Bread Flowers

In my uncle's room on one of the shelfs there is little basket with artificial flowers under the glass dome. It was always there and I although being ( vaguely ) aware of it never gave it any attention at all. If someone had asked me ( and never did ) about I would say it is one of the kitschy things people buy when travel somewhere as a memento and then simply keep it forever as it is in human nature to hoard meaningless stuff. So when Dusko told us story behind it the other evening surprise was mild description of what I felt. During the war when Split was occupied by Italians my uncle was part of underground movement and he got the task to throw paint on Mussolini's posters that were all over the city. Being clumsy he soiled his clothes with paint so it was easy for Italians to find him, and he was sentenced and sent to Italian prison. While in prison he made this bouquet from bread . How did he manage to smuggle it and keep it not only there but also in German prison it is a mystery for me, but I understand now why he has kept it and made it into little shrine. I was very close to my uncle and spent hundreds of hours in his room discussing, literature, history and politics without him mentioning anything about the flowers. He actually never talked about prison and never had any grudge toward Italians and Germans unlike most of his generation. Quite contrary he was making his annual trip to Italy almost until year he died and Goethe's Faust was book he was reading in German in the last years of his life saying that it is the only fiction ever written worth of reading.
This discovery and the fact that I made it by chance, is stark reminder how little I know about my family, with my mother not being around anymore there is less and less people that I an ask about family history and as time goes buy that will be more and more difficult.