The Devil's Garden: A War Crimes Investigator's Story

Introduction

1 INTRODUCTION z I was under surveillance just minutes after my plane landed in Zagreb. It was 2007, and I had returned to Croatia five years after my experiences working international war crimes. As soon as I left customs and immigration, I was bird-dogged all the way to a forested park just outside the village of Lokve, which rests in the mountainous Gorski Kotar region of Croatia. I’m not exactly sure who the dark-clothed men in the black BMW were, but after all these years I’d grown accustomed to seeing them. It was the nature of my business. My oldest son, Jonathan, was with me as we joined about thirty members of the Cenčić clan (Cenčić is the Croatian spelling of our surname). The villagers were there to welcome me not only as an American descendent of Josip Cenčić, a local Croat who had immigrated to America in 1892, but also as the person who had led the investigation into the murders , torture, and persecution of the Croatian people during the Yugoslav war of the 1990s. A lamb cooked on a slow-turning spit, and the šljivovica and Croatian wine flowed. These people and this get-together reminded me of my early teenage years in Detroit. My great-grandfather, Josip, lived on Newbern Street in the city’s Eastside neighborhood, near Hamtramck, and my father grew up in Centerline, just a few miles north over the Detroit city line. I remember the Croatian-American Fourth of July picnics we attended , hearing the distinctive mix of English and the Slavic language my relatives spoke. Many of my relatives were married to Serbs. There was laughter and children getting into mischief. There were people with heavy lines on their sun-darkened faces. The people of my past spoke passionately about the old country and often kindly of a man they referred to as Tito. Others seemed troubled by the situation in Yugoslavia. As a child, I had absolutely no idea what was 2 / THE DEVIL’S GARDEN going on in that part of the world. It was all a puzzle to me, and I never imagined that one day I would be there, right in the middle of it all. With me in Lokve was Mirjana Pleše, the principal of the local school. Mirjana took me to the school, where she showed me the original logbooks with entries for my great-grandfather, his brothers and sisters, and even his father. She took me to St. Katarina’s, the church where my great-grandparents were married and a place that World War II occupying forces later used for clandestine operations. I entered the train station where Josip had purchased his ticket for Naples, the first stop on his voyage to the New World, and I crawled inside bunkers that had been used by Nazis and Italian Fascists during World War II. I saw where Josip’s house had stood before it burned to the ground. I traced the steps of generation after generation of the Cenčić clan in this lovely village. Mirjana took my arm as we walked through the town in the rain, dodging puddles in the dirt roads. We walked up the steep steps to Kalvarija, where the Crosses of Rejection, Repentance, and Redemption stand, and then to the local cemetery, where the Cenčić family members who stayed behind were buried. We spent several days together—days that have become some of my fondest memories. Mirjana never spoke a word of English to me, but many of the messages she conveyed needed no translation. When we left the forest, Mirjana gently began to sing a song to me. My cousin Boris translated. It is a song about the people from Gorski Kotar who left and longed to come home one day: Snowflakes were gently falling On a lonely Christmas night. My forests kept calling, But I had to leave. The paths of my childhood Were weeping after me. At that moment I promised myself That I would come home. Come home to you, my dearest Gorski Kotar. Come home to you, the most beautiful country of mine. There is nothing like your sunshine, Introduction / 3 No place else that shines so bright, And the only ones who know it Are your inhabitants. Many long years have passed, But I still remember it all. My heart longs to go back...