Zagreb

= **Chapter 2** = = **A New Life in Zagreb** =

//Upheavals after the war – meeting a remarkable doctor and educationalist – making new friends in high school -- chemistry and the Egyptian stone sarcophagus – discovering music – the death of a beloved stepfather – a mother makes a miraculous recovery – languages and art – first love – first visits to Italy – the English challenge – photography and journalism -- first encounter with the film business – the phantom conductor – help from the Swiss Herzogs//

Post war Zagreb showed the results of four years of war. As soldiers returned home, there was a large migration from the villages. People were searching for work, and there was not enough accommodation for the burgeoning population. This included us.

Luckily a friend, Dr Isidor Kršnjavi, let us temporarily rent a small apartment on the upper floor of his house. It was in a neighbourhood of artists – for example, a famous Croat sculptor lived next door.

Isidor Kršnjavi was a wonderful, older man with a long beard. He lectured on ethics at the local university. He was full of curiosity and was a great problem solver. It was he who had cured me several years earlier when I had dysentery in Vrbovec. By the time he learned about it, the dysentery had completely undermined my strength. Isidor Kršnjavi sent word to my mother to run some milk across a white hot iron in order to burn the fat before I drank it. It turned out to be the only food I did not bring up. It kept me alive until I began recovering.

When once again I became very ill with Spanish Flu in Zagreb, it was Kršnjavi who helped me through it and got me back on my feet.

Life had not been a bed of roses for him. For years he had been married to a mentally ill woman whom he had looked after as well as he could. In the meantime, he had met Śtefa Iskra, my stepfather’s sister. Śtefa Iskra was a teacher who wrote beautiful poetry under the pseudonym of Iva Rod. Isidor and Śtefa were both good Catholics so despite being in love, it was only after Isidor’s insane wife died that they decided to join their lives and marry.

While we were living in the Kršnjavi house, I had my first serious contact with art. Kršnjavi was also a respected painter, even though he was better known as a professor of Ethics at the University of Zagreb. His house was filled with paintings, most of them painted by him. While he was studying painting in Italy and he had copied many of the great masters. He also painted murals in churches.

Towards the late 1800s, he had been appointed Minister of Education for Croatia. In the time that he was in that position, he oversaw the creation of several new buildings such as the public library and the high school (known as the “gymnasium” in Europe). The library building was an architectural masterpiece and is still in use. The same architects helped him design the high school. He had very specific ideas about the high school. He demanded from the architects that the new building should not only be classrooms but also afford an opportunity for the students to be exposed to Art, Music and Science. With this in mind, the buildings were designed such that when one entered, one had to walk through a long atrium which was lined on both sides with copies of classic Greek and Roman statues. We students had to walk daily by these magnificent masterpieces and were influenced by them. His ideas also affected our curriculum. As long as we were in the gymnasium (high school) we had to study Art Education at least one hour every week. We did not have to become artists, but had to be exposed to the various art mediums– pen & pencil, crayons and watercolors. No wonder that Emil Bohutinsky, my classmate and neighbour became a prominent sculptor. All our art education was paid for by the state.

Around the time I was born, the political powers of the Austrio-Hungarian Empire learned of Kršnjavi’s educational successes and put pressure on the Croat Government to fire him from the Ministry of Education. Seeing the Kršnjavi gymnasium, the Empire’s emissary, Kuen Hedervary, said “ what he did is too good for these Croats.” Kršnjavi returned to his position at the university and continued to paint church murals, while praying for deliverance from the slavery of the Hapsburgs.

Because of, and in spite of, the collapse of the Austrian and German Kaisers, and the total destruction of our sawmill and property, grandfather had one satisfaction. A revitalized political party, the Serbo-Croatian Coalition, was now in full swing helping to unite the many elements of the South Slav citizenry - the Serbs, the Croats and the Slovenes. Gradually a new country was born - Yugoslavia, with Beograd (Belgrade) as a “federal” capital. Since the Serbs already had a king, the rest of the country accepted him as the King of Yugoslavia.

During this time a new constitution was written which among other unifying elements, abolished all hereditary titles such as baron, count and nobleman and declared all major religions - Catholic, Serb Orthodox and Muslim - as equal.

It took many months before we found a suitable apartment. The one we found was across the street from the church of St. Blasius. The next eight years of my life were centered around this home. Three of my school mates lived a few houses away. One of them, Emil Bohutinsky, remained a friend till he died a few years ago.

