Our stay in Petrinja was not of long duration. One fine morning the order was given: ready to march. The 7th company was to relieve the force that was garrisoned in Rastovichza (Hrastovica). <\/p>\n
Rastovichza: Only 6 km from Petrinja lay the small village Rastovichza\u2014a brisk march, and we moved into the town.<\/p>\n
Rastovichza had on several occasions been threatened by partisan looting; several buildings had been burned to the ground, and others bore traces of fighting.
At the request of the inhabitants, and in order to protect them from further attacks, a small military force was permanently stationed in the town.
The 7th company immediately began the relief. The 1st platoon, under the command of the Danish Untersturmf\u00fchrer B\u2026, occupied positions to the south and east, where the road led out into the mountains and where wide meadows and a small river separated Rastovichza from the village of Taboriste.
The 2nd platoon, also under the command of a compatriot, Untersturmf\u00fchrer H\u2026, occupied the northern and north-western side facing the mountains and toward Petrinja.
The 3rd platoon, under the command of Oberscharf\u00fchrer Otto, took up positions to the west on a couple of projecting hillocks. A squad from the 8th company, equipped with infantry cannons, was stationed on the church hill in the middle of the town, and thus Rastovichza was secured. <\/p>\n
Rastovichza was about the size of an ordinary Danish village, but it looked rather different. Tucked in close beneath the forested limestone cliffs and with a wide view over the plains to the east, the small town had been built there.
A charming miniature church stood on the highest point of the town\u2014the church hill\u2014while the centre was a small open square below the church, the marketplace, as we called it. Here stood the town\u2019s only grocery shop, a few official buildings, and above all a spring with the best drinking water in the world\u2014crystal clear, ice cold, and of a remarkable taste.
The inhabitants were all farmers or closely connected to agriculture. Bakers, smiths, shoemakers, or other craftsmen did not exist; their functions were carried out by the farmers themselves in the old-fashioned way. <\/p>\n
Farms and houses lay scattered among one another in a strangely unplanned manner, reminiscent of children playing with building blocks. It was impossible for a stranger to tell where the boundaries between the different properties ran, and one wondered how the inhabitants themselves could keep track of what belonged to whom.
Apart from the parsonage, the post office, the grocery shop, and a few other buildings, everything was built of wood\u2014but what wood! Log houses made of the finest oak timber.
But how were they built? One might imagine a group of clumsy poorhouse inmates working on piecework with medieval tools, led by cross-eyed foremen\u2014that is how the houses stood: crooked, imprecise, and roughly constructed, certainly a hundred years old. <\/p>\n
That was Rastovichza\u2014an idyllic village on the surface, an average Balkan village, perhaps slightly better off than most.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2792,"template":"","personer":[115],"class_list":["post-2805","litteratur_og_kilder","type-litteratur_og_kilder","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","personer-marius-soerensen"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/litteratur_og_kilder\/2805","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/litteratur_og_kilder"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/litteratur_og_kilder"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2792"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2805"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"personer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/fkdanmark.simsoft.dk\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/personer?post=2805"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}