I was born in a country that no longer exists: Yugoslavia.
A few days ago, in Jajce, Bosnia and Herzegovina, I walked into the hall where, in November 1943, decisions were made that helped shape the country into which I would eventually be born. I wasn't prepared for how it would affect me. There were the old wooden chairs, the stage and photographs from that extraordinary gathering. Tito's chair was still there. In the photographs he was young and confident, in the middle of a terrible war, helping to create something that had not yet fully taken shape.
Suddenly my eyes filled with tears. This wasn't somebody else's history. It was mine.
I was Yugoslav. Croatia was the republic where I was born, one of six republics, along with two autonomous provinces, but Yugoslavia was my country. We didn't think very much about it. Among ourselves, someone might say, “Oh, he's Serbian,” or “They're Bosnian,” as a way of placing where someone came from. But when we lived in Germany and someone asked where we were from, we didn't say Croatia. We said Yugoslavia. We were Yugos, and there was pride in that.
We were a relatively small country, but we were respected in the world. We belonged neither to Moscow nor to Washington. Tito had broken with Stalin, and Yugoslavia developed its own form of socialism. Later, together with leaders including Jawaharlal Nehru of India and Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt, Tito became one of the principal figures behind the Non-Aligned Movement. Yugoslavia somehow occupied a place on the world stage far larger than its size might have suggested.
Even today, when I tell people I was born in socialist Yugoslavia, I sometimes realize that the country they imagine is not the country I remember. It was a one-party socialist state, and Party membership could open doors. I understood that even as a child. I saw families where the father belonged to the Party and knew that sometimes they prospered because of it. I heard adults talk about such things, although I was too young to form political opinions of my own.
My father would not play that game. He respected Tito and what he had accomplished, but he had his own beliefs and wasn't going to claim allegiance to a political party simply because doing so might make his life easier. That was my father. Good or bad, he was true to himself. But he didn't leave Yugoslavia because he hated his country, nor were we escaping political persecution. He left because he saw greater economic opportunity elsewhere. And he could leave. Our borders were open. Yugoslavs traveled and worked throughout Western Europe. We were not living sealed behind the Iron Curtain.
As for me, I was fourteen and delighted by the adventure. Perhaps I was simply born adaptable, curious and open to whatever came next. The old and familiar bored me even then. I had no idea how far that curiosity would eventually take me. Yet wherever I went, when someone asked where I came from, the answer remained the same: Yugoslavia. There are many words used to describe Tito today, socialist, communist, authoritarian, dictator. History can decide which ones belong to him. But reducing a human being, or an entire period of history, to a single word has never interested me very much.
Whatever one chooses to call Tito, he helped create and hold together a federation of different peoples, religions, languages and histories. He led a country with a political system unlike that of the Soviet bloc and gave a relatively small nation an international presence far beyond its size. We were proud of that. I was proud of that.
When Tito died on May 4, 1980, I was already living in Florida, and I cried. I remember the faces of people back home. There was enormous sadness, but there was something else, too: fear. What would happen to Yugoslavia without him? It felt as though we had lost a father. And in a way, the nation had lost its father.
Four days later, the world came to Belgrade to bury him. Kings, presidents and prime ministers came from East and West and from across the Non-Aligned world. Delegations representing more than a hundred countries attended. Whatever judgment history makes of Tito, the people who came to his funeral tell us something about the place he and Yugoslavia occupied in the world at that moment.
Then the wind began to change.
By the time Yugoslavia started coming apart a decade later, nationalism had become so powerful that perhaps separation was inevitable. I remember when Slovenia seceded in 1991. We happened to be spending the summer in the village when, in the middle of the night, my father heard something on the radio and woke us. He told us to pack. He was afraid the borders might close and we wouldn't be able to get out.
So we packed and left.
The country whose open borders had once seemed so natural to us was beginning to disappear. During other summers in the village, we could sometimes hear gunfire in the distance. Sisak and Petrinja were not so far away. Those were terribly sad years, and eventually Yugoslavia vanished from the map altogether.
New countries took its place, with new flags, new passports and new national identities. History began to be viewed through those new identities as well. I understand that. Every new country needs to tell its own story. What I find harder to understand is when telling a new story requires pushing the old one away. History doesn't cease to be history because it has become inconvenient.
Perhaps that is part of what moved me so much in Jajce. There, in Bosnia and Herzegovina, nobody seemed afraid to let that history remain. The photographs were still on the walls, the chairs were still in the room, and Tito and Yugoslavia were still part of the story. Nobody was asking me to admire it, and nobody was asking me to condemn it. It was simply history.
I stood looking at that young, confident man in those old black-and-white photographs and thinking about everything he could not possibly have known. He couldn't know that the country being created would one day become my country, or that a little girl would be born in one of its six republics, leave at fourteen and continue telling people she was Yugoslav.
He couldn't know that when he died, that girl would be thousands of miles away in Florida and would cry. He couldn't know that eleven years later her father would wake the family in the middle of the night, afraid that the borders of that same country might close. And he certainly couldn't know that more than eighty years after those photographs were taken, that girl, now an old woman who had traveled much of the world, would walk into that room in Jajce, see his chair and find her eyes filling with tears.
I don't want Yugoslavia recreated. That's not what I felt in Jajce. I felt gratitude for having known it, pride in where I came from, and admiration for what was accomplished, while understanding that neither the country nor the man who led it was perfect. And perhaps I felt some sadness that younger generations may never really understand what that country once meant to those of us who simply called it home.
Countries can disappear. Borders can change and flags can be replaced. But you cannot erase the country in which someone was a child.
I was born in Yugoslavia. It no longer exists, but it was my country. And for a little while in Jajce, I found it again. ❤️