An important person who lived next door was Zinka Kunz. She later became famous as Zinka Milanov, one of the great divas in the world of opera.

Zagreb, the capital of Croatia, was known as a university city. But in spite of its small population - it had only one hundred thousand inhabitants - it was a center of cultural activities. It had an active opera house, a regular theatre, a symphony orchestra, a well known quartet, a famous men’s choir, a national library, etc. It took special pride in its music academy. All these institutions greatly influenced my education.

The transition from the Vrbovec grammar school to the high school in Zagreb required some adaptation. In comparison to the small village of Vrbovec, Zagreb seemed to me like a very big city. As a child I had come a few times to Zagreb with mother - mostly to see a dentist or to the emergency hospital once when I had fallen from the garden peach tree. But now it became my home. I had to walk to school some ten blocks or more, crossing street car tracks and carrying a big school bag. When my stepfather for the first time spread out the books I was to take school, I was stunned. The geography atlas was so large and heavy. But it all fit into the shoulder bag and I proudly marched to the impressive school building.

A policeman on horseback oversaw the stream of students ranging in age from ten to eighteen. It was exciting to be part of it. In Zagreb we were separated in school by sexes. Mine was a boys gymnasium. Girls went to the lyceum. The boys in my class mostly knew each other, but I was a stranger. I did not expect the reception that I got in class. I was the only boy who came from a village school, and though they did not call me “peasant”, it is how they treated me. In brief, it took time to make modest inroads through the wall which separated me and the city boys. One boy was especially nasty. I still remember his name, Krpič-Močilar, a baker’s son. He tried several times to trip me. After one such trick - during the 10 o’clock recess as we were leaving to go to the playground - I revolted. Even though Krpič-Močilar was bigger and stronger than me I ran into him, kicked him with my foot, and before he could react went head first into his tummy. He fell down. I noticed the whole class was watching, and I just marched out. In a stunned silence the rest of the class also marched to the playground. Krpic-Mocilar did not reappear.

This was the only fight I ever had in school. From then on I was fully accepted as a member of the class. It was a class as diverse as the new Yugoslavia - most were Catholics, some Jews, a couple of Protestants, also a couple of Muslims. We never actually recognised the difference until we became a little older and as part of history lessons we had to take an obligatory religion course on Fridays given by different clerics.

The move to Zagreb changed many things in my life, but did not dampen my curiosity which often got me into trouble. Across the street, in front of the church was a large Egyptian stone sarcophagus. This was a gift to my Uncle Kršnjavi from the Egyptian Government while he was the Minister of Education in Croatia. He had, in turn, donated it to the Church of St. Blasius, which was the second largest church in town and was built at the end of a big plaza almost the size of a football field. The sarcophagus was at the entrance of the church.

While we were studying chemistry, and in particular the properties of saltpetre mixed with charcoal powder - a mixture similar to the one used in fire crackers - my best friend Emil and I wondered how we could test the strength of the powder. We decided that we should find something really heavy to move and came up with the idea, “Why not the sarcophagus”?

We had to find enough of the elements to make a strong mixture. We used our fathers’ names to acquire the different materials and secretly made the mixture. Late one moonless night we dug a hole in the ground under a corner of the sarcophagus and filled it with this mixture and black powder. Then we left a trail of powder all the way across the plaza to where we could safely hide behind a big tree. We lit the powder and ran off to our homes. We heard a muffled explosion and next morning, both of us sneaked out separately to check the results. To my astonishment, the explosion had made a big hole in the ground, much larger than the one we had dug, but the sarcophagus had not budged even a centimetre. We decided not to talk about it to anyone, but for a long time we worried about being found out. Fortunately for us, nobody ever found out.

I continued to experiment with all kinds of chemicals, using a corner of our bathroom as my lab. Not long after this incident, on a Sunday, I was distilling some liquid (I can’t remember now what it was) when I was called away for a moment and forgot to turn off the Bunsen burner. Suddenly there was an explosion from the bathroom! What we found was that one of the walls had collapsed and my entire lab was destroyed. Fortunately no one was hurt, but this spelled the end of my adventures with chemistry.

