Visiting my hometown of Daruvar, Croatia, in 1986, I was taken aback when a friend told me, “Go back to the States! We’ll have a war here. Serbs have lists of all the Croatian households. At night they will slit our throats.” I thought he was crazy. Now I think I was crazy not to see the warning signs.
Four years later, I returned to Croatia with my American wife Jeanette and my Croatian friend Daniel to celebrate Croatia’s declaration of statehood. As we approached Yarun, on the outskirts of Zagreb, we saw lights and rising smoke, then we smelled piglets, oxen, and lambs roasting, and beer and plum brandy. Here, among half a million Croats, there were very few Serbs, because they feared the outburst of Croatian nationalism. The Croatian red-and-white checkerboard flags swayed in the rising smoke amid crowds cheering and shrieking songs that had been prohibited for forty-five years. Now and then the singers glanced about mistrustfully, as though Tito’s cops from the old days might swoop down on horses and club them.
I hid my bearded face after Daniel said beards were a sign of Serbian nationalism. From the shadows where I stood all evening, I saw only four beards.
A few drunks in the crowd frothed at the mouth, but nothing violent happened the whole evening, an accomplishment celebrated by the press the next morning. But on my way home, from a crammed bus, I saw the corpse of a motorcyclist carried into an ambulance. Perhaps the man died recklessly, drunk on alcohol and nationalism. I worried that he foreshadowed Croatian liberty: a Hell’s Angel smashing into a Serbian truck on a dark night.
Until the age of twelve, I didn’t even know there were nations. My parents taught me that I was a Baptist, everybody treated me like a Baptist, and that was that. Then I heard about Croats and Serbs on a radio show. I asked my mother whether I was a Croat or a Serb, and she said she thought I was a Croat, but not much of one, because of mixed marriages. Still, excited that I could have a new identity — be a new person, be born again, something highly thrilling for a Baptist! — I ran over to a friend’s house. I found him plucking grass from the cracks in the pavement so that it would look clean for May Day.
“Danko, I’m a Croat. Are you a Serb?” I asked.
Danko dropped his lower jaw. His mother frowned, her lips vanishing into a blade-thin line. His father’s heavily browed gaze nailed me to the ground. I realized I had said something absolutely wrong — that nationality must be a greater and dirtier secret than sex!
I quickly forgot the whole business, but was reminded of it a couple of years later, in 1971, when friends from Zagreb explained to me how Croatia had enough oil and foreign currency from tourism to do beautifully on her own, and how Serbia stole the money. It was the Croatian Spring, the spring that Yugoslav federal police attacked students demonstrating in Zagreb, cracking skulls and clavicles. In the attack, a man from my town disappeared; his father, who never heard from him again, walked around town obsessively, his hair completely white.
After 1971, friendships often split along ethnic lines. Some friends who began to meet in a Catholic — and Croatian — “secret society” distanced themselves from me because I was a Baptist and my last name was common in Serbia. I believed you could rise above such divisions and have some kind of pan-national, global identity. So I went to study in Novi Sad, Vojvodina, a Serbian province with a large Hungarian population. My roommates were a Croat, a Muslim, and a Bosnian Serb. The Serb constantly quarreled with the Croat and the Muslim. He told me I should change my speech so I would not sound like a Croat; otherwise, I would fail my anatomy exam, which a Montenegrin Serb would run. But what happened instead was that the examiner threw my Serbian roommate out of the examination room and invited me to be his assistant because he was so happy with my answers. He was not a nationalist.
I became good friends with my Muslim roommate, and got along fine with the rest. Most people, it seemed to me, were not nationalists. So what is happening now is all the more incomprehensible.
Recently, my hometown of Daruvar was bombed — just like in World War II! I wonder if the house I was born in is still standing. But will I grab a machine gun to fight the Serbian conquistadores and defend my fatherland? I don’t feel that Slavonia (eastern Croatia) is my fatherland; I could get along with neither the Croatian Catholics nor the Serbian Orthodox, who both despised Baptists. Growing up, many children were forbidden to play with me, and in some homes, parents told me not to step over their threshold because they wanted nothing to do with the new believers. In fact, I didn’t get along with the Baptists, either.
How could I be a patriotic soldier? I have always detested the military. Despotism comes to mind when I think of the Yugoslav military and the Yugoslav police, both Serb-dominated. In Daruvar, where Serbs constituted only one-third of the population, the entire police station was Serbian. If you criticized the Serbian hegemony, you could be jailed as a nationalist.
