The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

standing any more. He wanted me to stay in Split and continue to take
care of the household and my brothers and sisters. He didn’t want to
give me money. I was desperate, and found out that it was possible to
go to Germany and earn money there. I thought that I would earn
enough in a year to come back after that and be able to study literature
and philosophy.
Early work and political life in Germany
I was of age, so I could go to Germany against my parents’ will. When
I went, my father had to be held down by three men. He threw himself
on the ground, a doctor was called and only when he started to take the
syringe out of his bag did my father get up and say, “I’m not crazy,
doctor. Pack the needle up.”
I went from Split to Zagreb by train, which took all night, and flew from
there to Schönefeld Airport in East Berlin, together with eighty other
women. After that parting from my father, it was as if I were drugged. I
only came to when I was in the aeroplane and was aware of my surroundings.
Next to me was a man reading a book by Dostoyevsky. He
lent it to me. I never saw him again, and I still have the book.
Porcelain holders for the electric cables were fastened to the high wall
on the border to West Berlin. The soldiers held submachine guns and
wore jackboots. Stiffly, without any expression, they scrutinized our
passports and our faces. I thought of the Second World War, of the
death of a young woman in the electrified barbed wire of a concentration
camp in the Yugoslav film “The Ninth Circle” (Deveti Krug, 1960).
Then we drove through the city. I saw houses with walls scarred by shelling,
many old, pale women with little dogs and many men whose legs
or arms were missing.
There was barbed wire strung on top of the wall around the hostel to
which we were taken. Eighteen years later, when I prepared an exhibition
on Yugoslav women in Berlin, I learned that before the Second
World War, this building had been part of the Argus Works, in which
parts for dive-bombers and tanks were made. Forced labourers worked
there, for each of whom the SS was paid eight marks per day. I learned
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