From the Publisher

Memento mori

General Luka Vasiljevic died in Rovinj, Croatia on January 17, 2010 at age 86. From his birth in 1923 until his recent death, he was shaped and defined by an historic Slavic karma over which he had no control. He was born into a world where people had long memories of subjugation, battles, ethnic and religious quarrels, and a moral imperative to even the score.

He was a patriot, possessed of great dignity, a soldier’s bearing and a quiet toughness that enabled him to survive life as a Partisan, cold, hunger, pain, capture, imprisonment in a German concentration camp, escape, war, post-war purges, and hard times beyond the experience or comprehension of most Americans.

Having suffered and endured so much for the dream of a unified and peaceful Yugoslavia, he was never really able to adjust to the destruction of that dream in recent years.

I shall never forget asking him if, since he was born in Bosnia, he was what The New York Times called a ‘Bosnian Serb.’ He replied, with a straight face, “No, we are Montenegrins. Our family has only been in Bosnia for 600 years.”

Most Americans have no idea where their great-grandparents were born.  The thought that a man knew that his family moved from Montenegro to Bosnia before Columbus discovered America is mind-boggling.

He did end up with a son and an American daughter and grandson. His legacy to them is not much in dollars, but then you cannot readily calculate the financial value of genes that equip you to survive whatever curves and horrors the world throws at you. What he has passed on can only be defined as “priceless.”

I think that he, like many warriors who have witnessed and done much violence, later developed a deep and passionate longing for peace.

My hope is, after all that he endured in his lifetime, he has now found that which he sought all his many years.

May my beloved father rest in peace.

Ljiljana Vasiljevic
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief