Television testimony and public case overview

00:19 [NARRATOR]: So far, Strange Stories has featured more than two hundred difficult life stories, most of them ending in death. But tonight, you will hear a very different story—one that is just as strange. 00:00:34.904 --> 00:00:48.673 [NARRATOR]: Detective Braca came to Kragujevac to meet Milan Petrović in person after Milan contacted him on Facebook and asked him to come, saying that his entire life had been built on a lie. 00:00:49.953 --> 00:00:54.161 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Milan, I’m glad to be here with you and to hear your story. 00:00:54.161 --> 00:01:00.894 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Given the times we live in—times when it’s hard to know what is really going on— 00:01:02.099 --> 00:01:13.749 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: —are babies really being taken from maternity wards, and are children really being adopted illegally? I suppose that remains a huge open question, including for the next government. 00:01:13.749 --> 00:01:18.593 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Your life has been a roller coaster of unbelievable events. 00:01:18.593 --> 00:01:22.316 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What is the very first thing you remember from your life? 00:01:22.775 --> 00:01:28.845 [MILAN]: My earliest memory is of a white van—more precisely, a Fiat 1100T. 00:01:28.845 --> 00:01:35.155 [MILAN]: And of the man who drove it, a man who was exceptionally kind to me. 00:01:38.256 --> 00:01:45.297 [MILAN]: I remember him taking me to see another older man, then to a woman, and then taking me away again. 00:01:45.297 --> 00:01:48.418 [MILAN]: It was an old Fiat van. 00:01:48.418 --> 00:01:52.599 [MILAN]: I remember that he disappeared. 00:01:52.599 --> 00:01:54.659 [MILAN]: There were a lot of people at the house. 00:01:54.659 --> 00:02:00.481 [MILAN]: Then I remember an even older man, and after that I remember Irig. 00:02:00.481 --> 00:02:01.801 [MILAN]: And I remember some people coming to take me away. 00:02:07.278 --> 00:02:08.019 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: From Irig? 00:02:08.019 --> 00:02:08.900 [MILAN]: From Irig. 00:02:08.900 --> 00:02:10.442 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How old were you then? 00:02:10.442 --> 00:02:11.323 [MILAN]: I was five years old. 00:02:11.323 --> 00:02:18.413 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: At five, a child is only just beginning to form lasting memories. 00:02:18.413 --> 00:02:18.473 [MILAN]: Yes. 00:02:18.767 --> 00:02:20.649 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What did it all look like to you? 00:02:20.649 --> 00:02:33.660 [MILAN]: I remember that when I arrived at those people’s house, there were a lot of people there, and they told me those were my father and mother. They said they worked somewhere else and were paying other people to look after me. 00:02:33.660 --> 00:02:35.982 [MILAN]: And I believed that was true. 00:02:35.982 --> 00:02:40.006 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What were the names of the people who presented themselves to you as your parents? 00:02:40.482 --> 00:02:44.183 [MILAN]: Their names were Milorad and Gospava Vasić. 00:02:44.183 --> 00:02:47.103 [MILAN]: This was in Budisava, near Novi Sad. 00:02:47.103 --> 00:02:52.964 [MILAN]: Milorad was, let’s say, an unusually tall man, very thin. 00:02:52.964 --> 00:02:56.465 [MILAN]: He had a small moustache and black hair, already slicked back even then. 00:02:56.465 --> 00:03:00.426 [MILAN]: There was one thing about him that struck me as very unusual. 00:03:00.426 --> 00:03:02.306 [MILAN]: He had a violin. 00:03:02.306 --> 00:03:06.487 [MILAN]: But he didn’t use it as a violin, to play music, I don’t know— 00:03:08.108 --> 00:03:11.110 [MILAN]: Liszt or anyone like that—but more like a gusle. 00:03:11.110 --> 00:03:19.877 [MILAN]: In the evenings he would sit down, make this rough, droning sound, and keep shouting until it passed. 00:03:19.877 --> 00:03:23.059 [MILAN]: It was hard to listen to, but that’s how it was. 00:03:23.059 --> 00:03:24.401 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And Gospava, the mother? 