As the years went by, he would become ever more embittered: there was nothing wrong with the original communist ideals, he thought, but serious mistakes had been made and nothing had turned out the way it was planned. After retiring, he held on to his service pistol and would be lucky enough to die before the dissolution of Yugoslavia, when everything he had fought for suddenly ceased to exist. To the very last, he kept his well-thumbed membership book of the Communist party, a party that would soon go the same way as the Yugoslavian state.

I never met him. If you had asked him about his identity, he would not have said Croatian, atheist or officer. He would have answered that he was a Yugoslavian communist. His wife, my Croatian mother-in-law, has already outlived him by almost two decades now. After the fall of communism and the dissolution of Yugoslavia, her standards of living deteriorated considerably. The new Croatian nation-state cut down her widow’s pension sev...