In order to get ahead, some people pretended to be Serbs. I knew a Croatian banker who subscribed to all the Belgrade political journals in Cyrillic, gave his sons Serbian names, and advanced in his post. My uncle was promoted in his Belgrade firm after claiming that our family was Serbian.
I faked high blood pressure to evade military service and won a temporary reprieve. I emigrated to the United States when I was twenty, after quitting my medical studies, but the federal army continued sending draft notices to my address in Yugoslavia. For years I did not visit because I was in effect a deserter.
I considered myself a pacifist. When I was interviewed for U.S. citizenship, I said I would not bear arms for this country. The interviewers, who clearly wanted me to pass the test, told me that if I did not say yes, they would annul my application. They reasoned with me that bearing arms did not mean that I would have to shoot; I could shoot into the air. So I said yes.
Meanwhile, I feel I have betrayed my native country. Perhaps I should go to Slavonia and protect my people, my relatives, my friends. Beyond that I don’t know whom to defend. Perhaps Hungarians (I’m a quarter Hungarian), Czechs (also a quarter), Croats (a quarter), and Slovenes.
My story of malingering is common. For decades, many Croats took pride in tricking military recruiters. Serbs, on the other hand, would hang themselves if rejected for service. I had wondered why it was so easy to trick the recruiters. Now I know. The Serbian administration must have been happy to see the Croats demilitarized, untrained for the type of showdown we are having now.
There were few Croatian officers in the Yugoslav federal army — partly a Croatian failing, and partly a Serbian success in repressing Croats. For example, the military used only the Serbian version of the Serbo-Croat language, rather than using both Croatian and Serbian. I’ve heard stories from many Croats who did serve in the army, but were abused for speaking Croatian.
Croats got only blame for any kind of military involvement, so naturally they felt that a military career was not a good option. My Serbian high-school history teacher gave numerous lectures about Croatian atrocities in World War II, but never mentioned any Serbian misdoings. Jasenovac, a concentration camp thirty-five miles south of Daruvar, stood as a blight on the Croatian nation and was amply talked about at school, in the papers, in the streets.
Last summer, I went with my wife and a Serbian friend to Jasenovac. A gigantic sculpture of a flame rose over a meadow where the multitudes were slain. Dozens of storks flew over the fields. A nearby village — where old people in rags, and chickens and pigs roamed the dusty streets — exuded somberness. The camp museum contained surprisingly few objects from the victims. The guard invited us to see a documentary about the camp, without explaining that the footage was not from Jasenovac. Images from German concentration camps flashed at us — bulldozers piling up emaciated corpses — accompanied by a soundtrack of howling winds and human cries. Several Serbian families were also watching the documentary, their children at their knees. Their faces hardened; lips vanished. No doubt they believed the scenes were from Jasenovac. The educational film, designed to inspire Croat-hatred, was a complete success.
Visiting Auschwitz in Poland, Jeanette and I saw mounds of victims’ hair, glasses, luggage, and furnaces and tools of torture — an overwhelming amount of evidence, unlike in Jasenovac. On a map of all the concentration camps in Europe, Jasenovac was listed only as a train depot, along with dozens of others. I realized what a complex thing history must be.
Teachers neglected to point out to us that in Yugoslavia’s war against the Nazis, the leaders were Croats — Tito, Ribar, and others — and that the Croatian government in World War II was not democratically elected, but a puppet. Croatia was split between the communists and the Nazis — and most people avoided both. Families split. My maternal grandmother divorced her husband because he wouldn’t join the partisans with her; he not only stayed out of the armies, but preached against all of them, for which he did time after the war. The partisans who jailed him told him that the only reason they wouldn’t execute him was that he had lived in the United States for twelve years (as a metal factory worker in Cleveland), where his head had been filled with strange ideas. Once you returned from America — nothing wrong with staying there — you were clearly insane.
After censorship slackened three years ago, the Zagreb media brought out the other side of the story of World War II: caves filled with human skeletons, remains of Croatian victims killed by partisans and Serbs. Children stared at pictures of smashed skulls next to the pornographic pictures of oral and anal sex which flooded shop windows all over Hungary and Yugoslavia.
The current crisis, as I see it, comes from the bad teaching of history, rather than from bad history. The winner writes history and the loser rewrites it. After World War II, Serbia took the role of the winner and the writer of history, though it was no more responsible for Germany’s defeat than Croatia was. And now Croatia, the loser, has been attempting a rewrite. It could almost be seen as a high-school writing competition, if the consequences were not so grave.