00:03:24.401 --> 00:03:26.362 [MILAN]: Gospava, the mother, was small... 00:03:27.407 --> 00:03:37.510 [MILAN]: A tiny woman. I clearly remember her old-fashioned underwear hanging on the clothesline—the kind older women used to wear. 00:03:37.510 --> 00:03:41.551 [MILAN]: Those old-fashioned ones, the kind that went down to the knees. I remember that. 00:03:41.551 --> 00:03:46.332 [MILAN]: She was thin, very small, and highly nervous. 00:03:46.332 --> 00:03:51.193 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did they have any source of income? Were they employed, retired, anything like that? 00:03:52.846 --> 00:04:00.367 [MILAN]: Milorad worked as a house painter and decorator, and he was also some kind of crew supervisor for a company in Novi Sad. 00:04:00.367 --> 00:04:07.109 [MILAN]: I can’t remember whether it was Novkabel or Energoprojekt, because I don’t have those records. 00:04:07.109 --> 00:04:10.029 [MILAN]: But yes, he was employed. 00:04:10.029 --> 00:04:12.130 [MILAN]: Gospava was a housewife. 00:04:12.130 --> 00:04:15.670 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And Gospava’s sister, Darinka? 00:04:15.670 --> 00:04:16.990 [MILAN]: I don’t know much about her. 00:04:16.990 --> 00:04:19.711 [MILAN]: Her husband was a truck driver, 00:04:20.382 --> 00:04:24.411 [MILAN]: and I remember that at one point he spent several months in Iraq. 00:04:26.524 --> 00:04:39.332 [MILAN]: Back in the early 1980s, companies used to send drivers to Iraq, and I remember stories from when he came back—terrible stories, about some drivers being found dead. 00:04:39.332 --> 00:04:51.040 [MILAN]: He was, I would say, a decent man, a bit heavyset, but he did not interfere much, while Darinka was clearly the one who ran the household. 00:04:51.536 --> 00:04:55.537 [MILAN]: As I mentioned, she would slap her grown son even though he was already married. 00:04:55.537 --> 00:04:57.698 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What happened next in your life? 00:04:57.698 --> 00:05:02.780 [MILAN]: Life went on, more or less, like a normal family life. 00:05:02.780 --> 00:05:08.262 [MILAN]: She was nine years older than Milorad, and I called them Mom and Dad. 00:05:08.262 --> 00:05:12.304 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And they addressed you as their son? 00:05:12.304 --> 00:05:15.585 [MILAN]: Yes, yes. As their son. And in a way— 00:05:16.649 --> 00:05:23.737 [MILAN]: —at least as far as I could understand it at that age, they had a stable marriage, up to a certain point. 00:05:23.737 --> 00:05:32.966 [MILAN]: That changed in 1981, when Gospava and I went to Vrnjačka Banja for seven days for her medical treatment. 00:05:32.966 --> 00:05:37.651 [MILAN]: When we came back, near the end of August, everything had fallen apart. 00:05:37.651 --> 00:05:39.193 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What do you mean by that? 00:05:39.737 --> 00:05:47.942 [MILAN]: While we were away, Milorad had started an affair with our next-door neighbor, Rajka. 00:05:47.942 --> 00:05:53.625 [MILAN]: She was two years younger than Milorad and eleven years younger than Gospava. 00:05:53.625 --> 00:05:59.429 [MILAN]: She was also married and had two children, aged twelve and eighteen. 00:05:59.429 --> 00:06:06.113 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did you react as a little boy? Suddenly there was another woman from the neighborhood in the picture. 00:06:06.762 --> 00:06:09.004 [MILAN]: It came out in an extremely brazen, shameless way. 00:06:09.004 --> 00:06:28.096 [MILAN]: Rajka came into the house, and Gospava accused her of being involved with her husband—which was true, because people had already been talking about it. At that point, Gospava grabbed a knife and lunged at Rajka. 00:06:28.096 --> 00:06:35.882 [MILAN]: Milorad stepped in and slapped Gospava so hard that she was thrown backward. 00:06:35.882 --> 00:06:36.282 [MILAN]: At that time— 00:06:37.065 --> 00:06:48.593 [MILAN]: —Milorad’s mother, Jelka, had also come from Bosnia, from the village of Gornji Osječani near Doboj, and she was left stunned by what was happening. 00:06:48.593 --> 00:06:51.895 [MILAN]: I sat in the corner and watched it all. 00:06:51.895 --> 00:07:00.822 [MILAN]: Gospava ran out of the house in tears and headed toward the railway tracks, saying she was going to throw herself under a train. 00:07:01.703 --> 00:07:03.704 [MILAN]: She really did make it all the way to the tracks. 00:07:03.704 --> 00:07:09.267 [MILAN]: Jelka kept telling Milorad, “Go after your wife,” but he did not care at all. 00:07:09.267 --> 00:07:17.011 [MILAN]: A neighbor farther down the street saw everything, ran after her, and brought Gospava back. 00:07:17.011 --> 00:07:26.015 [MILAN]: Later on, Gospava would say that if it hadn’t been for that man, the train would have killed her, and that she ought to buy him a shirt, and so on. 00:07:26.015 --> 00:07:28.056 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how did you feel at that moment? 00:07:28.342 --> 00:07:31.825 [MILAN]: I stayed silent—shocked and frightened. 00:07:31.825 --> 00:07:44.136 [MILAN]: Milorad stayed in that house for some time after that. On one occasion he was doing something in the attic. These were old German-built houses, with an opening and a ladder on one side. 00:07:44.136 --> 00:07:52.103 [MILAN]: Gospava came up and kept shouting things at him. He came to the attic opening, threw a hammer at her, and hit her in the chest. 00:07:52.103 --> 00:07:52.683 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Terrible. 00:07:53.202 --> 00:08:07.578 [MILAN]: No. After a short time, I just saw him drive away. One day, as I was walking to school, I waved at him, but he didn’t even look at me. Officially, he had run off with Rajka to Sremska Kamenica. 00:08:07.578 --> 00:08:15.346 [MILAN]: In the meantime, Gospava fell into a very bad mental state and turned to fortune-tellers, 00:08:16.125 --> 00:08:18.487 [MILAN]: and then to fortune-telling by reading beans. 00:08:18.487 --> 00:08:24.691 [MILAN]: Women who believed in that sort of thing would gather there. 00:08:24.691 --> 00:08:34.339 [MILAN]: Then, when she was diagnosed with cancer, she was taken to an institute near Novi Sad, where one of her breasts was removed. 00:08:34.339 --> 00:08:39.182 [MILAN]: But by then it was too late. The cancer had already spread throughout her body. 00:08:39.182 --> 00:08:45.087 [MILAN]: In the period before she died, after being abandoned by her unfaithful husband, 00:08:45.885 --> 00:08:48.847 [MILAN]: she showed all kinds of psychological problems. 00:08:48.847 --> 00:08:55.230 [MILAN]: Once, because of some childish mischief of mine, she chased me around the table with a knife. 00:08:55.230 --> 00:08:57.712 [MILAN]: As she chased me, she kept shouting that she was going to kill me. 00:08:57.712 --> 00:09:05.456 [MILAN]: I was backing away, tripped over a folded rug, and fell. What happened after that, I no longer remember because of the shock. 00:09:05.456 --> 00:09:07.157 [MILAN]: But I remember the knife very clearly. 00:09:07.157 --> 00:09:14.882 [MILAN]: On another occasion, two cats came into the house. The door was open because it was warm outside. 00:09:15.682 --> 00:09:23.646 [MILAN]: I went in and saw them. One ran away, but I closed the door, and the other one stayed inside and hid under the freezer. 00:09:23.646 --> 00:09:26.227 [MILAN]: And I shouted, “Mom, Mom, a cat!” 00:09:26.227 --> 00:09:31.890 [MILAN]: She came rushing into the house and somehow, I don’t even know with what, managed to catch that cat. 00:09:31.890 --> 00:09:35.452 [MILAN]: It was like the cat had gone wild, scratching and struggling. I remember gloves after that, but not much else. 00:09:35.452 --> 00:09:42.996 [MILAN]: She carried the cat by its tail. The cat was crying out. 00:09:42.996 --> 00:09:45.037 [MILAN]: It was horrifying to hear those cries. 00:09:45.508 --> 00:09:50.569 [MILAN]: She tied it to a tree, took a stick, and beat it brutally. 00:09:50.569 --> 00:09:52.150 [MILAN]: I ran back into the house to get away from that scene. 00:09:52.150 --> 00:09:53.310 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Terrible. 