Our apartment had a large balcony and my two closest friends liked to come and read on the balcony when the weather permitted. Since we had no radio or television, we spent many hours reading and also playing the piano. The famous Schott Verlag, a German music publishing company, had published transcriptions of the major classical symphonies for the piano for four hands and we spent a lot of time playing and learning classic music.

Our lives had changed completely. It no longer resembled the idyllic years of my early childhood at the sawmill. My grandfather, who was now 69 years old, was no longer involved in politics. He tried to make a living by selling Remington typewriters. My mother worked from home as a milliner, making hats for ladies in the area. My grandmother was always there to keep the family together. And my stepfather, an agronomist, continued to manage the properties of the Catholic archbishopric. However his health was deteriorating rapidly. He had been wounded in the war and living for a long time with a piece of shrapnel in his chest. Probably worse, he had taken up drinking again. He had a drinking problem before he married my mother, but it seemed he had rid himself of this habit. After the war, his friends had seduced him to the bottle again. The alcohol, combined with the war wound, turned out to be lethal. He died in 1924.

I was deeply saddened by his death. I had a good relationship with my stepfather, Anton Iskra, who I called Tonko. To me, he had always been a loving, tender and caring man and I considered him to be my father and addressed him as such. I could pour my heart out to him. He was there to take care of my youthful problems. I missed him a lot. Up to this day, I remember him with great fondness.

Anton’s death was of course a big blow for my mother. It was especially difficult for her because at the time of his death, my mother herself was so severely ill that she was unable to see him or even go to his funeral.

She had been taken ill very suddenly about a week after Tonka was admitted to the TB sanatorium. She was diagnosed with typhoid and was sent to the hospital for infectious diseases. She had three relapses and the doctors gave up hope.

I remember this period vividly because for me it was the most difficult time of my life. At the age of sixteen I had to go to school and also take care of my three year old sister. I also had to visit my father and mother on a regular basis. I remember going to the sanatorium, which was on a hill, and then running down to see my mother through a barred window, since no one was permitted to be in the same room with her.

It was during this period I came to believe in miracles. After my mother’s third relapse, when the doctors had completely given up hope and her legs started to darken, a nurse told me that mother had mentioned something about having a cognac. The nurse thought that it may be good to fulfil her wish and that it could not hurt her. So I brought a bottle of her favourite, local cognac (she was used to having a spoonful in her tea). I watched the nurse put the bottle on a shelf next to her bed. Some time during the night the nurse came in to find the bottle tipped over and the cognac dripping into my mother’s face -- she was licking the drops. When the doctor was summoned, he found her vital signs so much better that he felt that there was hope for her survival. Nobody knew how this had happened, but the fact is that my mother did get better, even though she had to stay in the hospital for several more days.

Anton Iskra was buried with full military honours. This was scant comfort to my mother. She had become a widow for the second time in fourteen years. When my father passed away in 1910, she had been left behind with a boy of two. Now widowed for the second time, she had a daughter barely three years old to look after. I was sixteen and tried to care for my half-sister Vera as much as possible. Bit by bit, my mother got better, and gradually she got back to work.

From 1918 till 1925, I attended school at the Zagreb Realgymnasium, a very good school with excellent teachers. We were given a sound education in science, languages and general knowledge. We sharpened our minds on the complexities of the Croatian grammar. Its level of difficulty was similar to that of classic Greek language.We also learned to speak and write fluent German and were taught to translate to and from Latin. My buddies and I made a game of it. Instead of saying in our mother tongue that we were dragging along two school bags, we joked: “Duos saccos nobiscum portamus”.

I am still pleased about having had to learn Latin. The analysis of Latin periods and the deconstruction and reconstruction of Latin sentences has provided me with an unique understanding of the structure of language. This understanding, for example, proved to be very valuable when I learned French. Furthermore, the Latin texts we studied opened up the foundations of Western culture to us. Our teachers fully encouraged us to discover the riches of classical antiquity.

As I mentioned earlier, the school’s large entrance hall was filled with Greek and Roman statues. We walked by Laocoön, Venus de Milo and Poseidon every day. We were familiar with the Age of Pericles. Everything was presented to us in a very appealing way. Believe me, this stays with you for life. I am still grateful for it.