If the first victim in war is the truth, it seems that both world wars never ended in Yugoslavia, but have continued quietly, behind the scenes.
On the phone, my brother in Daruvar tells me that our older sister, Nada, on her way to buy bread in Vinkovci, early in the morning — because the cheap black bread sells out early — was hit by a Yugoslav mortar. A piece of iron penetrated deep into her liver. She underwent surgery without painkillers, nearly bleeding to death. When she was in critical condition, the Serbs bombed the hospital; she was transferred to the basement, which has terrible hygienic conditions. She could have been killed; it is still not certain how well she is doing.
Her husband Kornel, a metal factory worker, suffered a heart attack three years ago. I don’t know how he’s handling the constant bombardment. My second brother, a theology student in Switzerland, says that he could hardly hear Kornel on the phone because the explosions were so loud.
Last summer Jeanette and I visited Nada and Kornel. Nada had given birth to five sons — one died of heart failure — and one daughter, and now was a gray old woman at the age of fifty-five (twenty years older than I). Now and then, her neck and eyes twitched uncontrollably. She raised her children in relentless poverty and feared for her husband’s heart.
Their five children dream of going to America. But the four boys will have to join the Croatian or the federal army. One of the boys, I remember, used to take his father’s lesson — turn the other cheek — so literally that every day he came home with bruises, a bleeding nose, black eyes. Children beat him and ridiculed him for his religious beliefs. Kornel protested in vain to the school principal and the police. Finally, he tried to re-educate his son. Fight back, he said. But Daniel remained averse to violence. Will he change now? I wonder. Shouldn’t he?
And shouldn’t I go over there and join?
There may be a better way to help. Boris, a Croatian friend of mine, who was teaching at an American university, called me a week ago and said he could secure dialysis machines for the town of Pakrac, where bombs had destroyed the kidney ward. I admired my friend’s scheme. But a day later he called to say he was quitting his teaching post and going to Croatia to fight the Serbs. Better bullets than dialysis, apparently.
I called up Ivo Banac, a prominent historian from Yale, and he advised me, “Yes, all kinds of terrible things are happening. Everything is true. Just write it down.”
On the phone, a Croatian acquaintance told me that Serbian guerrillas had committed astonishing atrocities — mutilated old men and forced them to eat their own testicles, plucked out their eyeballs and forced them to eat their own eyes.
A Serbian friend of mine tells me of a friend who fled Belgrade because the Serbian police slaughtered his best buddy, a leader of a peace protest, in his bed.
I try to see the bright side: at least there is a peace movement. Could Croatia have a sensible peace movement, or would it simply be a push for surrender and slavery?
Guerrillas have killed many journalists, so, when a Texan friend of mine, a journalist, told me I should go to Yugoslavia to gather stories from the front, I laughed at him. As though a press card meant anything there! And how would I live in Croatia? I’m broke. Moreover, who would give me a press card? The newspapers I called either already had journalists there or did not want to send any.
So, the phone is as close as I get to being there. Almost all the Croats I know in this country have overstepped their phone allowances. One man is so much in debt to the phone company that he’s hiding from the FBI. In Yugoslavia, he probably feared the UDBA, the secret police, would jail him. Here, it’s the FBI. I guess you re-create your psychological reality no matter where you go.
I bought a shortwave radio. Last night the BBC reported from Pakrac, where my older brother works as an eye surgeon. From a nearby mountain, Serbian guerrillas had shelled the town and demolished the hospital. The interviewers reported from the lunatic asylum’s basement, where inmates wail, crap, and live in a horrible stench to the melody of mortar fire.
Sixteen years ago, my brother took me for a visit to the asylum because I wanted to become a psychiatrist. I met there, as I was supposed to, Jesus Christ. If I had finished my medical studies, that is probably where I would have worked.
I called my brother, who told me the road to Pakrac was walled, so now he treats the wounded in Daruvar, where he lives, twelve miles to the north. A doctor friend of his had been killed when the whole ambulance team was hit by a projectile. Everyone else was killed, too. My brother was so depressed that he’d stop talking in the middle of a sentence. Thinking we had lost the connection, I’d ask, “Are you there?” Several seconds later, as though the answer required thought, he’d say, “Sure.”
To understand all of it, maybe I need philosophy. “War is the king of all,” said Heraclitus in fifth-century B.C. Did he mean that from war come all the good things: freedom, law, order, happiness? (And bad things, too, no doubt.) But I am no philosopher. And I am not ashamed of not being a philosopher.
