The Šumarice Memorial Park is a beautiful green space in Kragujevac, Serbia. In contrast to many spomenik locations I've visited, this park is actively taken care of by the council and used by the local population. The sunny spring afternoon I visited, the grounds were alive with locals walking, relaxing, and exercising across the 3.5 square kilometers that hold a memorial building and 10 monuments.
The focus of my visit, the Interrupted Flight Memorial, recalls various elements of other spomeniks; the winged dimensions of Moslavina, the parkland around the Stone Flower, and the Serbian trend of anguished faces, also seen in Ostra.
The contrast between the graceful, yet broken-wing shape of this monument and the faces, makes an impactful memorial to the 2,300 people, including a couple of hundred school-aged boys, that were massacred in and around Kragujevac as retaliation for Partisan resistance fighters attacking and killing ten German Wehrmacht soldiers four days earlier.
In a way only the Yugoslavian people and artists have managed to do, Interrupted Flight is a beautiful memorial to people lost to the horrors of World War II.