At the Zagreb gymnasium school we were encouraged to devour literature. We started off with the classics and ended up reading contemporary writers. We read the Russian giants. Dostoevsky, Tolstoy and Chekov, we were familiar with Shakespeare, Byron, Keats and Shelley, and we dealt on a daily basis with Goethe, Schiller, Heine and Rilke. We were aware of all major movements in philosophy. We had a basic understanding of Kant and Schopenhauer and we knew about Der Untergang des Abendlandes (The Decline of the West) despite the fact that Oswald Spengler published the final version of his book only in 1922. Our school expected us to visit the theatre and the opera. I first saw Parsifal and the Ring when I was at high school in Zagreb. But I also read Karl May, all sixty books! I knew Winnetou and Old Shatterhand. We were boys like all other boys except we had a remarkable, cultural experience along the way. There wouldn’t be a day we did not open our atlas in order to check political and international developments. We had a strong desire to be informed about what was going on around us and in the world. I still have that desire. I thank my grandmother and the Zagreb Realgymnasium for this intellectual curiosity. Unfortunately, this curriculum was not maintained after WWII.

I almost forgot to mention my geography teacher who I had when I was 13 years old. He was not only a good teacher, but also the author of a book on stenography (shorthand) and offered to teach stenography to the whole class after school. I obviously had an aptitude for it so I learned it very fast and soon became very skilled. Stenography, which was considered to be a trade skill and meant only for people who wanted to be clerks, played an important role in my career as a journalist.

In 1925. we finished high school. In order to be accepted at the university, one had to pass the Baccalaureate, a very difficult, five day, written and oral exam. My whole class passed the exam with flying colours.

Included in the group that passed the Baccalaureate was a man who was much older than us. It was the policeman on the horseback who used to keep on eye on us when we started high school. Thanks to the rules of our system, he was able to study at night and in summer school. until all the requirements to sit for the Baccalaureate were completed. Our entire class gave him a standing ovation. Eventually he became Chief of Police.

We were on the threshold of adult life. I was seventeen and was about to learn a valuable lesson regarding infatuation and love. I had been learning to play the piano since I was a child. In Vrbovec my grandfather paid for a private teacher. In Zagreb I attended the music academy, but I was also tutored by a young woman. I found her very attractive and she seemed rather fond of me too. We thought that we were actually in love with each other! I believe she was even more smitten than I was. It was romance in its purest form. In true Romeo and Juliet fashion we schemed to run away to a faraway land.

This was1925, a holy year for the Catholic Church which was celebrated extensively in Rome. She and I got our hands on some cheap train tickets to Italy. My family was informed that I was going on a trip and that I would be staying with Tonko’s brother in Rome. However, they were oblivious to the fact that my beloved piano teacher would accompany me. This secret only added to the excitement.

Looking back, how exciting was this adventure? I don’t think it added up to much, otherwise I would be able to remember more of the details now. The whole thing fizzled out. In Rome, my piano teacher, obviously the wiser of the two, came to the conclusion that what we were doing was foolish and childish. She discretely ended the affair and quietly returned home on her own. There were no harsh words, no sobs or tears, no shouting or rage, no threats of murder or suicide.

However, I did have another adventure, which made a man out of me.

After the piano teacher had left, I continued my travels through Italy. On the train to Taormina, Sicily, I made friends with a fellow traveler – a widow who had a son the same age as me, but who was away in America. She invited me to stay in her house and not only showed me around Taormina, but also taught me a great deal about sex.

However, what left a lasting impression, was not what I learnt about love and sex, but what I learned about Art and Culture. I felt like Goethe on his Italienische Reise. I can vividly remember my visit to Florence. And Rome! It was in these two cities that I saw for real the original sculptures, copies of which we had seen in the Zagreb Realgymnasium. It made an overwhelming impression on me without surprising me, which was quite wonderful. When I reached the Forum, I had the impression I already knew Rome. I felt at home amongst these ruins because the school had given us such a good background about these antiquities. “Ibam forte Via Sacra, nescio quid meditans nugarum”. I admired Rome as the cradle of civilisation, but also fully enjoyed the beauty and grandeur of the Renaissance. My stay was too short and I was sad to leave.

While I was still in high school, my family had given me a small camera as a present, one of these primitive square boxes. I had used this box to become a committed amateur photographer. I sent off pictures to a contest sponsored by Die Erde, the German equivalent of National Geographic. I was surprised to learn that one of my pictures had won an award! The award was a proper camera.