What can philosophy do, anyway? A wizened old man or woman on a deathbed, Croatia needs five thousand ground-to-air missiles and fifty American or French fighter planes to survive. But if I have to give up philosophy, what will become of my essay? Sure, I could give up writing. I could have given up writing even before I began. The first story I wrote — in Croatian, in an attic in New Haven — I eagerly mailed off to a Serbian friend of mine in Zagreb, an editor of a literary magazine. He wrote back telling me to give up writing in Croatian because my form of Croatian was not a language. Too many Serbian words, he said, too much English syntax. It turned out my friend was in fact a Croat, and a pure Croatian language was a cultural mainstay, perhaps the only one, that you could keep as a subdued people. It struck me as too bizarre to censure my native vocabulary, so I decided to write in English, my stepmother tongue, as a linguistic exile. I quickly wrote something I called a novel, got a fellowship, and a prominent editor asked to see my work. After she read it, she told me to quit writing. It was a mess. I’m sure it was. But I liked the synthetic way of thinking that writing gave me — words, memories, images, ideas — a melting pot. Now I can’t help putting the pot into the fire, the civil war, six thousand miles away.
When my wife goes out I make phone calls. Like a child, I have to call up stealthily; otherwise, my wife will bring out a pen and show me that one call a day means twenty dollars, and a month of that, six hundred, and since I am now unemployed. . . . But that’s unimportant compared to what I’ve heard on the phone. Although the Croat government claims that about two thousand people have been killed so far, my older brother thinks there must be at least ten thousand dead among the Croats alone. That’s the consensus among the doctors he knows. He often drives out to the forest to collect the wounded and the dead.
For a while, instead of calling, I wrote letters but didn’t get any replies. I sent $130 to my friend Daniel in Zagreb. A letter did come back from him: he gave the money to a psychiatric asylum, though I know he’s poor. Maybe, as R.D. Laing said, those in the asylum are the sanest. (Or perhaps the least guilty.) Daniel has sent me my membership card; I am now a member of the Vrapce Psychiatric Ward. I suppose it’s better than being a member of a political party.
Another call. While our sister Nada was still in the hospital, two bombs exploded near her home. One smashed the gate, shattered the front windows, and blasted holes in the wall. The other smashed the door and Kornel’s pickup. Fortunately, Kornel and his kids were in the back room. Kornel had been building the house with his own hands for thirty years. He had worked for twenty years to afford the pickup. For Kornel, the worst thing in all this is that he cannot drive to the fields anymore to visit his bees and winterize the hives. Once a corpulent man, he now sits at home, thin, eating nothing; there probably isn’t much to eat anyway. He says it’s all the same to him whether he lives or dies.
A week later his son, my nephew, tells me over the phone that Kornel’s brother, a carpenter, made Kornel and Nada a present of two coffins. “This way, if you get killed, you won’t end up in a mass grave.”
I recently got a letter from my friend Boris, the one who gave up his teaching post in the States to join the Croatian Guard. Instead of joining the Guard, he helped in an old people’s home in Daruvar. His letter was filled with anecdotes. When supplies arrived, Daruvar got only stretchers for the wounded and a neighboring town got only hand grenades; so the towns exchanged their goods — a stretcher for a grenade.
A hearse broke down on the way to the cemetery; the procession of five hundred mourners took a detour to a car-repair shop and waited for five hours before going on to the graveyard. Touched by the anecdote, the German government shipped to the town a new hearse, a Mercedes, but the townspeople were enraged, not thankful, because the money spent on such an expensive car could have been better used in a town where the average salary is fifty dollars a month.
Anticipating the arrival of UN troops, the town parents, particularly the mothers, urged that a brothel be opened on the outskirts of town near the army barracks so the soldiers would leave the native daughters alone. But once the brothel was opened, the town fathers began frequenting it; the mothers are now urging that it be closed.
In a letter two weeks later, I learned that Boris now works as the liaison between Daruvar’s town council and the UN troops. Daruvar has become one of the four major centers for the UN troops in Croatia. It strikes me that, unlike me, Boris does something quite useful.
But despite the newly dispatched UN troops, I recently heard a report from a village near my hometown: a Croatian peasant, returning home from the woods with a bundle of branches for winter, found the severed heads of his wife, two daughters, and a son stuck on the fence posts of his home, drenched in blood.
December 1991
A portion of “The Fence Posts” previously appeared in Boulevard.
