Autobiography - Ivan Jurakic



My father was born in a small rural village in Bosnia Herzegovina in 1927. He was a farmer's son. At the age of 15 his father, my namesake, was killed in a battle during the early years of World War II. After that my father left the family farm never to return.

In Zagreb, he was captured by the occupying German army and conscripted onto a train bound for the Russian Front. Somewhere along the way he escaped. With nowhere to return to, he made his way to Germany where he was briefly imprisoned. Once his papers were approved he got by doing whatever piecemeal wartime jobs were available.

He smuggled guns and cigarettes. For a time he was a wood stoker on a steam-powered troop transport, which sometimes received orders from Hermann Goering. Later still he was a worker setting up banners for Nazi party functions. He once stood only a few feet away from Hitler.

After the war he made his way to Belgium where he worked as a coal miner. Mining was his ticket out of war-torn Europe and into the inhospitable terrain of Northern Quebec. Time and isolation led to aborted experiments with early mechanical prototypes of a perpetual motion machine and an automobile ice brake, neither of which would ever see fruition. Coincidence led him to a brief vacation in Havana just prior to Fidel Castro's revolution. Later an industrial accident nearly severed his left thumb and forearm. What should have led to amputation instead led to then radical surgery and a new start in Montreal with $10,000 in the bank.

There he became a prominent member of the burgeoning Croatian cultural community. He helped build the first Croatian Roman Catholic church in Canada. Somewhere during this same period he worked briefly at CanadAir, on the tail assembly of the then top secret Avro Arrow. He had his hand shaken by Queen Elizabeth II on her inaugural visit.

These pieces of stories and anecdotes have been strung together over the years into a loose historical narrative culled from any number of short one-sided conversations shared during family visits and holidays when my father was either melancholy or had had a few drinks. Like many men from that era he remained stoic, reluctant to discuss a past that in those days people did not speak of lightly. Those were different times.

By the mid-sixties my father was corresponding with his younger brother. I've never met him or anyone else for that matter on my father's side of the family. That side of the family remains remote, impenetrable. There seemed to be an abnormally high percentage of premature deaths and whispered rumors of suicide or drowning. Regardless, my uncle wrote to my father to tell him of a young woman he had met living in Zagreb.

With his brother as matchmaker, my father began to write to this woman. She was 27, slender and looking for a means to leave home. He was a man of 40 who wanted to settle down with a nice girl from the old country. They exchanged letters and photos. Characteristically, he sent her flattering photos of himself taken nearly 10 years earlier.

Looking at period photos I see a sharply dressed confident man staring intently back at me. Hardly the same person I remember screaming at throughout most of the eighties over this or that disagreement or modified hair color. Those same albums also contained a parade of unfamiliar women. As a child flipping through these photos with my father I can still recall my awkward line of questioning. "Is that mom?"... "No." Next page. "Is that mom?"... "No."

They never once met in person before the marriage. Years later I realized at least partially why. My father had a terrific fear of flying. He came to the country in a steamship and had never set foot in a plane aside from the twisted wrecks that littered the European landscape after the war. He was actually in Hamburg during some of the worst Allied aerial bombings. Perhaps because of this traumatic experience my father never once flew in an airplane during his entire life.

My father met his new bride for the first time at the airport on January 26, 1967. She didn't speak a word of English. Legally, they were already husband and wife. My uncle had stood in as his proxy as part of a legal ceremony staged to speed up immigration. Within a few weeks they were remarried in a proper ceremony held in the same church he had helped to build. I was born on October 26, 1967, exactly nine months to the day of their first meeting.

By the early seventies, my father had mortgaged a property on the Niagara Escarpment - 10 acres of land with a creek meandering through it. He built the house that I spent the next 16 years of my life in. The house was a large duplex. It was always intended that I would grow up, get married, have children and live side-by-side with my father. I'm sure it was his way of trying to reclaim what he himself had lost as a child.

The Balkan conflict proved to be a particularly difficult period for my father during the nineties. I remember him preparing a large box of provisions and clothing to send overseas. I even donated my best pair of combat boots. I recall details - a distant cousin in a prison camp, my father's village leveled, ethnic cleansing. It was the only time I heard him speak openly about returning home, and at that to fight. I cruelly admonished him for his foolishness reminding him that he was a 65 year-old man. It hurt him deeply.

My father passed away at home on July 2, 2000 after a debilitating battle with prostate cancer. He was 74. During his last days he was in the grip of vivid hallucinations induced by pain, weakness and constant medication. Curiously, as he lay dying he spoke only in broken English and not in his native tongue, a language that he often criticized me for not learning properly. A language I now spoke awkwardly to him as he lay there in a morphine-induced coma.

I was sleeping in the bed next to him when he passed. I was given his gold wedding band as a memento. I sprinkled some soil from the old country onto his grave.

In his absence I was left with a difficult history to recover. My father was my direct link to the turbulent history of the 20th century, a fact that both frightened and fascinated me in equal measure. In retrospect, his legacy was something that I had a difficult time coming to terms with. I found myself forced to reconsider the kinds of memories I had inherited and how ultimately, despite my objections, that many of my actions conformed to a pattern, a series of intersections and seemingly random choices that have helped to perpetuate an increasingly familiar cycle.

Ivan Jurakic
Buffalo, 2003