The Contribution of Women to Peace and Reconciliation

that many German workers secretly brought the forced labourers food,
and that they purposely made faulty products. During the Second World
War, the building was rebuilt as a military hospital, and later as a hostel
for German refugees from the East. Twenty-three years after the end
of the war, we, the daughters of the partisans, slept in the same beds,
on the same mattresses and with the same sheets. In the basement,
there were still a few little white-haired people living, who hid when we
young women ran through the long windowless hallway after work. Because
of the eeriness of it, we were loud in groups, and quiet if we had
to walk through the hall alone. That too was Berlin.
At that time, in 1968, I worked in a factory for six months, and at the
same time went to a private school and learned German. After half a
year, I was given a job as the hostel interpreter, and after a year I was
able to register at university and study German. At twenty-one, I became
headmistress of a hostel with forty-eight women, which was always
described as exemplary. I worked and studied at the same time. I think
I was very serious and very old at that time. I feel privileged because I
was allowed to study and didn’t have to go to the factory so early in the
morning. Most women were older than I, had many problems with their
families, and with each other. Most of them came from villages, and frequently
didn’t even know how a toilet worked. They were like people
from my village; I had to show and explain this new world to them. Later,
I became a court interpreter and gave up working in the hostel. I didn’t
want to take over hostels with 800 women and men.
In 1971, I met a Berlin student who was from an anti-fascist family. That
made it easier at the beginning for me to get to know him, a German,
to go to the cinema with him. Although I became acquainted with many
kind Germans, it was important for me to make sure that my new
friends weren’t people who had been enemies of my country, and of
my father, during the war. Later we married, and had two babies. I am
very proud about the friendships which have arisen between my new
and my old family, between my father and my husband, who, like my
father, wanted to build a house for us in Yugoslavia.
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