Srbosjek

“God is on the side of the Croats.”

My grandfather’s words rumbled through his chest and into my small body as I sat perched upon his broad shoulders, watching the soldiers march through Zagreb’s streets. The year was 1914, and I was twelve years old, still young enough to believe in the simplicity of such statements, yet old enough to sense the weight of history pressing down upon us all.

The morning air carried the scent of autumn – crisp leaves, wood smoke, and the metallic tang of coming winter. Watching those young men march past, their uniforms pristine and boots gleaming, I thought they looked like toys come to life, each step perfectly synchronized, each face set with identical determination. My grandfather’s hands, huge and calloused from decades of working his land, gripped my legs firmly as he raised himself to his full height, allowing me to see above the crowd.

“Remember this day, Milan,” he said, his voice carrying that same certainty I heard in church, when the priest spoke of heaven and hell. “Remember how God blesses our people with courage.”

But what I remember most wasn’t the courage. It was the fear I saw in the soldiers’ eyes, flickering beneath their brave facades like candle flames in church windows. Even then, before I understood the nature of the human mind, I was drawn to these subtle tells, these glimpses behind the masks we wear.

The crowd sang hymns as the soldiers passed, their voices rising in a great wave of sound that seemed to lift the very cobblestones. My grandmother clutched her rosary, her lips moving in constant prayer. Looking back now, I see how that moment contained everything that would later define my life’s work – faith and fear, duty and doubt, the complex machinery of human psychology wrapped in the simple certainty of religious conviction.

My first confession came later that same year, on a cold December morning when the church windows were frosted with ice patterns that reminded me of the diagrams in my father’s medical books. I knelt in the confessional, breathing in the ancient smell of wood and incense, listening to my father’s words from earlier that morning echo in my mind.

“The soul, Milan,” he had said, his surgeon’s hands gesturing as if to shape the concept in the air between us, “is not simply a matter of faith. It is a scientific reality we have yet to fully understand. As a doctor, I see it in every patient – that spark of divine consciousness that makes us human. Your grandfather sees God in the church. I see Him in the operating theater.”

In the confessional, I struggled to articulate my sins in a way that seemed adequate to the solemnity of the occasion. The priest’s shadow behind the screen was patient, waiting as I searched for words to describe the doubt that had begun to grow in me like a second heartbeat. How could God be on our side and the enemy’s side? How could He inhabit both my grandfather’s fierce nationalism and my father’s scientific humanism?

“God speaks to us in many voices,” the priest said finally, after my halting confession. “The challenge is learning to hear Him in all of them.”

It was this challenge that would define my professional life, though I didn’t know it then. The first real test came in 1916, when my father’s hospital began receiving the shell-shocked soldiers from the front. I was fourteen, working as an orderly during school holidays, when I encountered my first case.

He had been a schoolteacher before the war, this broken man who sat in the hospital garden staring at nothing. His hands, I noticed, still made small gestures as if holding chalk, writing invisible lessons on the air. I spent my lunch breaks sitting near him, watching, taking mental notes that would later fill countless professional journals.

One day, he spoke. Not to me – never to me – but to his invisible class. He was teaching them about the soul, about how it could leave the body during moments of extreme trauma. His voice had the same careful pedagogical tone I imagined he’d used in his classroom, but his words were those of a man who had witnessed his own spirit’s departure.

“The soul,” he lectured to the empty air, “is like a bird that knows when the branch is about to break. It flies away before the falling begins.”

I wrote his words in my first notebook that evening, sitting at my father’s desk in our study. The leather-bound volume still exists, stored now in my office at the university, its pages yellow with age but the words still clear: “Query: If the soul can abandon the body in moments of extreme trauma, what role does the physician play in its return? Secondary query: Does God withdraw with the soul, or does He remain with the empty vessel?”

These questions led me to psychiatry, to years of study in Vienna where I tried to reconcile the mechanical theories of the mind with my persistent belief in the soul’s reality. My professors spoke of cognitive processes, of neurological pathways and chemical reactions, but I kept seeing that schoolteacher in the garden, teaching his phantom students about the flight of the soul.

My early patients were primarily veterans, men who had left pieces of themselves in the mud of various battlefields. I developed a reputation for being able to reach these cases, perhaps because I never fully subscribed to the purely materialistic view of trauma. In my therapy sessions, I would often find myself working in that liminal space between faith and science, between my grandfather’s certainty and my father’s careful observations.

“Tell me,” I would ask them, “not where it hurts, but where it’s empty.”

They understood this question in a way my colleagues did not. They would point to places in their chest, their head, sometimes making vague gestures toward the air around them, describing not physical pain but spiritual absence. I documented everything, filling notebook after notebook with their testimonies, building a catalogue of the soul’s departure points.

But it was the ones who had lost their faith that troubled me most deeply. I remember one patient in particular, a former priest who had served as a military chaplain. He came to me in 1924, his war experience having finally caught up with him after years of increasingly desperate attempts to maintain his vocation.

“I haven’t lost my faith,” he told me in our first session. “Faith has lost me. God was not in the trenches, Doctor. I looked for Him there, in every shell hole, in every dying man’s eyes. He had gone away, like a parent abandoning a child in the woods.”

I treated him for two years, watching as he struggled to rebuild some form of belief, not necessarily in God but in the possibility of meaning itself. His case forced me to confront the limitations of both my professional training and my personal faith. How does one treat a soul that believes itself abandoned by God?

This question would return to haunt me in ways I could never have imagined as I sat in that garden with the shell-shocked teacher, or listened to my grandfather’s certainties about God’s Croatian allegiance. The human mind, I have learned, is capable of extraordinary resilience and horrifying cruelty. It can construct elaborate systems of meaning or tear them down in moments of trauma.

When Archbishop Stepinac summoned me to discuss what would become my work at Jasenovac, I was already well-versed in documenting the soul’s capacity for flight. What I had yet to learn was its capacity for witnessing, for bearing the unbearable while maintaining enough presence to record it all. This, perhaps, is the true breaking point – not where the soul flees, but where it chooses to stay and watch.

My grandfather died in 1941, just before I received my assignment. At his funeral, standing in the same church where I had made my first confession, I remembered his words about God being on the side of the Croats. The priests sang the same hymns that had accompanied those soldiers in 1914, but now they echoed differently in my ears, carrying questions instead of certainties.

That evening, in my office at the university, I opened a new notebook. On its first page, I wrote what would become the framework for all my subsequent observations: “Query: Is God present in the observation of evil, or only in the resistance to it? Secondary query: What breaks first – the capacity for cruelty, or the capacity to witness it?”

The answers, I would learn, lie not in any single moment of breaking, but in the countless small choices that lead us toward or away from our own humanity. As I write this now, my notebooks filled with evidence of both the human capacity for evil and for endurance, I understand that my grandfather was both right and wrong. God is not on the side of any nation. He is present in the act of witnessing itself, in the choice to observe and record even when observation becomes almost unbearable.