Kosta was a sergeant, and along with other officers he was forced in barracks and told to work on the farms around a rural town called Heiden. My father fell in love with the area. He proceeded to make friends with the farmers he worked for and he flirted with Agnes, one of their daughters. One day the kisses went a step further and Agnes became pregnant. A scandal ensued. Her parents were incensed that their daughter had been impregnated by a dirty Slav (“race-mixing” was against German law) and accused him of rape. At a trial, my father was sentenced to three years in a harsh prison in Essen that he later referred to as a concentration camp.
In 1945, when Europe was liberated by the Allies, Yugoslavia won its freedom and became a Communist country with Josip Broz Tito at its head. He was able to unify the Slovenians, the Serbs, the Croats, the Bosnians, the Macedonians, and other ethnic groups, and to organize the rebuilding of Yugoslavia. People were hopeful they would have their lives back.
After his release from prison, my father never went back to Aleksinac, where he grew up (whose only distinction is that it was the first place U.S. forces in NATO mistakenly bombed during the 1998 war that finally split Yugoslavia after Tito’s death.) In the spirit of rejuvenating the country, my father’s brother Marko, a bricklayer, volunteered for a brigade that repaired the devastation left by the war in Yugoslavia. My father’s favorite brother was supporting Communism, something my father, ever a king’s supporter and anti-Communist, never knew.
Meanwhile my mother and Uncle Pete, still living with their uncle and his wife in Sveti Vid, were preparing to escape and rejoin their family. They had been denied permission to leave, even though Liza had written letters to Comrade Tito, pleading to be allowed to rejoin their beloved family in New York, where they were born. She wondered if her letters ever reached him; later she learned that they had been intercepted by a particular villager who had risen in the Communist Party ranks to a government position and had blocked their exits because of some old vendetta.
Uncle Dom helped Liz and Pete make their escape to the opposite shores of Italy. He brought them to a little boathouse a few miles from their village where they waited for a small boat. This had been arranged and paid for by him. After leaving them there, he went back home only to learn that that it would be another day before the boat was to arrive. He returned to the boathouse that evening with some food because he knew his niece and nephew would be frightened. Despite the curfew he got on his bicycle with some food for them and hugged them one more time. As he was returning in the dark, he was taken and jailed by local police for breaking curfew.
When the young brother and sister reached the Italian coastal town of Ancona, they were asked for papers. How could they prove their U.S. citizenship? The police thought they were lying and put them both in jail. Liza, now eighteen, sat in a cell peopled with prostitutes and thieves, crying in a corner until a nun who was a guard in the girls’ section asked her why she wouldn’t eat. In the Italian she learned during the occupation, Liza said she was going home to her parents. The nun was so moved by her story that she arranged a visit with the warden nun, who insisted that the teenagers were political prisoners. Liza pleaded, saying she had a relative in Rome who could confirm her story. When she was allowed to contact Ivo, the same cousin who had been taken to an Italian prison five years earlier, he came immediately, bringing papers from the consulate in Rome.
In 1948, events had come full circle. Ivo was thrilled to help the two young cousins who had given him such support years earlier. He treated them to good meals and cultural events in Rome while they awaited arrangements to go to New York. He was studying art history and preparing to be an academic, and they had a good time with him, but they were ready to move on.
At last they took off on a propeller plane to London and then to New York. They landed at LaGuardia Airport, but because of the time difference, no one met them—their family had the wrong time of arrival. Liza hailed a taxi to take them to the Bronx, to the address she showed the driver on a piece of paper. She didn’t know a word of English. By luck the driver was Italian, and she knew enough to speak to him. When they arrived at her family’s house on Cedar Avenue, she asked the driver to wait. She and Pete walked up to the door and knocked. Her mother answered and started screaming, crying, waving her arms, calling her husband’s name, overcome by the sight of her two beloved children, after nine years. My grandfather came to the door; they all hugged. He didn’t forget to pay the Italian taxi driver.
My mother began her new life in the land of her birth. At times, when she was alone, she wept because she couldn’t communicate in English. She missed her village life, the accordion she left behind, her uncle, aunt and friends. Playing the piano in the house helped.
My father came to the States shortly after my mother. He was sent to New York after the liberation because he had a relative there and he could start a new life, after what he had to endure.
This was my parents’ start in a new land, after much suffering in the old country. Their hopes and dreams were just beginning in New York. They met shortly thereafter. And that’s another story.
Imperfect Glass
I grew up in New York but didn’t speak any English until I picked it up in first grade. My parents were from Yugoslavia. We spoke only Serbo-Croatian and we didn’t have a TV. We socialized with family and other Yugoslavs. As a toddler, I would sit in the window of our kitchen and people would wave to me as they went through the yard to the elevator.
My parents met in 1950 after they emigrated to the United States and found jobs at the central Horn and Hardart retail food factory in Manhattan on 57th St. and West Side Drive. My mother packed donuts and cakes; my father maintained the furnaces. His first job was as a garbage packer, but the sight of food being thrown away in such large quantities made him physically ill. After years in a Nazi concentration camp, where starvation was his daily companion, he was throwing away food for a living. Needing so badly to work and make a living he nevertheless took the risk of asking his boss if he could have another job.
“Mr. Hardart,” he began. At the time family businesses were common, and the owner of this company actually knew his workers.
“Mr. Hardart,” my father said in his halting accented English. “I spent three years in concentration camp in Germany. I can’t see the food in the garbage. It’s too much. It makes me sick. I will do anything, anything else—wash toilets or any dirty job—just not this.”
Mr. Hardart understood, “I’ll see what I can do for you, Kosta.” My father became a stationary engineer in training on the night shift.
After her odyssey to New York from her village in Krk, my mother arrived in New York which to her looked like a jungle. It was so exotic and chaotic after her life in a small village. In the Bronx, her family had a nice little house overlooking the Harlem River, with a garden and even a goat, reminiscent of the old country. This softened the trauma for her. although she often sat at home in tears, unable to communicate with her American sister and brother, and feeling the loss of her village life, her grandmother, her home.
Dad met Mom, while cruising the assembly line one day, and was immediately determined to make her his wife. Their opposing political views—she supported Tito and the partisans, he was “a King’s man”—didn’t seem important. (King Peter, who was in power during World War II, was the last king of Yugoslavia and was deposed by Tito’s Communist government in 1945.) In addition, she was Croatian and Roman Catholic, he was Serb and Eastern Orthodox. He let none of this get in his way. He even agreed to convert to Roman Catholicism as my grandmother requested. My mother liked him—he was handsome and personable—and she thought she should get married.