of all those, soaked in wine. Great-grandfather learnt only as much Croatian as he needed for his transactions with local farmers. Games were broken off due to excessive drunkenness. Then they sang, retold their exploits and other’s misfortunes, and let out animal-like howls. Some drunkards had to sleep the night on the floor until they were brought new clothes because they’d pawned everything down to their underwear. The apprentices would come in the morning and sweep everything out onto the street: sawdust, broken glass and dead-drunk bodies. They would take great-grandfather home in the horse-drawn cart and put him to bed.
He quickly realised the value of having a private wine cellar, so he set one up in the premises next door. Then he bought the whole house and extended his business to renting out rooms. Things happened here which mellow-mooded gentlemen are inclined to desire in the middle of the night. Women from the annexe were part of the shop’s decor, tasked with topping up the glasses and sitting on customers’ knees. Grandfather learnt to sit on their knees at an early age, the notebook boasted. He grew up quickly, married at eighteen and immediately had a son, and another on the eve of the war. The elder, my father, spent a good part of his childhood helping out in the shop. The basement of that so educational business complex is today a macrobiotic food shop.
Great-grandfather was more inclined to the nocturnal aspects of entrepreneurship than to dry, academic business. Until Grandfather came of age, the day-to-day management was run by the apprentices, who sometimes lined their own pockets. If there was a profit, my great-grandfather looked the other way; otherwise he sacked them regardless of their diligence. A fanatical follower of his own instinct for happiness, every now and then he zeroed the business results and was left without a single bale of fabric, sack of flour or barrel of wine. Then he started from scratch again. I ask myself if he perhaps did that intentionally or because of a subconscious instinct to undermine whatever he’d built.
He was a great admirer of the Teutonic spirit: its breadth and firmness, its cult of vitality and personal expansion. A self-taught philosopher, he particularly esteemed German idealism. And he loved music, above all else, especially Wagner’s operas. He rarely got up before noon, and until then all noise was banned in the house, including kitchen clatter and children’s voices. But as soon as he opened his eyes he would start to sing arias from operas or military marches, whose words he would playfully, lasciviously change. That was a signal that one was allowed to talk at normal volume, and also for the beginning of preparations for the ritual main meal. He also sang while he shaved, then donned a fresh, starched white shirt which was waiting on the coat-hanger, while on the table was a little glass of rakija. Kein Glas mehr! he admonished, although rivers of wine had flowed the night before.
The house he bought in the Medveščak neighbourhood was soon populated. Along with three generations of my ancestors, there were also two Jewish girls who he took in as servants as much as out of compassion, and they also became part of the family. No problems were to be mentioned at the table, not even in the frequent periods of scarcity. Nothing was to spoil his mood or appetite. He had another child, a girl, in the early 1930s. He liked to caress her and both his grandsons in passing, amazed each time how much they had grown. Of this numerous household, Father was to be the only one to escape the concentration camps.
At first, it seemed that great-grandfather’s connections would guard his back. Business partners and pals held high positions in the new government of the Independent State of Croatia. His friendships with them now became especially cordial, assisted by many a costly gift. But the neighbours were also enterprising and proved to be even better connected. One June morning in 1942, an extermination team turned up at the door. Within a few minutes the whole household was out in the truck, with bundles of sheets containing what was needed for a new life, and a little more.
I’d heard about the truck before from Father. That morning he’d been sent on an errand, and when he returned he saw it in front of the courtyard fence. He ran after it until his legs gave way, sat down on a bench and cried, and then continued on down to Kačićeva Street. Men in uniforms were carrying out the merchandise and furniture. One of the apprentices spotted him, took him aside, and then out to his home village. His family let Father stay in the hayloft above the stable. He slept there until the war’s end, taking care of the cattle in return. For fear, he only went out at night. He returned to Zagreb at almost at the same time as the liberating Partisans. But he didn’t find anyone he knew. The shop was buried in rubbish since the building was missing all its windows and doors, and the Medveščak house had been occupied by a man with a moustache, lots of little stars and a resolute tone of voice. He arranged that Grandfather be taken in at a refuge for war orphans. After his three years of holidays, he went back to school. The curriculum was modest and the tests could be sat in advance. He soon caught up with his age group and, as an especially gifted pupil, earned a scholarship to study architecture. Towards the end of Father’s studies, Grandfather returned. He was another person altogether as if he’d been taken apart, limb by limb, and reassembled clumsily.
The notebook went into who and what had been in the truck, although the description was rather impressionistic. It was certain that the family was separated at the detention camp–a cluster of barracks somewhere on the outskirts of town, windowless and without beds, surrounded by barbed wire and guarded by thoroughbred German shepherds. When the accommodation was jam-packed, pure-bred Croatian selectors went through and sifted the human refuse, under the supervision of German delegates. They talked politely with every piece of refuse, and all the information was neatly recorded. Those fit for work were rewarded with a trip to Germany. Despite his germanophilia and assurances that he was still strong and healthy, my great-grandfather was rejected and sent to a holiday home somewhere in Croatia with my great-grandmother and their small daughter. Years later, Grandfather met a man who swore that all three had escaped during a mass breakout: they weren’t among the corpses piled up as a didactic installation to intimidate the local population. But another fellow maintained that he’d seen them along with about twenty others lined up on the bank of the River Sava that day; one after another, obediently, they stepped up to an Ustashi sledgehammer and then floated away lifeless down the river.
German technology was far more refined. Straight after their journey in a cattle wagon, Grandmother and Father’s brother were designated for the special showers and ovens. When the cattle were unloaded, they were divided once more. Like Grandfather, Grandmother was pointed to the right; but she didn’t allow her child to be torn from her arms, and so after several lashes of his whip the officer said Na gut, and gave her a towel and bar of soap; Grandfather was sent off with a group to have their heads shaved. This side or that, it all looked the same to him at the time–merely a question of sequence in the schedule of arrivals.
He must have been exceptionally resilient and resourceful. Step by step, he ascended the camp-inmates’ hierarchy. After a series of jobs outside in the rain and snow, with coal, cement and iron pipes, he advanced to a section of the barracks known as Canada after the fur coats which were sometimes found among the surplus possessions temporarily stored there. The punishment for theft was death by hanging, but the odd bauble, gold hairpin or tooth still made its way out of Canada in secret inner pockets to be exchanged for food or tobacco. He didn’t smoke before the concentration camp; he came out a hardened addict. If things had gone on for much longer, he probably would have set up an import-export firm with branches beyond the wire.
Riveted to his bunk with typhus and meningitis, he was among the few who didn’t wander off into the unknown before the Russians arrived, and the only one in his block who was still slightly alive. He wasn’t able to tell them his name or where he was from, so they took him along for a time as they advanced westward. As soon as he was able to walk again, they left him by the roadside. He roamed hungry from village to village, begging for food and sometimes stealing. Until one day he called on the widow of a German soldier and was able to stay on as a farm labourer, later as her husband.
You could make a living in the country in those days. Grandfather even went back to his trading alchemy, turning flour and lard into gold in the nearest city. In many respects, life began anew for him. Everything
