Gavrilo Princip

An email from friend Leigh Candy told me after my last post about the assasination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand that it was Gavrilo Princip, a Serb, who got him, so I checked Wikipedia. The motivation was resentment at Austria taking over Yugoslavia. He got the wife with a second shot from a pistol after she instinctively threw herself over him to protect him on 28 June 1914.

Gavrilo and five others set out to kill him when he visited Sareyevo to open a hospital. They lined the streets as the open topped car travelled through. One of his mates threw a hand grenade which the driver saw coming and accelerated away from. It went off under the fourth car seriously wounding two occupants and several onlookers. Later the Archduke was on his way to the hospital to visit the injured when his car stalled right in front of Gavrilo who grasped his opportunity.

Too young to be executed Gavrilo was jailed for 20 years and died in prison in 1917 from complications from a broken arm. He had suffered tuberculosis in prison and was emaciated.

The house Gavrilo lived in was destroyed in WW1, rebuilt and destroyed again in WW11, and again in the 1990's war. What an amazing war history all in one century?

My friend Dirk the painter in Gembrook tells me he visited Yugoslavia in the 1980's He won a big prize offered by a paint company at the paint shop he buys at. He found it a beautiful and friendly place with warm people who'd fall over backwards to help you and show hospitality. He could hardly believe it when later the places he visited were torn apart by the savage war and so many massacred.

Leigh's good woman is Serbian and came to Australia to escape the ravages of war.

None of us has any say in where we are born or the circumstances of the time.