by Daša Drndic
Or perhaps this Branko Marjanović was connected with the Partisan Movement and worked during the war undercover? If that is the case, why is there no information about this, why does no one talk about it today? Andreas Ban knows that there were such situations, his mother was rescued from prison by a guard who was an Ustasha member of the Communist Youth Alliance. Do the collaborationists, true or false, who survive after the war somehow redeem themselves? Andreas Ban would like to know how, by what means? Do they perhaps live under the burden of a secret past life that runs through their veins, the ballast of which lies on their chests, so their breathing becomes shallow and their words soft, until it suffocates them to death?
In Zagreb in Matica Hrvatska hall on March 18, 2010, and on April 8 and 9 (avoiding the 10th),†† in the city libraries in Split and Imotski, two books were launched by a certain Carmen Vrljičak, according to the newspapers, “an Argentinian university lecturer, writer and journalist originally from the Imotski region.” The books are called Croacia, cuardernos de un país (“Croatia, Notebooks about a Country”) and This Is How It Was. Andreas Ban leafs through the newspapers, seeking any kind of statement by Professor Carmen Vrljičak connected with her family’s past, at least a parenthesis about her parents’ worldview and activities; in interviews published at this time, in March and April, Andreas Ban searches for some allusion to the time of the NDH from which, after the collapse of that monstrous, satellite, sponging and bloodthirsty creation, the family of Carmen Vrljičak (with many other families) flees, and finds nothing. Does this mean that Carmen Vrljičak condones what happened in Croatia between 1941 and 1945 under the government of the Leader Ante Pavelić, in which her parents participated zealously, or does the writer and university lecturer Carmen Vrljičak believe that those are i tempi passati, and pointless to rake over? From the newspapers Andreas Ban discovers that in her books, the journalist, writer and university lecturer Professor Carmen Vrljičak describes the natural beauties of her former homeland of Croatia, its folkloric tradition and also the enchanting and complex landscapes of her second homeland of Argentina.
Anyone can search online and find the following: The mother of Carmen Vrljičak, Mira Vrljičak, née Dugački (1917–2004) was a functionary in the NDH, Independent State of Croatia. While still at secondary school, she writes for the magazine For Faith and the Homeland and is a member of the Croatian Eagles’ Union, that is, a crusader. With the establishment of the NDH in 1941, Mira Vrljičak takes up the position of Chairwoman of the Women’s Ustasha Youth organization. In 1942, at a functionaries’ meeting in Zagreb, Mira Vrljičak gets acquainted with the district leader of the Dubrovnik branch of the Women’s Ustasha Youth organization, Dolores Bracanović, and suggests that she take over her function in that jovial organization for the corporeal and social strengthening of Croatian girls and young women, the future multiparae, who go to rallies and scamper joyfully in the Croatian countryside. Ah, how this obsession with nature so integrated in the psychophysical complex of crazed rightists, fascists, Nazis, Ustashas and other defenders of the hearth becomes a nauseating, porous front for hypnotizing the Lord’s flock, so that Andreas Ban, under attack by that natural dominion, increasingly shuns nature, I can no longer stand nature and its beauties, he says, shutting himself in his miniature Hades.
So, the honored and nationally conscious “pure-blooded” Croatian woman, Dolores Bracanović accepts her new office with enthusiasm and a full heart, which beats for the Independent State of Croatia, while Mira Vrljičak, as the wife of Kazimir Vrljičak, Consul of the NDH in Madrid, goes off with her husband to give birth to new and great little Croats. The end of the war finds the family in Spain, so it does not occur to the family, loyal to the NDH, to return to Croatia, which is no longer an independent Fascist state, instead the family, with their three children, one of whom is future journalist and university professor Carmen of this story, move to Argentina, where, entirely in the spirit of their Catholic worldview and nationalist ideology, the grand multipara Mira Vrljičak brings a further five little Vrljičaks into the world. In Argentina, the now fairly numerous Catholic Vrljičak family immediately join the activities of the Ustasha émigrés and live their undreamed dream.
It does not appear to occur to the journalist and university professor Carmen Vrljičak, as she walks freely through her former (lost) homeland of Croatia, to visit, say, an archive or two and take a look at the press which her parents followed with ardor and zealously supported. So now Andreas Ban, quite senselessly, and agitated, is doing that for her, determined to post whatever he finds on Professor Carmen Vrljičak’s Facebook page, in the faint hope that it will perhaps bring her to her senses. But it won’t.