I started working as a free lance photographer for the Zagreb daily paper Novosti.. My stepfather had been on friendly terms with the publisher and had put in a good word for me many years ago. For more than a year I was covering local sporting and theatrical events. Then one day the publisher, who liked me and my work, presented me with a challenge. He said that if I wanted to be involved in the paper on a permanent basis, I had to learn English. He pulled a small book out of his pocket - a book in English by Jack London, To Build a Fire – which he wanted to publish in a serialised Serbo-Croatian translation at Christmas time. I was given six months to complete the project. I accepted the challenge and started learning English along with my good friend Cedo Novkovic, who also wanted to learn English. An English woman, married to a doctor in Zagreb, provided us with a crash course. She had her own way of motivating us. She entrusted us with copies of Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Ernest and Lady Windermere’s Fan and told us to read the books. “Never mind if you don’t understand them at first”, she said, “you soon will”. She gave us all the necessary auxiliary materials such as dictionaries etc. We saw her three times a week. She went through the text with us, explained the difficulties and gave us lots of home work. We could call on her at any time when we needed help.

Her approach proved successful. I remember how one evening my friend Cedo shouted excitedly from underneath my window: “Milan, I can understand it!” I knew Cedo was very clever, and I wanted to be able to hold my own with him. I worked twice as hard and within six months I had finished the translation of the Jack London book. Novosti published To Build a Fire in 1923 as Zapaliti Vatru.

As a reward for successfully accomplishing my task, the Novosti publisher bought me a large professional camera, a beauty with a Zeiss lens. It used glass photo plates and weighed 3 kilos. He then gave me the assignment of covering the Slavic Olympics in Prague. I became the official press photographer for the sports pages for Novosti, even though I was barely 18 years old.

Incidentally, my friend Cedo went on to study economics in Zurich. He later became a Communist and worked a long time for the Party as a secret agent. During the Second World War he fought against the Germans as a Yugoslavian guerrilla fighter. After the war during Tito’s regime, he became the head of the Department of Statistics. I saw him again only once in 1962. He called me a “rotten capitalist”. That was the last contact I had with him. He died soon after.

With the knowledge of English, I was now able to communicate in four languages.

I had learned French when I was 14. I had been lucky to learn the language from a woman who was a real française. She was the wife of the French consul in Egypt. Her husband had died around 1920. She had his body embalmed and wanted to take it back to Paris via Zagreb, but during the journey something went wrong with the coffin and the man had to be buried instantly in Zagreb. The French lady decided to stay on in Zagreb. She made friends with my mother who had taken pity on her. That is how I got to know her.

She spoke good German which helped her to get along in Zagreb,

but she needed something to occupy her, something to do such as teaching French. I was delighted to get the opportunity to learn French, especially since she could teach me proper Parisian French. Very much like the lady who later was to give me the intensive course in English, she too had her own special way of getting me interested in her language. She told me about her grandfather, who had been a ship’s captain. He had sailed the Pacific in the 1800s and had kept a diary full of entries about his hobby -- anthropology. “You have to read this, Milan”, the French lady said, “I am sure that if you use a grammar book and a dictionary, you’ll be fine”. It took me a whole year to get through the diary. I tried to translate parts of it. The French lady corrected me, while providing me with the necessary explanations. She would read to me as well, in order to teach me the right pronunciation.

In 1923, my high school French teacher organised a trip to Paris for her pupils, and I was invited to come along. It turned out that the Zagreb born French teacher did not understand Parisian French and as soon as we arrived she found out she could not even understand the porter at the station. She was very relieved when I took over. I became the official interpreter.

My knowledge of languages has been very useful throughout my life and given me great pleasure. During my last year at high school, or my first year at university, I am not quite sure which, the Bengali poet, mystic, philosopher, composer, painter and pedagogue Rabindranath Tagore, who had been awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1910, visited Zagreb to give a lecture. Because of my English I was chosen to be his guide, which of course was a great honour. I remember he was very interested in the history of the baroque city of Zagreb and the educational system of Croatia..

The authorities of the young independent country of Yugoslavia paid great importance to language. An impeccable use of the national language. Serbo-Croatian, in all official and unofficial papers was of vital importance to them. They refused to accept poor translations and unrelentingly censored all texts with grammatical mistakes.

