Bloody Fairy Tale
Bloody Fairy Tale - meaning Summary
Ordinary Schoolday, Unbearable End
This poem recounts a single day when a class of boys, indistinguishable in age and routine, is led from school to execution. The refrain anchors the scene in a rural Balkans setting while emphasizing ordinariness: shared festivals, vaccinations, notebooks, and a math problem moments before death. By repeating sameness—same year, same desks, same expectations of long lives—the poem transforms individual stories into a collective elegy. The title’s “fairy tale” hints at bitter irony: a narrative frame that promises wonder but delivers atrocity. Without naming places or perpetrators, the poem asks readers to hold the contrast between everyday childhood and state violence, letting simple images carry the moral weight.
Read Complete AnalysesIt happened in a land of farmers on Hilly Balkan, far, far away; A troop of students died martyred on one single day. They were all born in the same year. For all of them, the school days were the same: They were all taken to the same festivals with cheer, they were all vaccinated until the last name, and they all died on the same day. It happened in a land of farmers on Hilly Balkan, far, far away; A troop of students died martyred on one single day. And only fifty-five minutes prior the death moment, a small troop of fidgets sat beside their school desks solving the same hard math quest: “If a traveler goes by foot, how much time he needs to rest...” And so on. Their thoughts were filled with same figures and tags and there was a countless amount of senseless As and Fs in their notebooks and in their bags. They were squeezing a whole bunch of secrets that mattered - either patriotic or a love letter - on the bottom of their pockets. And everyone of them supposed that he would for a long time, for a very, very long time run under the blue sky -- until all math quests on the world were done and gone by. It happened in a land of farmers on Hilly Balkan, far, far away; A troop of students died martyred on one single day. Whole rows of boys took each other’s hands and leaving the last school class went to the execution quietly, as the death was nothing but a smile. All friends in rows were, at the same moment, lifted up to the eternal domicile.
Between 19–21 October 1941 in Kragujevac (Serbia), German soldiers executed nearly 3000 civilians, among whom were students of local gymnasium. This poem is dedicated to them and their teachers.
It’s about killing of innocent school children -pupils in Kragujevac-Serbia by Germany soldiers in 1942 years, second world war .