At a small station near Bileca a cluster of Serbian refugees got on the train. At first they were close-mouthed and apprehensive, but once they realized there were no authorities on the train, they relaxed. They were fleeing from the Ustashi terror. A fair, robust peasant in his thirties, with bruised cheekbones and curly hair matted with dried blood, told us how the Ustashi had surrounded his village and driven everyone - men and women, young and old - to a rocky ravine, then struck them down with clubs. The peasant freed himself of his bonds at the very edge of the ravine; though he had been struck in the face, he was able to scramble into a brush-covered mound of boulders. "They are killing every Serb in sight!" he lamented. "Like cattle - a blow on the head, then down the ditch. They are mostly Turks [Bosnian Muslims]. Their time has come. They want to wipe out the poor Serbian people."

For me this was a new story. Later, in the course of the war, I was to hear it many times and almost always the same: a village surprised and the men all bound, murdered, and thrown into a ditch. Religious and ideological murders do not require any imagination, just efficiency: in this lies all the horror and - for the victims - "relief." Yet I was not as shocked as I should have been. I was already familiar with the Ustashi ideology - an amalgam of primitive Croatian nationalism with modern fascist totalitarianism. While in prison I had come to know many leading Ustashi. I had followed the evolution of their ideology from militant separatism to fascism and total anti-Serbianism. Reports had reached us in the Central Committee in Belgrade concerning the persecution of Serbs in Croatia; then came the first of many large droves of refugees. We knew of the circulating drumhead courts-martial and of Pavelic's "laws," which contained few articles but always decreed the death sentence. My own lack of horror reflected the atmosphere - the nature of the groups pitted against each other, the flood of propaganda, and the bloody events themselves.

Those simple people, mostly peasants, were even less horror-stricken. One could not even say that they were bitter: a misfortune had come along, terrible because it was human, but perhaps for this very reason surmountable. In the group there was also a slight, dark girl in city dress. She told us calmly that the Ustashi had assembled all the prominent Serbs in her town - merchants, priests, and officials - and two or three days later loaded them on a truck and took them away, supposedly to Mostar, but in fact to be murdered and thrown into a ravine. The Serbs who remained in the little town, mostly women and children, helplessly awaited a similar fate. This girl was fleeing to Montenegro, but she was not too happy about having escaped. Death had suddenly become commonplace, something as ubiquitous as the air and the soil.

"Well," I said turning to the injured peasant, "why don't you defend yourselves?"

"Who can defend himself?" the peasant lamented. "We didn't expect anything. We couldn't believe a government would attack people just like that. We have no weapons. We are left to ourselves like cattle. But at Nevesinje they did rise up and finish off a lot of Ustashi."

People got on and off at each station, but the telling of Ustashi massacres continued - of course, with new details. I don't remember whether my brother joined the conversation: after being followed by the Ustashi in Sarajevo and my constant warnings, he was subdued.