Fare Well, Illyria

Chapter 4: Macedonia

Chapter 4 Macedonia The Convair 340 was packed with Macedonians anxious about their families and homes. In the cockpit, the JaT pilot dipped the nose down over the city and rolled the plane slightly to the starboard to give me an opportunity to snap pictures from the cockpit with my clumsy but reliable rolleiflex : a first glimpse of devastated Skopje following the earthquake of July 26, 1963. It was noontime, some seven hours after the great tremor struck. “From the air Skopje looked as if it had been struck by a heavy bombing raid,” I wrote in my first dispatch. “Gaping holes where roofs had been. a haze of brick and mortar dust hung over the city.” The pilot was one of dozens of yugoslavs who helped me that day and later to report the event—from the JaT personnel at Surčin, who got me aboard the first civilian Skopje flight, to Bora Čausev, the Macedonian secretary of home affairs who started the city’s rescue and evacuation operations a mere twenty minutes after the initial shock. He had emergency experience with a huge flood of the Vardar river in Skopje eight months earlier. Čausev told me I was the first foreign journalist to arrive at the quake scene. But I was also a greenhorn with less than two months in the Balkans and one hundred words of Serbo-Croatian. yugoslavs seemed almost by instinct to realize that Skopje needed a lot of help and including help from abroad. Most striking was the extraordinary silence and seeming purposefulness of people walking amid the shattered buildings and crazily slanted lamp poles, some of them pushing wooden barrows loaded with bedding and other household belongings. Bora Čausev said there was an initial 48 FARE WELL, ILLYRIA moment of panic with crowds running headlong through the streets, but soon calm prevailed. Thanks in part to his efforts, thousands of People’s army soldiers, firemen, policemen, and health workers were summoned to Skopje to assist. The temperature under the cloudless skies was in the high 90s. Initially there were strong fears of an outbreak of typhus. Numerous water trucks provided relief. They were mobbed by thirsty citizens as soon as they stopped. excavating machines and brigades of men with shovels and picks were deployed to the hotels Makedonija and Skopje, where scores of guests lay pinned alive under rubble and others were already dead. It was easy to gather material for a report on the quake. The difficulty lay in finding a way to transmit a dispatch. Telephone and telegraph lines were down and the Skopje radio station was a shambles. The nearest functioning phone line appeared to be in Kumanovo, twenty-six miles to the east. I hitched a ride and walked to the post office, where I tapped a report on my sky blue 8.6 lb. Hermes typewriter and queued up at the counter for telephone calls. It was after dark when I got through to Mirjana Komarečki, my Belgrade office manager, and dictated the dispatch to her for transmission by telex to New york. I also told her to be on the watch for a roll of film from the rolleiflex, which a Belgrade colleague would bring to her. The first-day story got through for the first edition printed that night. To my astonishment everything functioned smoothly amid the chaos and, in The Sunday New York Times of July 29, five of the Skopje photos from the film roll were printed. * * * It dawned on me that the Skopje earthquake, though relatively small in terms of death toll (1,070), had become a major international event. a sign perhaps of yugoslavia’s peculiar nature, perched precariously between east and West, but siding with neither. That morning, George F. Kennan, on his last day of ambassadorship to yugoslavia, donated a pint of blood to aid victims. lawrence (larry) eagleburger, then a junior officer, having drawn the weekend duty at the american embassy in Belgrade, succeeded by telephone(s) to get the U.S. army to fly its eighth evacuation Field Hospital with 200 physicians and nurses from ramstein, Germany, to a site near Kumanovo. They started work three days after the quake. (eagleburger, himself later an ambassador to yugoslavia, was dubbed “lawrence of Macedonia” by colleagues—parallel to the soubriquet of T.e. “lawrence of arabia”). 49 Macedonia Major international contributions came as well from Britain, Sweden...