As I have mentioned, my uncle Sandor Shay, who was married to Teta Ivka, my mother’s sister, and who lived in Vienna was a sales representative for the Dresden Ernemann Werke. The company manufactured film projectors that my uncle sold across the vast territory south and east of Vienna, all the way down to Bulgaria and Turkey. He regularly visited clients in our area, and he frequently took me with him to interpret for him. My schooling had ensured that both my German and Serbo-Croatian were very good.

On one such visit, Uncle Sandor was meeting with a film distributor. I was not needed since they both spoke German, so I sat at another desk where I found some silent film titles translated into Serbo-Croatian. I started to read these and found that the pages were full of grammatical errors, so I automatically started making corrections. After we left, the gentleman found my corrected titles and he used many of them. They were passed and approved by the censors. He was so pleased that he offered me a job as a translator of subtitles for silent movies. My work as a translator was so well paid that I started to earn more than my mother did making and selling hats. I translated German and French texts into Serbo-Croatian subtitles, which were then added to the film in a laboratory in Budapest. This was my first involvement with the film industry.

All this may sound as if I never had any fun, but I did. I played left wing on the soccer team at school, I often swam in the Sava River, and I skied a little on Mt. Sljme above Zagreb. And, since our schools were not co-educational, we could only meet girls in the park in the centre of the city. I never missed an opportunity.

I participated in another big event which I will never forget. The year 1925 marked 1000 years of the State of Croatia. In the year 925, the first Croat king Tomislav was crowned in the city of Split in Dalmatia. To celebrate this event, the city of Zagreb organised a mammoth celebration. One of the main events was a gigantic choir consisting of all the school children of Zagreb. All of the children were to sing a collection of the folk songs specially arranged for the occasion. The person in charge of coordinating this presentation was our music teacher, Matic, a composer himself.

While we were practising in our gymnasium, Matic had me watch him conducting. What he wanted, was to have me get up on the podium and conduct the best I knew how while he stood behind me and did the actual conducting. In other words, it would look as if one of the students was being the conductor, but in reality it was the teacher who was the real conductor. To this day I can remember the sight of all these hundreds of young people facing me in the large plaza in front of the Opera House. I felt as if I was, indeed, conducting them. For weeks the parents complimented me on a job well done.

In 1925, during my last year at high school, I took part in an exchange programme of the Alliance Française and was allowed a second trip to Paris, together with some of my classmates. My uncle had given me some pocket money so I could stay in the French capital a bit longer. This gave me the opportunity to further discover the “city of lights” on my own. Unfortunately, when left in France by myself, I overestimated my financial means. I had spent more money than I should have and was unable to afford the return ticket to Zagreb. I could get no further than Lucerne, Switzerland. Because I did not have the means to travel on, I got off the train in Lucerne, crossed the bridge and took the first street that was going up to the city centre. All of a sudden I spotted a bakery that had my name above the door: Bakery Herzog. I walked in, told them my story and asked the owners whether they were distant relatives of mine. It turned out they weren’t at all. I asked whether they could help me to contact my family or whether I could work for them until I had earned enough money to continue my journey home.

The Herzogs of Lucerne were very friendly and helpful people. They seemed to trust me. I was allowed to sleep in their attic, and during the day I helped them out in the bakery for which they paid me. After a week I had earned enough money to buy a ticket to Zagreb. I informed my family and said goodbye to the baker and his wife. I stayed in touch with them for a long time. We sent each other Christmas cards and occasional letters. Bit by bit our correspondence became less frequent. I returned to Lucerne in the seventies and the name Bakery Herzog was still above the door, but the baker Herzog and his wife were no longer there.

After this adventure, I started my higher education. However, I did not fancy studying history or ancient languages at the university because I had decided after finishing high school to become a marine engineer. I was interested in shipbuilding. However, an accidental injury to my left eye prevented me from doing the fine draftsmanship that was required. In 1926 I went to Zagreb University and enrolled in the Faculty of Law. In the first year I took Roman Law, the Evolution of Feudal Law, and Canon Law. I do not remember anything about the last one, but the first two proved themselves very useful at a later date.

The most interesting aspect of my studies at the university was my membership in the Cercle Français. I was introduced to this circle by the same Parisian lady who had taught me French. I became an exceptionally active member, perfected my French and got more involved with French culture. I was rewarded for my enthusiasm with a scholarship to the Sorbonne’s Ecole de Droit thanks to the French Consul General in Zagreb, who recommended me.

Paris opened for me the gates to Europe.