Heroes and killers

In those days, it was not easy to get weapons in the city. Vinko and his friends stole rifles and ammunition for his war, for example, from the HSS's Zaštite magazine in the Gripe fortress, that spring when Karađorđević's Kingdom fell apart and the Germans overran Yugoslavia. They then buried the crates in Dumanić's vineyard in the Split field, to wait for them when the time came. Today, that field is the wider center of Split, and in the place of Dumanić's vineyard, there is now an Ina gas station in Vukovarska street.

The time came already in a couple of months, when Vinko and his friends found themselves in the vineyard one summer night, dug out their weapons and headed towards Kučina. The plan was to cross Mosor and wait for a guide in the hamlet of Krušvar near Dicmo. They were city kids, brave and impetuous, but young and without any experience: among the forty-four was the entire team of the Workers' Football Club Split, and Vinko, at twenty-nine, was the oldest in the squad. When the Ustashas and the Italians discovered them three days later near Trilje, they had no chance.

Vinko, seriously wounded in the leg, sacrificed himself to protect the backs of his comrades in retreat. They held out until dusk, but failed. After a whole day of fighting, six of them were killed, and the rest were taken to Sinj. Twenty-two never returned to Split: twenty-one was shot on the slopes of Ruduša, and twenty-two, Vinko, died with his legs broken in the Sinj prison after seven days of brutal torture, refusing to give his torturers even his name.

His name is thus preserved in the city's memory: he was declared a national hero, and the new elementary school in Trstenik, Split, was named after him. The students of that time still have a brochure about Vinko, the hero after whom their school was named, in their family lockers. Each city school named after a national hero received one such small booklet, which was written by a journalist from Split, a correspondent for Belgrade's Borba.

Vinko Paić Ozić. That was the name of the school, that was the name of the national hero of this small, today completely irrelevant and uninstructive story. He was - the famous history of the time would say - the right man at the right time in the right place. In memory of Vinko and his comrades who shared the right time and the right place with him, a monument was erected on Ruduša with engraved verses in the heroic twelve-pointer - "You stood at the foundation of life with life, immortal as the land for which you fell".

Later, however, it turned out that neither the kids from the First Split Partisan Detachment nor the country they fell for were immortal. The heroes suddenly became Vinko's killers, the shameless criminal and criminal residue was beatified, and brochures in honor of the new heroes will be written and printed by the same former local correspondent of Borba who wrote brochures about Vinko and his friends, you may remember him, Marinko Božić called.

In Split, Yugoslavia is also poorly remembered, let alone Vinko Paić Ožić. The memorial plaque to the detachment, erected in the place where Dumanić's vineyard used to be, has been devastated for decades and covered with Ustasha and Nazi symbols. The school that used to be named after Vinko is now called only Trstenik Elementary School. It is one of those schools in Split where the teachers employ their own wives and the principals their own daughters, so people from the neighborhood find children who have run away from class on the street because the teachers are screwing around on Facebook during class.

One such school, which, like the one in Trstenik, was once named after a national hero, and today is dotted with Ustasha and Nazi symbols, was attended by the second national hero of this story.

Born in the days when the Homeland War ended, grew up in a typical split, violent and dysfunctional family, grew up on the streets of a city that in the meantime had collapsed in on itself, Marin - like many of that futile generation - was a member of Torcida, spending his life from Saturday to Saturday in the north of Poljud. In the neighborhood and on the stand, he was known by the nickname Pajser. Between two Saturdays, Pajser was also a small-time dealer, one of those who are said to be "previously known to the police": a few months ago, two hundred grams of heroin were found in the search of his home.

Last Saturday, Pajser sat down Jurica Torlak on his Suzuki motorcycle in Split's Varoš, another one of the city's gang "previously known to the police" - a guy who about fifteen years ago killed an eight-year-old girl on a motorcycle in front of the third elementary school in Split - when a twenty-five-year-old sailor Filip Zavadlav was mowed down by a Kalashnikov burst in broad daylight on the square in Šperun.

It is actually somewhat easier to get weapons in the city today than it was during the Second World War. For only a few hundred euros, it is possible to buy Kalashnikovs from the private arsenals left over from the Homeland War, so it turned out to be a rather funny shock to the nation that called this crime "unremembered": the right to call a Kalashnikov murder in the middle of the city unremembered is only available to you if you are twenty-four years old. so your life and the history of Split began with the welcome of the Freedom Train.

In a historical sense, painfully expected, barely an hour or two after the massacre in Varoš, almost the entire city and almost the entire shocked nation beatified Pajser's murderer Filip Zavadlav alive, a petty burglar from another typical Split broken, violent and dysfunctional family, a folk hero of an instant urban legend about a withdrawn young man who liquidated Jurica and Pajser - and a few minutes later another petty dealer - protecting his family from the scum who harassed them and blackmailed them with the debts of Filip's drug addict brother.

The ill-fated Pajser, however, soon turned out to be only a collateral victim of a burst intended for the guy he tied up on a motorcycle, and by tomorrow he too had entered urban legend, as an innocent victim of the "chaos on the streets of Split", the wrong man at the wrong time in the wrong place .

"He was in the wrong place at the wrong time": just like that, in those words, and with the explanation of how "a bullet that was not intended for him" hit him in the "chaos on the streets of Split", comrades from Split's Torcida - the association of real people on in the right place at the right time, and widely known activists against chaos on the streets - the next day they said goodbye to their "brother from the stands" Marin Ožić Paić aka Pajser.

Yes, Marin Ožić Paić. That was the name of the folk hero of this important and instructive story. In memory of Marin, the people of Torcida lit candles at the place of the murder and posed for pictures by unfurling a huge banner with verses inscribed in cursive font - "Neither guilty nor guilty, they killed those brothers, cursed are those who smear your dead name!"

Four generations of the Split tribe of Paić Ožić stood between the two heroes, Vinko and Marin. Once upon a time, our national hero was called Vinko Paić Ožić, and he was a twenty-nine-year-old who acquired weapons to stand on the winning side in the biggest war in the entire human history. Somewhere in that long interval, however, we declared Vinko's killers heroes, so in such a broken, violent and dysfunctional society, our national hero today is Marin Ožić Paić, a twenty-nine-year-old torcida, hooligan and small-time neighborhood dealer. When such a society revises its history, and in the "chaos on the streets" proclaims the killers of heroes as national heroes, in the end it usually turns out to be a distracted twenty-nine-year-old petty burglar who acquired weapons to kill all the scum of the neighborhood in his private war.

We used to name schools after heroes, with the ambition to preserve their names. Today we call them by neighborhoods, with the ambition that city dealers know whose is whose.

Who is to blame? We in Split know: either the people are to blame, or the place is to blame, or simply - the time is wrong.

(hr.n1info.com)