Experiencing Mixedness, Being out of sync

I just returned from my hometown of Mostar where I attended a Catholic mass my aunt organized to commemorate one year anniversary of my grandfather's death. My grandfather and I were extremely close. We were best friends, colleagues who often talked about politics, philosophy, and current events. He was someone who really knew me, and I felt like I could share anything with him. This is why the Catholic mass came as a surprise to me. My grandfather, as far as I knew, was never religious. He was born in Croatia while it was in the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and grew up in the small Serbian town of Uzice. While Catholic Croat by his background his father was a strict disciplinarian and a member of the Yugoslav gendarme (probably the most pro-King section of the society). After World War II, he was a card carrying member of Tito's Communist Party and a proud atheist who married a secular Zagreb woman who was one of the few who attended a university (of meteorology) after WWII. Consequently, my mother grew up feeling Yugoslav and has never (to this day) entered a Catholic Church. She married my father, a man from a Muslim (although secular) family who has never entered a mosque, and whose father was a Partisan courier during the bloody days of World War II and who to the very last day remained an unwavering Titoist. His father (my father's grandfather) was a village hodza (a Muslim priest) and a devoted believer.

While sitting in the Cathedral in the West side of Mostar on a cold but beautiful Tuesday morning, I was struck how much this recent war made my family mixed. It was after the war that I found out that my grandfather (my mother's father) actually served in the regular military (the so called domobrani) of the Independent State of Croatia during WWII (run by the fanatical Ustashe leader Pavelic), and was forced to flee the country as the angry Partisans liberated the country in 1945. He was a witness to the controversial and a bloody event known as the Blaiburg massacre. This massacre happened in 1945 when the British authorities occupying Austria returned thousands of fleeing Ustashe, Chetniks, and other former Axis allies to the Partisans forces who went on to slaughter many of them. The event became a symbolic memory for the virulent Croatian nationalism that swept Croatia and Bosnia in the early 1990s. My grandfather revealed to me only in 2000 that he was in this column of refugees and was interned by the Partisans, questioned and went through a thorough background check before he was released and allowed to join the party. The Croatian authorities in Mostar confirmed his story by awarding him a pension and a status of a political prisoner, a vague term that referred to those Croats who had been persecuted by the Communists.

After the ceremony my grandfather's sister-in-law also revealed to me that while he might have been an atheist, his mother secretly registered all of her children and grandchildren (including my mother) with the Catholic priest so that their names would be in Catholic birth registers. My aunt also revealed to me that on his bed, one of the last things he asked, right after he asked to see the picture of his family, was to see a priest.

Also, while sitting in that church I was completely out of sync with the rest of my relatives (who are church going Catholics): when they went on their knees to pray, I would just stand there, when they uttered prayers, I would be silent, when they got up to, I would sit down. This reflected the extent to which as a child from a secular mixed marriage, I am completely out of sync in the ethnically divided Mostar and by extension, Bosnia. The war has pushed my family into scratching the surface of our previous lives and has revealed a whole new layer of past previously hidden, or irrelevant.

It is this new past that continues to haunt me every time I walk the streets of Mostar, feeling like a complete stranger in a place that I often referred to as "my hometown."