Interrupted Flight: A Great School Lesson, Forty-Five Minutes Long

In a Serbian school, to be prozvan is to hear the teacher call your name, usually to stand up and answer.

On 20 October 1941, German soldiers came into the gymnasiums of Kragujevac and arrested pupils at their desks. Whole classes were taken. The next day, many of them were shot in Šumarice, on the edge of town, along with thousands of other civilians from Kragujevac and the villages around it. Šumarice is now a memorial park.

Two decades later, a Yugoslav film told the story with that school word. It was called Prozvan je i V-3: “V-3 has been called too”. V-3 was a class: the third section of the fifth year at the town’s First Gymnasium.

The letter V

A year after the film, a white V went up in Šumarice, where some of the pupils are buried. It is by the sculptor Miodrag Živković, and its official name is the Monument to the Executed Pupils and Teachers.

The V has long been read as the V of V-3, the class said to have been shot here together. An English-language guide to Yugoslav monuments still explains it that way. The local heritage institute sees something else in the shape: two severed wings, a weak bird that cannot quite leave the ground. Most visitors know the monument by a name closer to the second reading: Interrupted Flight.

A class photograph

Up close, the wings are crowded with faces and hands in shallow relief, row above row, like a class photograph.

Nobody in it is named.

The register

A class photograph comes with a register. In October 2024, the local newspaper Kragujevačke novine went back to the school’s own, along with its yearbooks, and checked them against the records of the post-war state commission.

According to the paper, three of the First Gymnasium’s classes, V-3 among them, were taught that autumn in a separate building across the street from the cathedral. No pupil from those three classes was arrested. Three teachers, the paper says, convinced the Germans that the pupils were children under sixteen.

The class that lost the most pupils was VIII-1. The article’s title uses the same word as the film: Prozvano je osmo jedan, “VIII-1 has been called”.

If the registers are right, V-3 is the class the soldiers did not take.

What the stone says

The stone at the foot of the monument calls no class.

Nor does it give a number. Only who is buried here, and when they were shot.

A lesson at the monument

Every 21 October, Kragujevac holds its main commemoration of the killings in front of this monument. It is called the Great School Lesson, Veliki školski čas. To the sound of a school bell, the first wreath is laid by a delegation from the town’s gymnasium. Over the years, dozens of new poems, plays and pieces of music have been written for it.

In 1941, the lessons were interrupted. Here, once a year, a lesson runs its full forty-five minutes.