And in 1991, Dolores Bracanović, former chairwoman of the Women’s Ustasha Youth, bigoted Catholic and teacher of German and Italian, hurries to Croatia and to a certain Tomislav Jonjić, and just before she passes, in 1997, well over eighty years old, into the other world, she wails about the beginnings of her “tortured” émigré life when, after the collapse of the NDH, she flees her beloved homeland and sails under a false name from Genoa to Argentina where, poor thing, she is first obliged to do physical work, what a tragedy, to sew jute sacks and, with a dose of revolting pathos, nostalgically recalls the announcement of the establishment of the NDH as “a moment of general enthusiasm for all Croats,” beginning almost every sentence with that “well” so beloved of Pavelić. And she, this Dolores Bracanović, also remarks, well, Let us not forget, she says, that a good number of the crimes committed “in the name of the NDH” were not carried out on the orders or intentions of the government, but represent actions of individuals and groups which in those chaotic circumstances exploited opportunities to act of their own accord, says Dolores Bracanović authoritatively, and Andreas Ban seems to hear the yelling of contemporary Croatian right-wingers
in relation to the crimes committed by the soldiers of various contemporary Croatian Armed Forces against the non-Croatian population in the 1991–1995 Homeland War.
This Dolores Bracanović talks about the time Mira Vrljičak introduced her to the Leader, who made an excellent impression on her, because the Leader was, she says, a straightforward and witty man, exceptionally close to the people. The Leader had a rare ability, says eighty-year-old Dolores Bracanović in 1991, a rare ability to speak warmly with both laborers and intellectuals. She had met numerous other high dignitaries, says Dolores Bracanović, well, she says, she did not have frequent contact with them, but was in contact with the wonderful Professor Oršanić,‡‡ and with lieutenant Dr. Lovro Sušić,§§ and she had particular contact, she says, with the supreme and ideal fighter for the Croatian cause, Božo Kavran.‖‖
Oh, and here comes Joža Vrljičak, the brother of “our” Carmen, editor of the Argentine journal Studia Croatica, whom the Croatian Government in 1995 decorates with the Order of the Croatian Triple-Strand,¶¶ while in June 2010 the journal Studia Croatica itself, which is “generally held to have played an important role in the life of Croats on the South American continent and beyond, publishing thousands of pages about Croatian literature, history, culture and politics,” is presented by President Dr. Ivo Josipović (in absentia) at the Croatian Center in Buenos Aires with a Charter of the Republic of Croatia designed in the worst possible kitsch style of modern folkloric traditional “art.” Everything would (perhaps) have been all right, the tenderness and compassion for those disconnected Ustasha clerical-Fascist émigrés, who had, on the face of it, sobered, and had the apparently civilized concern for their fine, educated offspring, if only those émigrés somewhere, somehow, publicly apologized to their victims, if their children and grandchildren at least glanced back at their forebears’ ideology of blood and soil. But no. Muddy little islands of poison continue to float through the Republic of Croatia. When founded, the journal Studia Croatica appoints as editor-in-chief the businessman Ivo Rojnica (1915–2007), the most prominent figure in the Ustasha NDH government for the Du
brovnik region and the main instigator of all the mass crimes and murders, torture and deportation to camps, torching, plunder and destruction of property, in other words, all the crimes carried out against Jews, Serbs and Croats from the beginning of the Italian occupation until September 1941 in the territory of the Greater Parish of Dubrava. And while various international organizations call (unsuccessfully) for the extradition of Ivo Rojnica, the established owner of Argentinian textile factories, proclaimed a war criminal in 1946 in the Federal National Republic of Yugoslavia, while, in other words, the progressive world calls for this Ivo Rojnica, also known as Ivan Rajčinović, the first chief editor of Studia Croatica, to be brought to trial, in 1993 President Franjo Tudjman appoints that same Ivo Rojnica Plenipotentiary of the Republic of Croatia in Argentina. Even though, under pressure from international public opinion, Franjo Tudjman soon relieves Ivo Rojnica of that duty, “the first Croatian President” makes amends by decorating the Ustasha Rojnica with the Order of Duke Trpimir, for “promoting Croatia in Argentina, and in particular for his work in bringing together the political, cultural and civic values of the Croatian people since the Second World War,” and now somewhere in Buenos Aires that medal shines to the delight of the eternally Great Croats.
After Mr. Rojnica, another senior functionary of the Independent State of Croatia becomes editor-in-chief of the leading archaic Croatian journal Studia Croatica, as today’s Croatia has the ever-growing prospect of becoming: archaic, hidebound, poor, and the servant of revised tradition abandoned by the world, but with splendid natural beauty and drinking water soon to be marketed. Dr. Radovan Latković, as glorified by Croatian neo-Ustasha, neo-Fascist and neo-Nazi websites, was director of Croatian State Radio and played “an important educational role, culturally enlightening the Croatian people via radio stations in Zagreb, Sarajevo, Banja Luka and Dubrovnik, and transmitting stations in Varaždin, Petrinja, Ogulin, Požega, Osijek and Hrvatska Mitrovica.” In 2001, in Zagreb, Jurčić Press publishes a book by this same, allegedly former Ustasha Radovan Latković, with the sentimental title We Lived and Worked for Croatia, and the still more abhorrent subtitle My Recollections of the Struggle for Croatian State Independence and the Freedom of the Croatian People: Memories and Documents 1930–1990.
Then yet another editor of that benign culturological journal, Studia Croatica, is appointed: Danijel Crljen, the NDH ideologue and Ustasha colonel in charge of education and propaganda in the Ustasha headquarters (GUS), secretary to the Ministry for Foreign Affairs and director of the State Directorate for Propaganda.
