“Sonja,” she said so sweetly, recognizing my “Hello, Maria,” her voice rising at first, then falling slightly, the same way she used to say my name so many years ago. She seemed so glad to hear from me. We chatted about our lives. She was a nurse now and had just split up with a woman. I told her I was a lesbian. She said, “I’m not surprised.” We laughed.
Then I told her how sorry I was when years back I said no about getting together.
“Oh, that’s nothing,” Maria said. “I understood.”
Escapeto America
How my parents came to America is a story fraught with the politics of their country, Yugoslavia, and of World War II and its aftermath in Europe.
My mother’s older cousin Ivo tells this story: Hands cuffed behind his back, he was standing on the deck of a ship docked on the island of Krk, then part of Yugoslavia just before the Nazis took over. The ship was to take him to a prison in Rome. He had been accused of writing pro-Tito, pro-Communist graffiti on the town wall. The graffiti angered the Italian Fascists, who were in control of some Adriatic Sea islands and Croatian towns along the coast; they didn’t want anyone to get away with showing support for the Partisans. Local people were divided about who deserved their allegiance. Many looked away in disapproval as they passed Ivo standing on the ship awaiting his fate.
Word got to my mother, Liza, thirteen at the time and her brother Pete, a year younger. They ran to the harbor from their village of Sveti Vid (St. Vitus) as soon as they heard the news that their cousin had been captured and was to be taken away. They stood there on the dirt shore, wanting to go to him, but they could only wave as the ship pulled away. They knew enough about the politics of the times to understand that it was risky to be associated with Ivo, who was an “enemy of the people,” but they waved and he never forgot their bravery and concern. He could not know then that he would be able to repay them when they were in trouble some years ahead.
Yugoslavia was a young country, created in 1918, at the end of World War I, as a merger of the Kingdom of Serbia and various ethnic states of the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. In 1941, the Nazis conquered it, following the Italian Fascists. Other forces vying for power at the time were the Chetniks, a predominantly Serbian nationalist group, and the Partisans who were fighting a guerrilla war organized by Josip Broz Tito. The royalists, loyal to King Peter, and the Ustashe, Nazi supporters, were also part of the mix. But, as my mother said later, all these forces “were just killing their own people.”
During the invasion of Yugoslavia in 1941, the king’s army, including my father, a Montenegrin living in Serbia, defended their country with swords against the Nazis with guns. Ethnic Balkan conflicts were in full swing during World War II, the Croats and Serbs and other small nationalities taking the opportunity to air their historic hurts and act with a vengeance. Tito’s partisans eventually won control. The new Yugoslavia would be a Communist state, remaining independent of the Soviet Union and Stalin. The Partisans had fought for a new unified Yugoslavia free from foreign domination, and they had won.
For my mother, the days of the Nazi occupation of the Adriatic island of Krk were terrifying. Soldiers ransacked the village, taking the food and valuables the people had set aside for their own survival. One day when the Nazis descended on the village, my great-grandmother, hearing that the Nazis often raped the young women or took them away, quickly gave my fifteen-year-old mother some wine she had, to make her seem disabled. When the Nazis came to the door, my mother, who was not used to alcohol, slurred her words and rolled her eyes and they left, repelled.
Out of touch with her immediate family, who were safe in New York, my mother was happy to stay with her grandmother in the village. The family was just temporarily away and would soon come back. Then the war broke out and life became a struggle for survival. Every so often a care package might make it through the battle lines for someone in the village, which quickly became known to all the villagers. The food would be consumed before you could blink an eye. Villagers were forbidden by the occupiers to fish because of curfews and a ban on the use of flashlights.
Everything was in short supply including shoes. While my mother played the accordion for village events, her friend Mary had a beautiful soprano voice. Once, when they were supposed to parade into church to perform, Mary turned to my mother at the last moment and said, “I have no shoes and I am first in line. Give me your shoes.” It was much more important that Mary have shoes because she would be seen first. As they entered the church vestibule and the music was about to begin, Liza (my mother) took off her shoes and Mary quickly put them on. Still friends as grown women years later in the Bronx, they’d laugh about it.
I asked my grandparents when they were old, what they felt during that time of separation from their children who were in a war zone. They said, of course they had no idea such a vicious war would occur in Europe. They constantly worried about the news, so far away from their house in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium. Their son and daughter were in the utmost danger, and with no word from them, they feared the worst.
Liza and Pete, her brother, were actually born in New York in 1929 and 1930 at the start of the Great Depression. My grandfather, working in a foundry, felt he could better provide for his wife and three children by sending them back home to Sveti Vid, Krk, with money, which would go a much longer way there than in New York. Then he lost his job, and for a few years my grandfather went back to the village. He built the only house with a flush toilet before returning to New York. My grandmother and the three little ones stayed in Sveti Vid, and then came two more after visits from my grandfather. Eventually it got to be too much for my grandmother—the village gossip about ties to America and her husband being away, the five children she had to manage—so she planned to rejoin him in New York with the children. Things were getting better in the States and he had a good job as a carpenter at New York University. It was 1939, and Europe was rumbling.
Little Liza, my mother, only ten then, begged to stay with her grandmother, whom she loved. She wanted to continue playing her accordion and going to school with her friends, but most of all she didn’t want to part with her special grandmother. My mother remained with her grandmother and little Pete with his other grandmother. This was to be temporary. They could go to school on the island for one more year, perhaps, and then they come to New York. That was what my grandparents thought when they left.
When the war went into full swing shortly after, it grew impossible even to communicate. Although the tiny village of 350 seemed insignificant in the large scheme of things, it was used by both the Italians and the Nazis as a base and source of supplies. After both grandmothers died, the two children left behind were for all intents and purposes orphaned. They lived with their uncle and his new wife, and it was nine years before they saw their parents again, who were in grief and extreme anxiety about their children.
Meanwhile, my father, Kosta, in a different part of Yugoslavia, serving in King Peter’s Serbian army as an equestrian and swordsman, was captured by the Nazis in battle in northeastern Yugoslavia and taken to northern Germany to a work camp. In those terrible years after 1941, Yugoslavia was in thrall to the Nazis and their collaborators. The Balkan Jews were rounded up and the Nazis thought almost as little of the Slavs—they were lowlife among the pure Aryan race.