bauhauswerk

Fredi looked thru the window and waved... Hana waved him back from the street just across the retirement home. It was the last time she saw her father, it was the last time he saw his daughter...

...After the end of the WWII, when Fredi returned to Zagreb from Jasenovac concentration camp, he bought the news that his niece was alive. His brother and his family were taken together with him, one evening at 8 o’clock, just after they’ve closed their family’s jewellery shop.

Hana, a three year old girl, was at home with her neighbour Marija. Barbara, their neighbour and maid was just cleaning the shop when she saw the scene through the shop window. It was always the same scene, a truck, soldiers and shouting...

Barbara ran home and took Hana to her apartment in the basement of the building. Around 10, they were in the monastery just a block away from their home, where Barbara’s brother was an Abbot. They hugged and... they’ve never seen each other again. Barbara joined partisans and was killed in action somewhere on the outskirts of Zagreb.

...Fredi tried to find out any information about his family members. One day he got in contact with Jozef who served as a guard in prison in Savska street.

The information cost him a golden watch and a diamond ring but it was worth the price. Oh, it was well worth.

Hana was hidden in the monastery till the end of the war and was taken to war orphanage just after. She was named Jana and baptised and wasn’t ever told who she really was.

From the day Fredi found her, they haven’t separated ever since. In 1947 he got the papers and his niece became his daughter...

The time passed and Fredi felt he was too heavy burden to his loving Hana and secretly applied for a place in a retirement home in the city center of Zagreb, his microcosm and the only place he ever called home.

The day he announced her that he was moving out of their big apartment in once their palace, she didn’t want to hear about it, but resolut, as he always was, he packed and left the very same day.

At 4:30, every single day, they went for a walk and were having a coffee in a small coffee bar near the city’s main square. The bar was placed where his jewellery shop once stood.

At 4:30, every single day, till the first Covid lockdown...

He was transferred to a room which didn’t have window on the street side but on the park within the retirement home building. He couldn’t see his dear Hana, she couldn’t visit him, only phone calls were possible but Fredi’s old age and bad hearing were big obstacle.

Fredi started fading and his sad eyes were just looking for her. The only person he could call his family for over seventy five years.

Less than two months after they’ve separated him from her, Hana recived a call from the Director of the retirement home...

Thanks for reading,

Srdan

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