The function of editor-in-chief of the journal Studia Croatica is also carried out by Franjo Nevistić (1913–1984), district leader in the NDH of the University Command and editor-in-chief of the weekly newspaper Spremnost (“Readiness”).
Soon after the proclamation of state independence, after 1992, members of Pavelić’s family return to Croatia, finding nothing better to do with their time than to disturb the public with their fascist statements about the NDH as a lost paradise on earth. Pavelić’s bigoted daughter Mirjana, brought up on Ustasha ideology, and her husband Srećko Pšeničnik, also a functionary in the NDH and after the war, in exile, president of the terrorist organization the Croatian Liberation Movement, once Croatia had long since been saved from an absolute catastrophe by the Partisans and Allied forces, addresses, in one of the Tudjman years, inflamed masses in Bleiburg with the ominous prophecy: “You, Croatian soldiers, Ustashas and home guards, you had to be slaughtered because that is what the Communist occupiers wanted, but your spirit will lead to the resurrection of Croatia. The cursed enemy from beyond the Drina wished to crush forever the spirit of the Croatian people, but I say that, without Bosnia and Herzegovina, Srijem and the Bay of Kotor, there can be no free, sovereign and democratic state of Croatia. Our struggle was not in vain, and we find ourselves now on the eve of a final Croatian victory . . .”
Andreas Ban torments himself with all the scraps of information he digs up, rummages through, which seem unimportant, like desiccated data rotted in time, but they enter his rooms, sit at his table, knock into him in the street, and this is why he goes out less and less, why he refuses to listen and to hear.
Pavelić’s granddaughters come, they want their property back, one of them, with a bit of sadness and a great deal of determination, Ivana Sheridan-Pšeničnik, like her father, exclaims, “Today we have lost Bosnia and Herzegovina, the heart of the Croatian State. If Pavelić were alive, I believe he would be a member of parliament!”
In Melbourne there is a little restaurant, Katarina Zrinski, in which for many years April 10, 1941 has been celebrated and homage has been paid to Ante Pavelić. The Jerusalem Post of April 17, 2008, records that Croatian émigrés celebrate the genocidal policies of that leader of theirs, policies that led to the death of four hundred thousand Serbs, Jews, Roma and Croats. This event celebrating the leader of the Croatian Fascist Ustasha Movement is a shameless offense for its victims, but also for all those whose morals and conscience oppose racism and genocide, states Efraim Zuroff, the famous Nazi hunter. A local newspaper reports that there was a large photograph of Ante Pavelić hanging in the restaurant and that guests were able to buy T-shirts with his portrait on them.
This does not surprise Andreas Ban. In the little Istrian town of Rovinj there used to be a café in which a picture of Pavelić also hung, and under his gaze people chatted and greeted one another, he did not dare go there or say anything and risk getting beaten.
Then in 2010 Radoslav appears, son of that Andrija Artuković,*** saying that he would like to bury his father in his native Herzegovina. That would be perfectly all right, even President Josipović states in a conciliatory tone that everyone has a right to his own grave, but on January 14, 1988, when (after a lengthy public trial and passing of the death sentence) the war criminal, the butcher Artuković dies in a Zagreb prison hospital, Radoslav organizes a memorial mass for his father in Los Angeles, attended by four hundred nostalgic Ustasha souls and at which, to the horror of the American public, he announces in a military manner that his dear father Andrija Artuković was the victim of huge injustice and energetically denies all claims of mass murder committed on his father’s orders during the Second World War. A scandalized Los Angeles Times journalist explains to his readers that Andrija Artuković was a fascist, Minister for Internal Affairs and keeper of the state seal in the puppet government of the Independent State of Croatia, and that his son Radoslav is lying for all to see, lying and stating that his dear papa was an ordinary civilian minister and knew nothing about any concentration camps. The journalist explains that the American Supreme Court had ordered the extradition of Artuković so that he could be tried in Yugoslavia for war crimes and for mass murder, specifically for the shooting of 450 men, women and children in 1941, and for the elimination from the face of the earth of the entire population of Vrgin Most and neighboring villages in 1942.
But Radoslav Artuković, like Gudrun Himmler, daughter of Heinrich Himmler, Himmler’s favorite, her daddy’s “Puppi,” who dreams Himmler’s dreams and till her death mourns her father, as fanatical a Catholic as he was a racist, Radoslav Artuković, in that church in the center of Los Angeles, over his father’s empty coffin says, “He believed in God, in his state and in his people and I am proud to be his son.” Oh, horrors.
So, from 1991 on, elderly, retrograde, clerical-fascist right-wingers, more or less prominent figures of the Ustasha Movement, crawl through Croatia like rats, some in secret, some with pompous announcements in the state-controlled media, many of them having lived secretly as émigrés, changing their names and surnames, but not their love for the NDH, a nondescript, backward, black little hanger-on of a country, leaving behind them their foul rats’ droppings, and now, with their children and grandchildren, howl the same threadbare, patriotic song:
See, they return; ah, see the tentative