Jelena's Book

Jasenovac Concentration Camp, early 1940s

I. The Girl Who Was Never Counted
I wasn’t given a name at first—
only a number.
And even that,
they forgot to write down.

I remember the scent of boiled linen,
the sting of lye soap on my knees.
They told us we were lucky—
a roof, a uniform, silence.

But I had a sister, once.
She sang when no one was listening.
She drew flowers in the margins of her workbook
until the nun slapped her for wasting ink.

One day, they came for her.
The headmistress said she'd been
“placed somewhere more fitting.”
I never saw her again.

I stopped singing.
I stopped asking.
I folded myself in obedience
until I disappeared, too.

Only my shadow remained—

pressed into the floorboards of the chapel hallway.

It still smells like candle wax and blood. 

II. Jelena’s Book
She came to the camp with a braid too tight
and a book hidden under her skirt.

The guards took the braid—
but they never found the book.

She wasn’t the loudest,
not the bravest—
but she remembered everything:

the names, the songs,
the days that passed without bread,
her sister’s voice,
lavender pressed between dictionary pages—
a talisman against the bad.

Jelena wrote with anything she could find:
a bit of charcoal, a sliver of soap,
a piece of her own fingernail once.

She wrote on receipt backs,
on the latrine walls,
inside her skin—
where no one could reach.

The other girls watched her,
not because she was the strongest,
but because when she told a story,
the cold stopped biting so hard.

And the sky didn’t feel so far away.

She told tales of birds who outsmarted fences,
of forests that remembered your name,
of girls who stitched maps into their sleeves
and walked backward into freedom.

When her sister stopped coming,
she didn’t cry—
not where anyone could see.

She folded herself smaller still,
listened harder,
waited quieter.

Then one night, when the moon cracked open
just enough to show the edge of the wire,
she tore a piece from her coat lining
and began her last story.

She wrote it with blood from her bitten lip:
“I was here.
I was someone.
I loved. I learned. I waited.
I wrote.
My name was Jelena.
I belonged to no one but myself.”

And when they called roll the next morning,
she was gone.

But the girls say—
sometimes, when the wind shifts,
you can hear her voice in the bricks,
whispering stories
that still warm their bones.

And in a forgotten drawer,
in a place no one dares to raze,
there’s a scrap of cloth,
stiff with rusted red—
and words stitched in a trembling hand:

“Tell them I lived.”

Afterword (Jelena’s Whisper)
If they read this …
tell them to look for each other—

the ones who still sing,
the ones who hide stories in their socks,
the ones who pretend to be small.

Find them.
Write them down.
Save something soft for them.

I wasn’t the only one.

About the poet

Milanka Sulejic is a first-generation American writer and military veteran, born to parents from the former Yugoslavia. Her work channels her cultural heritage and life experiences into stories of resilience, memory, and transformation. As a linguist who served in Bosnia, Milanka blends lived history with the surreal, exploring the fractures between loss and healing. Her writing appears in the Written Tales anthology Flash Phantoms and is featured on the Frightening Tales podcast. She is currently completing her debut collection. Connect with her on Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/milankasulejic/.