Denis Knezovic
Chapter 2: Peto, War, and My First Glimmer of Hope
We went to Hungary annually, always staying a few months at a time. It was an amazing and completely new world for me. The therapy was based on the revolutionary concept of letting and encouraging the kids to do things on their own as much as possible. As stated above, it was an international institute and the language of instruction was English, although the therapists--or conductors, as they are properly called--were all Hungarian as far as I recall. My parents helped me lean the basics of the language, to which I caught on quickly. The institute was located in a quite large modern building. A day at Peto was filled with rigorous exercise that was often masked as fun and play. We would stretch our legs, strengthen our arms, and balance that with singing songs and drawing.
I made my first few friends there. The kids were from all around Europe, but I also seem to remember some from the US and maybe even Australia. The majority seemed to be from the United Kingdom and Ireland. I also took my first steps upright there, while holding on to and pushing a large chair with handles, with a conductor also holding me from behind. That was a truly amazing experience. The therapy was great, but it was also quite costly and my parents put our entire life savings into it. My father worked as an engineer for a construction company. My parents were still quite young and it was a huge risk to invest so much into Peto, especially in light of the increasingly volatile political situation in Yugoslavia.
The the institute was seemingly in a different world from much of the rest of the city. In the early 1990s, Hungary was still barely recovering from having been under the thumb of the former Soviet Union for decades. The first apartment that my parents rented for us in Hungary was small, dirty, and badly maintained. We stayed there for only a month and moved on to a nicer place after that. What I can still vividly remember about it is that it had satellite TV that for the first time exposed me to channels such as MTV, Eurosport, and even a few German networks. In retrospect, another highlight was Princess Diana’s visit to the Peto Institute while I was there. However, I was disappointed at the time, because she looked nothing like I had imagined, and she only talked to the British kids. In any case, I had mostly a fun time in Hungary and in my early childhood more generally with hardly any idea of economic problems, or a completely uncertain future.
However, things were far from rosy, especially back home. On February 27, 1991, my maternal grandmother died at a young age, after a long battle with cancer. Not long thereafter, the vibrant, multiethnic, and multi-religious Yugoslavia began to break apart after a sudden outbreak of nationalistic fervor that pitted friend against friend and neighbor against neighbor. In 1992, Serbian forces began occupying and bombing Mostar. It has been (and in establishment Bosnian, Croatian, and international circles it continues to be) claimed that the Yugoslav civil war and the country’s subsequent breakup were caused by Serbian nationalism, to which the other ethnic groups responded with their own outbreaks of nationalism. To me, that is far too simplistic and naïve an interpretation. Anyone who looks into it deeper sees that nationalism played a toxic, though secondary, role in the conflict and that it was mainly about privatization, theft, and the plunder that further enriched the elites, at the expense of the rest. That is why I refuse to blame the Serbs or any nation-state for it. In any case, sirens often started howling in the middle of the night and we had to flee to the basement, in order to escape the bombing. Even then, it was mostly fun for me early on. But as soon as I was old enough to understand the gravity of the situation, I developed a strong anti-war stance that I still hold.
One day, my father was taking out the trash and a sniper bullet just barely missed his head. It was then that he decided we had to leave. We first went to Split, Croatia, where a family friend let us stay at his villa for some time. By then my mother was already pregnant with my brother. The time in Split was quite enjoyable. I liked to live close to the sea, where I eventually learned to swim. We then moved on to Zagreb, where a great-aunt of mine let us stay at her apartment. But the question still remained: Where would our young family find a new, more permanent home?
When we returned to Budapest for more therapy, we finally the answer to that question: A German family that we had befriended offered to take us to their country and help us start life there. That was an excellent solution at the time, given my mother’s past there and her knowledge of the language. My mother later returned to Zagreb on her own, in order to give birth there, among other reasons.
My brother was born on September 30, 1992. He was fully healthy and there were no complications. My aunt called my father from Zagreb to tell him the exciting news. It was also an unforgettable moment for me. I was in the same room where my father took the call. I was very happy and could not wait for the months of therapy to be over, so I could meet my little brother.
When the time came to return however, our trip back to Zagreb did not go according to plan. The officials at the Croatian border stopped us in the middle of the night and refused to let us through, due to our Yugoslav passports. They rejected the papers from the disbanded nation, from which their country had just declared its independence. They were also quite rude and insulting. I remember having told my father, soon after we turned around, that I no longer wanted to be a police officer. (That had apparently been my dream profession at the time and the border personnel were wearing what looked like police uniforms to me.) We spent the night at a Hungarian hotel and were let into Croatia without being stopped when we tried again the next morning.