Biografía del autor
Roger Cohen is a columnist for the New York Times, where he has worked since 1990: as a correspondent in Paris and Berlin and as bureau chief in the Balkans, covering the Bosnian war (for which he received an Overseas Press Club prize). He was named a columnist in 2009. He became foreign editor on 9/11, overseeing Pulitzer Prize–winning coverage in the aftermath of the attack. His books include Soldiers and Slaves, Hearts Grown Brutal, and The Girl from Human Street. He lives in New York City.
Extracto. © Reimpreso con autorización. Reservados todos los derechos.
The Lost Century
Chapter 1
My Father's War
Sead Mehmedovic grew up believing that his father was dead, one of the more than one million Yugoslav victims of World War II. Where he had died, nobody knew, there was no grave, there was nothing, but Alija Mehmedovic's death was a fact of Sead's childhood. So when Sead learned that this might not be true--that his father might be living outside Yugoslavia under an assumed name--the quest to find him naturally became an obsession. For years the search was fruitless, leading only to new riddles, but finally on December 15, 1970, Sead sat down in Belgrade to write to the father he had never known. With an address for his father at last in his possession, Sead could scarcely contain a tremulous excitement.
As he sat down to compose a letter, Sead confronted again the fact that he knew almost nothing of the dashing, dark-haired young man who appeared in the few surviving photographs of his father. Alija Mehmedovic remained a shadowy figure. He had worked at the Belgrade daily newspaper Politika; had abandoned Sead's mother, Gaby, on the eve of World War II; had remarried in Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital; and had, it was long believed, been killed somewhere in his native Bosnia or in Croatia. This was the story on which Sead was raised. Such fragments, the shards of past conflict, were his inheritance.
Sead, like countless Yugoslavs, was a child of war. The Second World War took his father. The conflict had left him with confused memories. Certain images were always vivid, imbued with the particular luminosity of childhood. Others had faded. Of Hitler's bombardment of Belgrade, starting on April 6, 1941, when Sead was not quite three years old, he recalled only a dim sense of terror. He had found shelter in cellars as the Luftwaffe pounded the Yugoslav capital. Fear, the most instantly communicable of viruses, spread in a city that only days earlier had been full of defiant demonstrations against the Nazis that displayed a typical Serb bravura.
The crowds had poured into the streets to protest the Yugoslav prince regent Pavle's decision to enter into the Axis Pact with Hitler. "Better war than the pact" ("Bolje rat nego pakt") and "Better the grave than a slave" ("Bolje grob nego rob"), the people of Belgrade chanted. A Serb officer, General Dusan Simovib, who led a coup that ousted the regent, gave a rousing speech of defiance to Hitler in which he recalled the bones of Serbian military heroes and the Serbs' epic struggle, over many centuries, against the Turks.
Winston Churchill, the British prime minister, was delighted. "Yugoslavia," he declared, "has found its soul." But Hitler was enraged. By April 10, 1941, wide swaths of Belgrade had been leveled. The defiant crowds were silenced; the Yugoslav army crumbled; the Nazis quickly installed General Milan Nedib, a soldier who did the Nazis' bidding in Serbia as assiduously as Marshal Philippe Petain's Vichy regime in France, and Yugoslavia disintegrated with the proclamation in Zagreb of an independent, puppet-Nazi Croatian state.
Belgrade was transformed by days of bombing. There were bodies piled in the streets and many dead and stray animals. A bomb hit the Belgrade Zoo, and Sead recalled animals roaming through the burning city. As if in a child's bedtime story, a polar bear made its way down to the River Sava.
A devastating conflict began on the fragmented Yugoslav lands, a conflict that was at once resistance battle against the Germans, revolutionary communist struggle aimed ultimately at the overthrow of the Serbian establishment that had ruled Yugoslavia, and civil war--violence laid layer upon layer.
Sead remembered the second bombardment of Belgrade with much greater clarity. In 1944, on the Orthodox Easter, the Anglo-American Balkan Air Force embarked on a campaign of heavy bombing against the Nazi occupiers of Belgrade. Once again there were scenes of mayhem. Sead, by now six years old, watched from what was then Kosmayaska Street as the Allied planes came swooping in. When the bombing started, he hid under the bed, until he was dragged down to the cellar by his mother. The Allies were doing to Belgrade what their Nazi enemies had done three years before.
Six months later, in October, Belgrade was again engulfed in fighting as the communist Partisan forces led by Josip Broz Tito and the Soviet army closed in on the Yugoslav capital. Sead saw the shabby, ragtag Yugoslav Partisans, rifles slung over their shoulders, red stars on their hats, moving up Kosovska Street in the center of the capital as a platoon of German troops--perhaps the last Germans in the city--took up a commanding position on the top of the central Albanija Building. The Germans were well stocked in two essential commodities for a last stand: ammunition and alcohol. They shot everything that moved on the square where Sead used to play. When the German snipers were finally silenced, Sead emerged from hiding to find his square littered with corpses and the bodies of dogs and cats. It was October 20, 1944, a beautiful, sunny day. He could not take his eyes off the small, splayed animals or shake from his nostrils the sweet, emetic smell of death. Some of the German corpses, still in uniform, had newspapers over their faces. Their boots had been removed by the scavenging Soviet forces and the equally deprived local population. After the mighty armored cars of the Germans, it was amazing to see Soviet soldiers sleeping on straw in the back of horse-drawn carts. This ramshackle army--through its mass, its momentum, and its morale--had triumphed over the Nazi war machine. He looked for a friend who used to sell tobacco on the square--his wooden leg, big mustache, and booming voice deeply impressed the young boy--but could not find him in the chaos.
