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Another of his favorite themes was his monumental importance to the Fourth Reich His records could not possibly be duplicated And it was not just his records, he assured me There were also the funds he personally controlled Certainly the Party leaders would not like to see thatI keep about the house, you ain; perhaps the question had been impertinent "Money tucked safely away in a numbered account in Zurich Money that no Jews or Communists can ever take away frohout the world"

How much money? I asked him that question more than a few tiave ave me varied from a low of a hundred thousand Swiss francs to ten tie in dollars of 20,000 to 200,000 I was sure it was closer to the top figure than to the bottom one Twenty thousand dollars is a lot of money for an individual but a fairly small amount for an international politicalabout ran well into six figures, if in fact they existed at all

Theto think about I had to worm his records out of him once we reached Lisbon, but the records did not concernback hoain I did not want to leave it for the Nazis, nor did I feel it ought to remain forever in the custody of a Swiss bank The United States government, as represented by ht to it It was at that point that I got a shadeNow, for the first ti in it for me

But that was the last chance I had to pump Kotacek about it Because by then ere two and a half days into Yugoslavia, and shortly thereafter he did everything possible to get us both killed Whereupon I fixed it so that he didn’t talk to ain for a while

It happened so, and ere eating breakfast in a farmhouse with twoIt was one of those conversations in which I was speaking Serbo-Croat with theh I knew he didn’t understand a word of Serbo-Croat, and I never suspected that the taller of the two understood Slovak But you can never take ignorance of a language for granted in that part of Europe It is not safe, and I should have known better

Our hosts were Serbs, very passionate Serbs Their priovernment stemmed from the fact that it was not wholly Serbian They felt that Serbs and Serbs alone should run the country, and that those portions of Macedonia controlled by Greece should co with considerable territory in both Bulgaria and Rumania Pan-Serbian nationalism is old-fashioned but still has a certain charuht arew froht our hosts were Croats There is no logical reason why Croats and Serbs cannot get along together, but there are a number of historical explanations The Croats are Roman Catholics, the Serbs Greek Orthodox The Croats use the Latin alphabet while the Serbs e the war, the Nazis exploited these differences to weaken the country by setting each group against the other The experioslavia was the first country in Europe to organize a Resistance, and the partisans gave as good as they got

But soe The Croat leader, Ante Pavelic, organized his own SS and developed a final solution to the Serbian problem Pavelic is supposed to have kept several bushels of human eyes in his office He is supposed to have referred to them as "Serbian Oysters" I don’t knohether he did or not, or what he may have used the I care to dwell upon

But while I was agreeing in Serbo-Croat that Serbia ’s claim to the Greek portions of Macedonia was unquestionably valid, I was also noddinglike this: "The Croats were grand allies, believe me They had an outfit called the Ustashis Good troops, stout-hearted fighters Killed Serbs by the thousands I knew Ante Pavelic well; he’s in Argentina now as I recall And another Ustachi leader, I don’t remember his name, but I believe he lives in your country, in California Or he died recently, I don’t know, these are terrible ti…"

One of our hosts, the tall one, the one who understood enough Slovak to get the gist of what Kotacek had just had the bad grace to say, drew a gun And pointed it at us And held it on us, to Kotacek’s amazement and my distress, while he translated Kotacek’s ill-advised speech into Serbo-Croat At which point we had not one but two persons in the room anted to kill us, which made, with myself included, three anted to see the last of Kotacek

To top it all off, he was shouting in ht these ht they were Ustashis Didn’t you tell me they were Ustashis, Captain Tanner? Or should I say Lieutenant? Why is…"

I tried to explain No one wanted to listen The two Serbs were arguing over our fate One wanted to kill us at once; the other wanted to find out more about us We had co us in a less cellar, and there, with ht with its pencil beam, I put Kotacek once more to sleep

When they ca rifles, I talked as quickly as I kne "I ies for my companion," I said "He is a fool, a lout You know that and I know it I speak for myself On July 23rd last year I donated twenty thousand Swiss francs to the Council for a Greater Serbia The donation was rade ill confire to him The words I say to this scum with me are of no consequence The words he says are of no consequence You should knoho your friends are You radually they wavered, and finally they checked the story I had given them It happened to be true, as they found out in due course, and ulti Kotacek out of it They thought he was dead, which pleased thee their reed that he was dead and convinced them, God kno, that I had to take his body back with me Since they had no particular use for his corpse they reat objection I was provided with a donkey and a cart and left that night

So we got out of there with our skins But Kotacek had done his best to sink our little ship, and he had certainly ed to scare the hell out of ive hiain I could not take the chance For an old revolutionary, he had certainly forgotten how to keep his mouth shut He simply could not be trusted, not with the infinite variety of hosts and helpers we had to oslavia

From that moment on I kept him in his blue funk Twice he ca enough to eat and drink and urinate and take his insulin Then the light appeared and flickered in his red-riain He didn’t much like it, but then he didn’t have much chance to complain about it, either He just stayed out, and he was better that way, much better

Chapter 15

We still had the donkey cart e crossed into Greece, and Kotacek was still lying in the cart So was I Soed artfully over us A Macedonian named Esram drove the cart and used souards not to take too close a look at the cart’s contents The bribe was accepted, the cart was passed on through, and ere in Greece

It ht have been a difficult border to cross but Esram crossed it all the ti across a frontier at all He was a Macedonian, and as far as he was concerned he was si from one part of Macedonia to another That one part was said to belong to Yugoslavia while another part was said to belong to Greece, this was a matter of complete indifference to him Someday he fully expected to lay down his life in an atte in this fashion since time immemorial, and Esram expected to follow in the wake of his ancestors Meanwhile he was content to follow his trade, crossing frooslavia, while never once leaving his ho a border in which he did not believe while s contraband for profit and friends for friendship