

To the same celebrations,

From the same diseases they were all inoculated

And they all died on the same day.

It happened in a peasant's land

In the hilly Balkans,

A troop of students

Died a martyr's death

In one day.

And fifty five minutes

Before the deathly moment

The little troop

Sat in their school desks

And solved the same, hard assignments:

How much can a traveler walk if he goes by foot...

And so on.

Their thoughts were full

And in the notebooks in their school bags

Laid a bunch of senseless

Fives and twos*.

A handful of same dreams

And same secrets

Patriotic and love ones

They clenched in the bottom of their pockets.

And everybody thought

That they'll run under the blue vault

For a long, 

For a very long time,

Until they solve

All assignments in the world.

It happened in a peasant's land

In the hilly Balkans,

A class of students

Died a martyr's death

In one day.

Entire rows of boys

Took one another by the hands

And from their last school class

To the shooting they went peacefully,

As if death was nothing.

Entire rows of friends

In the same moment rose

To their eternal abode.

*-grades in the Serbian school system range from 1-5 with 1 being the lowest and 5 being the highest. 

Behind the poem

Desanka Maksimović wrote this song inspired by a tragic, real-life occurrence. In 1941, as a revenge for many injured and killed Nazi soldiers (in a battle against united Serb forces), the Germans committed a massacre in the city of Kragujevac and its surrounding villages. There were many victims, but the official number was never determined. Today, it's estimated that almost three thousand Serbs and Roma lost their lives during the Kragujevac massacre. But what hurts the most is the fact that Nazi soldiers went as far as to kill school children, taking them out of a class. 

That day, 300 school children were killed. The Germans offered Miloje Pavlić, one of the children's professors, to go home and save himself, but he refused. He insisted on dying amongst his students. Apparently, he told the Nazis "shoot me, I'm still teaching". And he really did - he went into immortality teaching the Serb nation about bravery. 

Desanka wrote this song right after the massacre, but she of course couldn't publish it until Yugoslavia was freed of German occupation. Today, "A bloody fairytale" is regarded as one of the greatest Serbian poems. The place in Kragujevac where the massacre was committed was later turned into a remembrance park Šumarice.