36. No longer fatherless

For my parents, especially for my father, it was special coming to Germany. My father was of German origin, his father was German and mother Croatian. He was born in 1944 in Croatia where his parents lived. His father only saw him once when he was 3 months old and had to move back to Germany with the families of his two bothers.

My father stayed in Croatia with his mother and fraternal, German grandmother, who due to her age wasn’t able to travel back to Germany. The family kept loose ties, mostly by writing occasional letters, until the grandmother died in 1955. Dad’s father invited his wife and son to join him, but she refused and the link was lost. My grandmother died in 1964, two years before I was born, so I knew my dad as a man without any family. On the contrary, my mother had a large family: parents, two sisters and three brothers.

Throughout my childhood I felt dad’s pain of feeling lonely. Every time we would go to visit grandparents or the uncles and aunties dad would comment, “I wish I had someone to take you to visit.” He would show us the pictures of his father and his uncles and their families that were sent from Germany. Sometimes dad would talk to us how he felt miserable being all on his own. As a child I always tried to encourage him, “Dad but you have us, mum, Ana, Joseph and me. We are your family.” Dad didn’t want to disregard what I said but his comment would be, “You just don’t understand.” It was true, how could I understand?

Dad grew up in a communist post war Yugoslavia with a nickname Little Schwaba (Little German). When he started school he was despised by the teachers because he didn’t speak good Croatian, for he spoke German with his grandmother. He told us many stories of how other children were protected by their siblings and he had no one to stand up for him. His mother worked hard to provide for them and she was rarely at home. She had no close by relatives and never kept in touch with any of them.

Now that we were in Germany I tried to find our relatives. We managed to find a wife of grandfather’s youngest brother. However, they were divorced and she was in the second marriage. Dad’s uncle was dead and his son didn’t want to make any contact with our family. So to our great disappointment our search ended there. We never found out what happened to dad’s father, how he lived or if he had a new family.

My father never found his father and his father never came back to Croatia to look for his son. However, my father met his Heavenly Father who looked for him and found him. In Germany, his fatherland, dad made a covenant with his Heavenly Father; he was no longer fatherless.

37. Baptism

It was hard to hold back my thoughts about the event of mum and dad’s baptism. My soul was dancing and the words were just looking for a piece of paper to jot them down.

Baptism

Today heaven celebrates;

Lost has been found,

Sinner has been saved.

Sins forgiven, wiped away.

Freedom, no more chains.

Mercy, our human claim.

Today earthly meets heavenly,

Mortality meets immortality.

To eternity, you are born again.

Today, mother and daughter are sisters,

Daughter calls her father brother.

No orphans in the family of God;

Children of God, we are the same.