From Yugoslavia to Dukinfield

IN common with most people of east European extraction, my parents arrived in the UK in the years following the Second World War. Both were Yugoslavs but met for the first time at a house in Rochdale where they had come to seek work in the Lancashire cotton industry.
Many thousands of exiles must have arrived at that time from countries that had found themselves behind the Iron Curtain, but little mention is ever made of them. There have been no exhibitions or television documentaries, possibly because they integrated so quickly into British society.

My father, Petar Pavasovic, was 43 when he came to England in 1948. He was a regular soldier in the Royal Yugoslav Army and had risen to the rank of lieutenant colonel. He had seen some action in 1941, following the Axis invasion of Yugoslavia, when he was stationed in Skoplje, which is now the capital of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. In his diaries, he tells of being awoken by what he thought was the sound of somebody sawing wood only to realise that the air was full of Luftwaffe planes. Obviously, Yugoslavia was quickly conquered by the vastly superior German army, but my father did take part in fighting at Kacanik Pass where the Wehrmacht advance was briefly checked.

After the surrender, my father moved to Belgrade where he was an officer in the Serbian National Guard, loyal to the German-imposed government of General Milan Nedic. Nedic has since been condemned as a Quisling, but my father always insisted he was a man trying to do his best for his country in very trying circumstances. My father hated the Nazis, but he always maintained that one had to come to some sort of accommodation with them given the ever-present threat of brutal reprisals and the inability of the Allies to provide help. However, he and his men always retained their loyalty to King Peter and to General Draza Mihailovic, the leader of the royalist resistance — often referred to as Cetniks but really named the Royal Yugoslav Army in the Fatherland.

In the autumn of 1944, when Mihailovic called a general uprising because he believed Allied landings were imminent on the Adriatic coast, my father went to fight in Bosnia as chief of staff of the Serbian Shock Corps. But the landings did not materialise, ammunition quickly ran out, and after various skirmishes with Tito’s Partisans my father’s men were forced to surrender to the Germans and were taken to Austria. He eventually made his way to the Trieste area, and was there in 1945, preparing for an attack on the communists, when he met up with New Zealand troops under the command of Field Marshal Freyberg. It was a lucky encounter, because Freyberg made sure my father’s men were not repatriated as so many were, only to be massacred by Tito’s forces at Kocevje.

My Father spent the next three years at camps in Italy and Germany before coming to Britain in 1948. He quickly made his way north, married my mother — his first wife refused to emigrate to the UK — and settled in Dukinfield, Cheshire, in 1951. He died 40 years later aged 86.

My mother, who was born in 1924 and was 19 years younger than my father, was one of a family of eight daughters. She was born in Montenegro but my grandfather, a post office employee, soon moved to Kosovo and it was there that she was brought up. At the age of 16 she was married, but Yugoslavia was invaded soon after and her husband disappeared with the resistance, never to be seen again. The area was taken by the Germans who, although they impressed my mother with blond good looks and discipline, soon handed over control to Italian troops, whom my mother described as little more than a rabble.
My mother also became involved with the resistance in some way and this led to her and her elder sister being interned by the Italians along with several other women. Just before her 17th birthday she saw her family for the last time and was transported through Albania and mainland Italy to a concentration camp on a tiny island named Ustica which is to the north of Sicily. She spent two years there — basically rotting — before being moved to Naples ahead of the Allied advance.

She was imprisoned in Naples — the worst experience of her life, she always said, but one night heard a tremendous noise in the city. The following day, she and her sister learned that Mussolini had fallen and they were able to walk out of the prison. They resolved to return home and somehow got as far as Zagreb before being handed over to the Germans by the Croat Ustase. After being transported around Germany my mother spent the rest of the war as forced labour in a Nazi munitions factory in Austria. It was another place where she saw great horrors.

At one point some Czechs attempted an act of sabotage, got it wrong, and were killed in the explosion. She said the area was littered with limbs. Another time a US plane came down. The pilot, lad of around 20, was alive but dazed. One of the female guards broke his neck.
Eventually, my mother was liberated by the Americans — who named her Stella rather than Stanislava. And, after working as a nanny for a US officer, came to Britain. Although she saw great horrors and was left with permanently damaged eyes because of a lack of nutrition, she never held any grudges. She often recounted how she had been so hungry she could happily have murdered the Italian soldiers she saw with loaves of bread. She also insisted that Italian soldiers could be very cruel, that she had seen one torture a girl by burning her chest with a cigarette.

Despite this, she always had many Italian and German friends. Also, she encountered various acts of great kindness. An Italian officer sent her some chocolate in prison because he was hurt to see someone so young there. And, while she was lying exhausted on a railway platform somewhere in Germany, she felt a nurse bump into her. Later she found an apple in her lap — the first she had seen for years. It was an act of great bravery on the part of the nurse, she could have been killed for it. My mother said she ate the whole apple, including the pips and core my mother also finished the war speaking five languages — Serbian, Albanian, Italian, German and English. As she moved around Europe it was a case of learn the language or starve.

Stella Pavasovic died of cancer in 1997, aged 73.

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