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Slightly Foxed 18 Summer 2008Editions
ReviewThis issue contains an article by Johnny about 'Spy In The Vatican', a memoir/diary by Branko Bokun of his time during the war as a Serb envoy trying to obtain an audience with the Pope. Here is the first half of the text: In 1986, when I had just started at the bookshop where I still work, I was given a book by a tall, amiable man in late middle age. He had a pronounced accent that I vaguely identified as Central European. He was the book’s author and he had just reprinted it himself. He imagined I might be interested. Branko Bokun’s Spy in the Vatican begins, ‘In April 1941, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany and her allies. With the surrender, a new State of Croatia was formed. The Ustashi, a band of Catholic fanatics, backed by the clergy, decided to eliminate all non-Catholics in Croatia. Orthodox Jews, Serbs and Gypsies – men, women and children – were slaughtered in their thousands.’ Four months previously, aged 21, Bokun had been accepted into the Yugoslav Foreign Office. When his country was ‘obliterated’, he joined the Serbian Red Cross, by whom he was sent to Rome. Registering at the University of Rome ostensibly to study ‘Corporate Economy’ and the ‘Doctrine of Fascism’, his real mission was to present a file of Ustashi atrocities to the Vatican. As well as several eye-witness accounts and photographic evidence, the file included a statement from a Catholic priest: ‘Brethren, up to now we have worked for the Holy Roman Catholic Church with the cross and the missal. Now the moment has come to work with a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. The more Serbs and Jews you succeed in eliminating, the more you will be raised in esteem in the heart of the Catholic Church.’ Since Ustashi policy depended on the Vatican’s power, surely the Pope Pius XII had only to say that he did not condone it and the atrocities would stop? One might assume that once our man had got the evidence into the right chap’s hands, the enlightened pontifical head would signal his disapproval. But shocking as the preamble is, what follows is, in a way, even more so. A week after delivering his file to Monsignor Montini, an influential figure in the Vatican, Bokun was told by the Monsignor’s secretary that he ‘has had a word with the Croatian Ambassador who explained that the atrocities described in your file are the work of the Communists, but maliciously attributed to the Catholics . . . We can do nothing further.’ Outside, amidst Bernini’s columns, a sympathetic Polish priest divulged that the Pope’s only response to German persecution of Catholics in Poland had been the observation that ‘Hours of painful distress are hours of grace.’ Moreover, it turned out that Bokun’s file was copied by the Vatican and sent to Italian counter-espionage. They in turn had been tipped off by an anonymous letter that he was an ‘agent provocateur for international Communism’. A priest in a confessional in St Peter’s told him that the Croatian Ambassador to the Vatican had managed to persuade everyone, including the Pope, that the Croatian massacres were for the ‘supreme glory of the Church of Rome in the Balkans’. As a member of the Red Cross, Bokun was in an extraordinary position. His pass was respected by everyone, including Germans, so that he was able to observe events with unusual detachment, and to keep some surprising company. Ivo, his closest friend, was a cynical, witty Yugoslav who worked as a censor for Italian Intelligence. ‘His job was to read all suspect ingoing and outgoing mail in Russian, Spanish, French and English, as well as Serbo-Croat. As a result there was little he did not know about the majority of the foreigners in Rome.’ Other friends included Sasha, a former lieutenant in the Red Army who had fled to Rome to study singing; Bora, a Romanian deserter who wanted to put on a stage version of Crime and Punishment; and Rudi, a Slovenian interpreter for the Gestapo of whom ‘no one was ever quite sure how seriously he took his job’. Everyone knew who was spying for whom, and it was understood that everyone had their own agenda, although they were all hostage to circumstances. Because the book is presented in diary form against this background of cynicism and helplessness, we see how everyone reacts to unfolding events and gossip in ways that are often very funny as well as alarming. - review by John de Falbe |
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