Three Days of Freedom

The war was over on June 12th
That's the day the Serbs
let me out of the concentration camp
in Grachanica.

For three days we celebrated
that Kosovo was free at last.
Free, until NATO troops arrived
with the Albanians.

Then the war started
all over for us:
house-burnings,
hand grenade attacks,
kidnappings, killings.

The Albanians told NATO
we were war criminals, that we
had collaborated with the Serbs.

The Albanians threatened
to cut our throats if we did
not eave the country.

Gypsies haved been in Kosovo
for almost seven hundred years.
Three days of freedom was all we ever knew.

I don't want to tell you

When NATO started bombing Kosovo,
I left my home. The Serb military
was all around us. I feared a bomb
would fall on our house.

We stayed with friends in Obilich.
After the Serbs departed, four Albanians came
with shovels and told us
if we were still there tomorrow
they'd bury us alive.

When we got to this camp,
I found a relative here
who told me a NATO bomb
had fallen on my sister's home,
killing everyone,
even her four small children.

I don't know if my home is still standing.
I don't know where my sons are.
I don't know where my brothers are.

I have a daughter,
but I don't want to tell you
what happened to her.

Making their skin blacker

The Macedonian cops in Stenkovec II were big, beefy,
burly men who carried truncheons
as if they were extensions of their own arms.

These cops were always looking for Gypsies
smuggling in beer to forget their burned homes,
stolen cars, murdered relatives, raped women.

Gypsies caught drinking were made
to hold one arm straight out,
grasping the center pole of their tent,

while a Macedonian cop hit
the outstretched limb,
trying to break it,

After these cops stopped beating a man,
who always dropped to his knees
at the last moment,
they whipped a small boy who
had run into the camp road
chasing a soccer ball.

These cops thought they were terrorizing
the Gypsies into submission,
but all they were doing
was making their black skin blacker.*

* In all Slavic countries, Gypsies are called "black." Their skin color ranges from white to dark brown.

No hope in Macedonia

Across the ice-blue lake,
the mountain tops streaked in snow reminded me
of the Himalayan foothills, the Gypsies'
homeland a thousand years ago.

We sat on an empty wooden boat
turned over on the sand
while the men told me their stories.

In the UN collective center,
several families had to share a room
no bigger than a normal bedroom.

During the war, the Serbs had killed Gypsies
claiming they were Albanians. After the war,
the Albanians burned the Gypsy homes
saying they had collaborated with the Serbs.

I said I tried to get them refugee status
in the United States, but the State Department
still believed all Gypsies were thieves.

"I'm going fishing," Baskim said.
"And I hope the fish eats me."

The Well

They caught me in the marketplace
where my people used to sell clothes,
where Albanians now sell contraband.
Four men threw me into the back seat
of a blue Lada, yelling, "We told you,
no more Gypsies in Prishtina."

As I was pushed down on the floor,
I felt the gun barrel in my left ear. It was so cold
I jerked just as someone pulled the trigger.
Blood splattered the side of my face
from the would in my shoulder.
I collapsed, pretending to be dead.

I prayed to my dear, deceased mother,
to all mulos,* that these men wouldnąt see
from where the blood was oozing.
When we arrived, they dragged me out
by my feet. My head crashed on the ground,
bouncing over several stones.

They threw mw head-first into a well.
I never reached the water.
There were too many bodies.
I lay crumpled up, almost unconscious
until the smell and sting of wet lime
brought me back to my senses.

I held my breath until I heard
the car leave, then choked
on the stench around me.
With only one hand, I pulled
myself over stiff legs that became
my ladder to climb out.

My face, my hands, my whole body
burned from the lime. I used grass
to wipe off what I could,
they stumbled down a dirt road
toward a long line
of slow-moving lights.

Twenty minutes later I was on the highway
watching olive-colored trucks and jeeps
driving past as if I were a telephone pole.
I finally collapsed in front of two headlights.
I couldn't tell if the last sound I heard
was a screech or a scream.

The next day in a military hospital
NATO interviewed me for a few minutes.
The Albanian translator made the soldiers smile.
By mid-day I was walking
through a woods following a wagon trail
nobody uses anymore,

except Gypsies
escaping a country
where they have lived
for almost seven hundred years.

- * mulos: The Gypsy dead, Gypsy ghosts.

The Blacksmith

fought and killed Serbs
for the KLA
the Kosovo Liberation Army.

But now that the war was over
life for him
was no different.

His children still
couldn't go to school
without being beaten up.

He still couldnąt leave
his village without fear
of being kidnapped and killed.

"Why?" I asked.

"Our skin,"
he said,
"is still black."

Only as an Observer

At the conference in Skopje
a poor-looking man asked to speak.
His head was almost shaved,
his ragged clothes almost pressed

"We came to Macedonia
to save our lives," he said,
"But we are slowly dying here
just like we were in Kosovo."

He squinted at a small piece
of paper in his trembling hands.
His voice broke over every word,
"UNHCR has put us in

homes with people worse off
than we are. We live in basements.
We don't have toilets.
We don't have enough to eat."

"I beg the United Nations
High Commissioner for Refugees
to give Gypsies refugee status,
to help us, to save us."

When the chairperson asked UNHCR
to reply to this situation, their representative
said she was attending the conference
only as an observer.

On the border between Kosovo and Macedonia. After eight days the Macedonian government allowed the Kosovo Roma in but not as refugees, only as "protected people" for a limited time.Paul Polasky is pictured in the center, wearing a baseball cap.