The city still echoed to the intermittent crash of shells fired by the German troops retreating northward, and the cacophony of rifles, tommy guns, and--loudest and strangest of all--the Soviet Katyusha multiple-rocket launchers. Whether these were the sounds of battle, or of celebration of Tito's victory, was not always clear. The Germans had retreated to Zemun, on the other side of the Sava, the river whose confluence with the Danube provides Belgrade with the splendor of its setting. From Zemun they shelled the capital. Thirty years earlier, in 1914, and from the same positions, Austro-Hungarian troops in Zemun had fired the first salvos of World War I after the defiant Serbs rejected a demand from Vienna that Austro-Hungarian police be allowed into Serbia. The Austro-Hungarian government had demanded that the police be admitted to investigate the assassination by a Serb nationalist, Gavrilo Princip, of the Habsburg heir, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, and his wife in Sarajevo.
Belgrade was liberated, Sead free in the smoldering streets of the white and devastated city. Tito's forces took control amid the mixture of euphoria and terror that accompanies any revolution. It was not unusual to see a young man, denounced as an informer, being dragged off and summarily shot.
So it was that Sead, born on April 25, 1938, into a young country ruled by a conservative Serbian monarchy, found himself, at the age of seven, growing up a communist. A deeply wounded Yugoslav state was reconstituted under the unlikely banner of communism. Sead embraced this new religion, but he could not come to terms with the war that had led to its victory.
Sead was unable to walk through Belgrade without remembering that time. The wartime city and the modern city shared very little. Most street names had been changed several times and most of the town rebuilt after the war. But in Sead's mind they were superimposed on each other, like a house and its reflection in water. He lived in time present and in time past, trying, it seemed, to understand something that had escaped him.
Churchill's response to Tito's communist victory was laconic. On January 18, 1945, he told the House of Commons, "We have no special interest in the political regime which prevails in Yugoslavia. Few people, in Britain, I imagine, are going to be more cheerful or more downcast because of the future constitution of Yugoslavia." Freedom for the Yugoslavs and the "Yugoslav soul," extolled by Churchill in 1941, had ceased to interest him greatly by 1945, when realpolitik and the exploits of Stalin's Red Army had come to dictate a carving-up of Europe.
For Western governments, the way the war in Yugoslavia was perceived was ultimately a question of interests. But for Sead it was an affair of the heart. The mystery, for Sead, centered on the disappearance of his father. Repeated attempts by his mother to discover where, and in what circumstances, Alija had died proved fruitless. As Sead grew older, the phantom of his father began to haunt him. Clues emerged that Alija Mehmedovic a Bosnian Muslim, had survived the war, fled Yugoslavia, and started a new life under a new identity in Turkey.
The fact that, by an odd coincidence, Sead had, like his father, found work at the newspaper Politika, as a graphic artist in the advertising department, had only intensified his curiosity. Increasingly, the search to find his father seemed to Sead to hold the key to unlocking his own uprooted life, a life that struck Sead as eternally unresolved, a puzzle in which the pieces would not fit together.
"My dear old man," Sead began the letter in December 1970, "I have been writing to you for several days now and have not found time to finish the letter. I come to my office very early in the morning, between five and six o'clock, although my working hours begin at seven. (Every time I get up, I move the alarm hand on the clock so that my wife does not notice how early I wake up--she would scold me.)
"This is the only time when I am alone. It is still dark and there are no people around. That is when I write you a letter. But later, during the day, when I am bombarded by everyday life, things take on a different guise and however close to you I felt in those early mornings, you drift away from me and I become scared that I opened myself too much, that in my unsent words I burden you with the thoughts of someone who is a stranger, and so I tear up what I wrote to you.
"Before, I fended off thoughts of you, but now that it seems I have found you, I am discovering how much I missed you as a Father--not so much in the formal, family sense, but as a friend, in whom I might completely, fully confide: the friend who would understand me. In a sense, perhaps it is better that I found you only now. In this way, we will avoid the barrier of a father's formal authority that is established in childhood and which has to be overcome later in order to establish real friendship, with no fences, between father and son.
"In some ways, as I grow older, I withdraw into myself. I try to hide from my surroundings because I have a growing number of thoughts that seem to me to be incomprehensible to others. There are ever more barriers and ever more secret spaces that I try to make unnoticeable to others, impossible for them to find. But then you appeared as someone in whom I can confide, someone who will understand me without the desire to cram me into a mold, into his way of thinking.
"Maybe you will be disappointed that you found a son who--instead of comforting you in all the misfortunes that have befallen you--burdens you with his own thoughts and dilemmas.
"Please do not misunderstand me. But I would prefer if people close to me, with whom I live, do not find out about our relationship, or, more accurately, about this part of me. I would like to keep it all to myself. These are all unselfish, wonderful, open and good people and maybe it is not right that I hide a part of me from them. But that part exists in me and I have to save its integrity. I think that I have a right to a part of you, a part that will be undivided and mine only.
"But I will tell you more about me when we finally meet and see each other. Still I am afraid that the meeting will not occur and we will pass like two ships in the night. I have a strong feeling that we two are alike and that we will understand each other. . . ."
Sead carefully folded the letter into an envelope and addressed it to Ali Erhan. Through an acquaintance, Sead knew this as the assumed name under which his father lived in Turkey, the better to shield himself from the past, the shadows of his former life in Yugoslavia. After a long search to understand the fragments of his life, Sead felt deliriously close to his goal.
The state of Yugoslavia lived for seventy-three years, an average human lifespan. Its life, like that of Sead Mehmedovic was marked by a restless search for origins and identity. Thrown together in haste on the ruins of the Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1918, Yugoslavia sought restlessly to reconcile differences within itself of religion, culture, and tradition. After 1945, in its second incarnation as a communist state, it sought also to overcome the deep divisions left by the violence that World War II ignited on Yugoslav territory.
