Ozrenka

Ozren is a mountain in northern Bosnia, between Doboj and Zavidovići. At its foot, in the small village of Boljanić, my mother Julijana was born in August 1943. “In the first days, the newborn daughter had a somewhat misshapen, elongated little head. She was healthy and lively. We all came to love her,” my grandfather Franček wrote in his Memories from My Life. My mother also got a second name, Ozrenka, after the mountain beneath which she was born. The reason was not only the natural beauty of her birthplace but above all my grandparents’ gratitude to the people of the area, who, despite their own deprivation and the hardships of war, did everything to help a young family expelled by the Germans from Styria to Bosnia.

On those, thank God, rare but intense occasions when media in the service of truth turn their attention to my biography, the blame for my perverse character and worldview is most often attributed to my late father. But even if my father was not without sin, a large part of the blame for what and who I am—not only me but also my brothers Andrej and Gregor—must surely be attributed to my mother, her life experiences, her personality and her values. In the service of truth, it would certainly be right for me to reveal the full extent of her influence and responsibility.

When the Germans, with the help of local collaborators, came for my grandmother and grandfather, they gave them only a few hours to prepare for the journey. They were allowed to take only their eldest daughter, my aunt Breda. Their second child, newborn Marija, who had not yet been entered in the official registers of the pedantic occupying bureaucrats, they were forced to leave with neighbors. In the cattle wagon in which they traveled to Bosnia, my grandmother was still bleeding from the birth of a child who had been torn from her arms and whom she would never see again. Marija died only a month later, from one of the childhood illnesses, in the arms of a woman who was not her mother.

Immediately after arriving in Bosnia, my grandmother and grandfather began supporting the Partisans, and so that the family would have something to eat, my grandfather also began distilling brandy. You can deport Grandpa from Styria, but you can’t deport Styria from Grandpa. Grandma sold Grandpa’s schnapps in nearby villages while also running errands for the committees of the National Liberation Struggle. During her pregnancy, on her way back from a meeting of the Women’s Antifascist Front in Tuzla, my grandmother was captured by Chetniks, who shoved a shovel into her hands and forced her to dig her own grave. She was saved from the bullet at the last moment by an officer who started shouting that they were not going to kill pregnant women. Soon after my mother was born, typhus broke out in Boljanić. Since there were no medicines, the neighbors advised my grandmother to bathe her in urine. Today, a similar therapy, and not only for external use, is recommended against the coronavirus and a whole host of other health problems by the Bollywood star Akshay Kumar. Whether there was a causal link between the stinking bath and my mother’s survival, I don’t know, but the fact is that the experience did not give her any particular affection for alternative medicine. So this year, as soon as it was possible, she got vaccinated against Covid, and in contact with anti-vaxxers her temperament usually prevails over her otherwise exemplary tolerance.

I remembered all the horrors my grandparents, my mother and my aunt lived through during the war when, as a teenager, I brought a friend from Germany to visit my grandmother. When we were leaving, I apologized to Grandma for the pain this thoughtless invitation must have caused her. She looked at me as if I had lost my mind. “Matjaž, war is shit”—Grandma Anuncijata never minced her words—“but you can’t hate a whole nation. Every person decides for themselves whether to be good or bad.” Later she told me a story from one of the offensives against the Partisans, when a German soldier burst into the house. Grandma, with my mother in her arms, started shouting at him in shock, like a wife at a husband who stumbles home drunk in the morning. The man put down his rifle, sat down beside her and, in tears, began apologizing and showing her pictures of his six or seven children waiting for him at home. In the end he left them a month’s supply of powdered milk. Yes, war is shit. And everyone, not only in war, decides for themselves whether to be a good or a bad person.

Of course my mother doesn’t remember most of these events, except from what she was told, but they had an important influence on her attitude to people and the world. She cannot stand intolerance, hatred or nationalism. She is a die-hard anti-fascist, but, as the child of parents who were taken into the unknown in a cattle wagon, also a person with deep compassion for all those who, anywhere and on any side, shared a similar fate and often met an even more tragic end. Compassion, solidarity and humanity are values we were brought up with from childhood. They are not abstract moral aspirations but a reflection of my family’s life experience. None of us experienced what the migrant crisis brought to Slovenia as something that only happens to others, but as something that had already happened to us too. After the war, my grandparents returned to Slovenia, first to Gornja Radgona and then to the Styrian capital. This gives me the moral right today to support NK Maribor, at least when they are winning or not playing against Olimpija. My mother attended the First Maribor Grammar School, where her already eventful academic path was further complicated by meeting a journalist from Ljubljana a few years her senior. That little girl with the somewhat misshapen, elongated head had long since turned into a beautiful blonde young woman. She passed her final exams after two resits and with a ring on her finger.

She spent the first years of marriage with two small children in Trieste. My father was in his natural social and professional element there; my mother certainly was not. After a few years she had had it up to here with housekeeping and decided she would not spend her life cooking and cleaning. Before she had even unpacked all the suitcases after returning to Ljubljana, she enrolled at the Faculty of Arts and finished her studies on time. With two small children and great, but exclusively moral, support from my father. Ambition, independence and a willingness, if necessary, to hit the books, we brothers got above all from our mother. During our schooling she never nagged us or looked over our shoulders. If we understood that we were learning above all for ourselves, we would manage, she thought. And although her trust in our personal responsibility was put to some very hard tests, in the end she was right.

At the beginning of her studies, she brought home one day a fellow student, Darja, a young woman from Ljutomer who couldn’t find a place to live in Ljubljana and so came to stay with us for a few days. She stayed a few years. I owe my knowledge of the multiplication table and regular tooth-brushing to Darja. Darja is movable cultural heritage and deserves a column of her own, but through her, and through my parents’ other friends, with whom they had spent time almost since their teens, I discovered the meaning of true friendship. The kind that lasts a lifetime. Today, after more than half a century of close friendship, they still meet regularly. Lately, often on Friday evenings, when they like to stroll through the center of Ljubljana.

During her studies, my mother saved enough from the housekeeping money my father gave her to take my brother Andrej and me, our cousin Romana and our friend Igor, together with Darja, to Denmark for a month. At the age of eight, what impressed me most were the Tivoli amusement park, the nudists at the swimming pool next to the Parken stadium, and the raid on the cold buffet that Darja, with the help of us children, carried out at a reception to which we had been rashly invited. On that first big journey, my mother passed on to us her passion for discovering the world. She traveled with my father, from Brazil to Greenland, and after his death also with friends or alone. For her 75th birthday we gave her a plane ticket to Gambia. “If you’re good,” my elder brother promised her on behalf of all of us, “you’ll get a return ticket.” A very unusual sense of humor is another thing we have to thank our parents for. When I reminded my brother of their wedding anniversary a few days ago, he replied that he had already congratulated Mum but couldn’t get Dad on the phone.

My mother is an educationalist and psychologist by training. She spent most of her career at the Ministry of Justice, where she was responsible for the education of prisoners. Here another of her qualities came to the fore, namely that she sees something good in almost every person. Almost. This quality of hers has lately been increasingly put to the test. My mother never passed her driving test, and I have never seen her on a bicycle either. Which is funny, since she is so fond of cyclists.