During the retreat to Niš with the First Army, we stayed in Mladenovac for almost the entire summer because there was no transport... There were interruptions in the railway service — the tracks would be out for ten kilometres, five kilometres, so we would walk, then wait for some convoy.
Some German prisoners were being held in a number of barracks there. Some of them were specialists of some kind who had remained behind and were working on something, I suppose. One of them had an old injury on his hands, and a soldier brought him to the infirmary for me to dress his wound. I cleaned the wound thoroughly and bandaged it carefully and gently, without looking at him particularly or speaking to him at all. Just professionally, attentively.
The soldier standing there said: “Comrade, you did that very gently.” He was actually reproaching me. He was criticising me for being gentle with a prisoner. But I was being gentle with a patient.
Then I remembered Šid, and I remembered that machine-gunner who hadn’t fired into our living flesh, but had let us pass. Now, to answer the soldier, so that he wouldn’t report me or accuse me of something because I had been so careful — and because the prisoner had even kissed my hand — I said to him: “Well, you know, comrade, I’m not a wartime nurse. I went to school for this, this is my profession. And this is my patient, a sick man.”
That was how I answered him. But in a way I was also making fun of the wartime nurses, because they were brave, but they weren’t trained professionals, while I, you see, was an “expert” nurse.
Two or three days later, they gathered us together for a lecture. Among other things, the political commissar giving the lecture said: “And let me tell you something in passing — treat these prisoners with care. They are no longer enemy soldiers; they are our prisoners, and we are their victors.”
So what I had said did, after all, reach the right place. They neither reprimanded nor punished me. In fact, indirectly, they gave me a kind of recognition that I had behaved in the right way.
I stayed in Niš for a year and a half, until 15 July 1946, when I returned to Belgrade once again, this time at my own request for a transfer. I was transferred to the Main Military Hospital in Belgrade, where I took up my post at the Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, working in microbiology. I remained there throughout my service in the army — twenty-four years.