"There were real 'butchers' there, people who were up to their elbows in blood," he said in an interview with "Vreme". Dear Pilsel (1962), writer knjige Argentine novel (Laguna), explaining what the Croatian emigrant community in Argentina looked like after World War II. This autobiographical book of a publicist, journalist and theologian, who was born in Buenos Aires, and since 1991 has lived in Croatia, is mostly a story about his upbringing and life in that Latin American country. The author unreservedly reveals a lot about himself, but also about his family with Ustasha heritage. In addition to the political aspect of the book, this is primarily a family saga, but also a story of redemption and the search for one's own identity.
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"I thought I was Croatian, but studying journalism, immediately after the war with the English (for the Falkland Islands), I discovered that I was Argentine, in fact, more precisely, Latin American. I had colleagues and professors who were heroes during the military dictatorship. I experienced the realization, but also gratitude, that I had something in common with Marquez, Borges, Cortázar and Llosa. At university, I discovered the unknown and original Argentina, the country of the victims of the dirty Falklands War, and all that created a real mess in my head. The question arose: What am I, a Croat or an Argentine marked by Croatianness", says Pilsel.
"WEATHER" You believed that he would never come to Yugoslavia...
DRAGO PILSEL: At one point, I realized that I was most interested in theology and that I had an increasingly clear Christian identity, which I had to build, and that my national identity was less and less important. I came to Croatia for the first time in May 1991, as a member of the Franciscan order, as a man who is deeply religious.
You describe pro-Ustasha emigration in Argentina in detail.
The post-war emigration in Argentina consisted of approximately 40 people, concentrated mainly in Buenos Aires. We had a Croatian mass, on weekends we "hung out" at the Croatian Catholic center, I played the tambourine and bass guitar, I sang in the choir... My brother and sister danced in the folklore society, and also sang in the choir. We stuck stickers "Yugoslavia - dungeon of the Croatian people", so we competed to see who would steal the sign with the street name "Yugoslavia".
You write that it was a feat because there is a prison nearby and there were a lot of police.
Such things were the most normal for me. By the way, at that time, around a hundred people, the younger and the older, revolve around me. Of course, as a boy, I knew nothing about Ustasha crimes. I had a picture of Ante Pavelić in my room, admittedly, that's what many people there had at the time. But when I became a guy in my twenties and when the dictatorship in Argentina fell apart, texts about the crimes of the Second World War began to reach me.
And then the distancing from the Ustasha begins?
At that time, in the early eighties, there were a lot of pro-Ustasha magazines around the world, they came from everywhere, from Canada to Australia, but there was one good magazine in London, "Nova Hrvatska", published by people associated with the "Croatian Spring". At the age of 18, I realized for the first time that you can be a Croat without being an Ustasha. That you can be a liberal, a socialist, something...
photo: marija janković...
In your youth, you participated in some "mischief" which you still remember very vividly. One of the incidents was related to the screening of the film Do you remember Dolly Bell? Emir Kusturica, within the framework of the event "Yugoslav Film Week" in Buenos Aires.
The Yugoslav ambassador was present, as well as some other diplomats from other countries as guests. We carried out a diversion, we threw a smoke bomb. The police arrested us and I ended up in the police station for three days. Afterwards I went out the back door, I managed to get away thanks to my connections in the police.
The central theme of the book is, in fact, as someone who has been raised in an atmosphere of nationalism since childhood, myths about NDH and hatred towards Serbs and Yugoslavia, completely reconsidered his view of the world.
As for my attitude towards crimes and Serbs, the turning point was in February 1996, the village of Komić near Udbina. Six Serbs were buried, the oldest of whom was ninety-two-year-old Sava Lavrnjić, killed on August 11, 1995. Those corpses were exposed to wolves and storms all winter, when we from the Croatian Helsinki Committee came there. They were already skeletons, tied with wire and riddled with Kalashnikovs. When they were burying that old lady, I broke down. I was in emotional shock for days afterwards. That's when I decided that the Serbs are a theological place for me, in the Christian sense, that I must explore and build a new ecumenical identity.
The story of the father, Adolf Pilsel, who was Pavelić's bodyguard for a time, occupies an important place in Argentine novel. He is like a boy., with family, arrived in Buenos Aires by ship from Genoa. It's all organized through "rat ducts".
The father was Pavelić's personal bodyguard in 1956 and 1957, and for a short time after the assassination, while he was lying in the house, wounded. Very soon after that, Pavelić was taken to Spain because it became apparent that he was in Buenos Aires. Until then, the public did not deal with him, the military junta said that it did not know of any former head of the NDH. Pavelić had a construction company there, even my grandfather worked with him. Namely, my grandparents saved Pavelić after the war, they hid him from the Russians in a small Austrian town and then he got revenge on them in Argentina, when they came in 1949. So my father grew up watching and listening to that man, because he often came to my grandfather's house.
In Argentina, your father was a businessman for a time?
Yes, like Pavelić, he had his own construction company, he also built the Croatian home "Jure Francetić". However, he went bankrupt, and on top of that, he participated in a murder in Patagonia, so his life changed suddenly, which also affected my mother. After the divorce, I did not see my father for 25 years. The reunion took place in 1997 in Paraguay, where the father lived. It was a wasted life. While he was with us and my mother, he was happy, and I had an idyllic childhood. After that they broke up, he found a new wife, and married several more times. And every time he constructed the story as if we, his children, did not exist. In the end, he died in very difficult conditions in Paraguay, in dirt and poverty, as if he wanted to punish himself. Unfortunately, he did not manage to come to terms with me until the end of his life, but also with his life. He didn't understand my leftism, he thought I was some Yugoslav... He died with a wrong image of me and Croatia. However, he had moments of lucidity because he wanted to come to Jasenovac. I also have a photo showing him standing in front of Bogdanović's monument - a concrete flower. He even wrote in the book of impressions: "I'm sorry that we caused such a tragedy", he wrote. But I mostly wrote about him in the book The Return of Adolf Pilsel, which was published in Zagreb.
The promotion of the book in Belgrade took place after a large student and civic gathering at Slavia.
I sympathize with that strength, there were no students on the streets for a long time, but they showed that they are there, that the citizens are with them. The lack of European flags bothers me a bit. I do not understand the need to insist on the issue of Kosovo at this moment. If it's because of the electorate, then that's fine. But the main thing is that I still don't see how the students will get 4,2 million voters, without that they won't win.
You have been friends with Patriarch Porphyry for a long time. Many were surprised by his closeness to the progressive government and his attitude towards student protests, especially after last year's stay with Putin and the statements he made then about the so-called "colored revolution".
I interpret it differently. I was then surprised when I saw that he was speaking Russian, he shouldn't have done that, because he doesn't know that language well. If Irinej Bulović was translating, or an official translator, then he would have said much less than what he said. I think that he and Bulović agreed on the plane, there was no special preparation. When the glitch happened, he realized that he was wrong, but from the position of the patriarch it was complicated to admit to Putin that he had done something wrong in front of him. Also, that association with Vučić is something that stuck with him. I know he's not happy about it.
Do you maintain relations with friends from Argentina?? Many of them still live in historical delusions, You mentioned some by name..
I am related to one of them through my parents, and my mother is his sister's godmother. The two of us were together as babies, but in the end we split up because of the Ustasha ideology. I still congratulate him on his birthday every year, but he doesn't.