00:09:53.310 --> 00:10:00.731 [MILAN]: After that, according to what she later said, because I didn’t see what happened next, she claimed that she had cut the cat’s head off. 00:10:00.731 --> 00:10:11.714 [MILAN]: Then she called for an elderly woman from the neighborhood, someone named Mrs. Ignjatić—I remember the surname—to come and see the cat and the severed head. 00:10:12.420 --> 00:10:15.983 [MILAN]: Later she claimed that both the cat and the head had disappeared. 00:10:15.983 --> 00:10:38.423 [MILAN]: At that time she was also visiting a fortune-teller in Budisava. Then, at one point, she took me to the Orthodox church in Kać, and we attended a service there. That still wasn’t enough for her, and then she met some people who were Jehovah’s Witnesses. 00:10:39.313 --> 00:10:42.355 [MILAN]: That was a few months before she died. 00:10:42.355 --> 00:10:54.122 [MILAN]: Then she devoted herself to Jehovah’s Witnesses, and every week she would take me to one of their Kingdom Halls in Novi Sad. Anyone from Novi Sad would know where it was. 00:10:54.122 --> 00:10:55.263 [MILAN]: Every single week. 00:11:00.906 --> 00:11:06.670 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: When she took you to those Jehovah’s Witness gatherings, how did you experience it all? 00:11:00.906 --> 00:11:06.670 [MILAN]: Honestly, I found it very boring. 00:11:06.670 --> 00:11:06.830 [MILAN]: Truly. 00:11:07.072 --> 00:11:12.620 [MILAN]: I mean, I’m not saying this against them. They had their teachings, about sin and all that. 00:11:12.620 --> 00:11:13.882 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Were there children there? 00:11:13.882 --> 00:11:20.532 [MILAN]: Yes, there were children, and we were told that we should only socialize with each other, not with other children. 00:11:21.523 --> 00:11:33.827 [MILAN]: But by then her illness had already progressed badly. She became bedridden, and in the last month she could no longer speak. Her tongue was bleeding, and she kept losing blood until she died. 00:11:33.827 --> 00:11:38.549 [MILAN]: If I remember correctly, that was on April 20, 1983. 00:11:38.549 --> 00:11:46.371 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: While she was bedridden and could no longer get up, did you care for her as your mother? 00:11:46.371 --> 00:11:48.292 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: At that point, you still believed she was your mother? 00:11:48.412 --> 00:11:56.199 [MILAN]: Yes. I listened to her. But since I was still small, her sister Darinka would come from Novi Sad to look after her. 00:11:56.199 --> 00:12:02.104 [MILAN]: And when Darinka couldn’t come, she would bring her mother-in-law to stay with her instead. 00:12:02.104 --> 00:12:06.848 [MILAN]: I was just a child, seven or eight years old, and all I wanted was to play. 00:12:06.848 --> 00:12:14.195 [MILAN]: I tried not to get pulled into all that trauma. I did whatever needed to be done, and it didn’t feel hard to me. 00:12:15.078 --> 00:12:20.240 [MILAN]: But as a child, I did not understand how serious her illness really was. 00:12:20.240 --> 00:12:22.901 [MILAN]: I was there when she died. 00:12:22.901 --> 00:12:25.742 [MILAN]: Her sister was there too, and someone else, I don’t remember who. 00:12:25.742 --> 00:12:28.863 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Were you just there by chance, or did someone call you into the room? 00:12:28.863 --> 00:12:35.045 [MILAN]: I was not there by chance. I had been there the whole time during those last few days. 00:12:35.045 --> 00:12:39.066 [MILAN]: I think I was even absent from school with permission. 00:12:39.066 --> 00:12:40.267 [MILAN]: I definitely spent— 00:12:41.378 --> 00:12:54.206 [MILAN]: —those days watching her agony. Before that, in some kind of will, she had left half the house and property to her sister Darinka and, supposedly, the other half to me. 00:12:54.206 --> 00:13:00.289 [MILAN]: I never saw that document myself, but I know Darinka collected her share. 00:13:00.289 --> 00:13:04.311 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how much land and property was there? 00:13:04.311 --> 00:13:05.292 [MILAN]: It was about... 00:13:07.034 --> 00:13:21.092 [MILAN]: Land... It was a plot in Budisava with an old, renovated German-built house, maybe fifty to sixty square meters, and perhaps ten ares out of a fifteen-are lot. I can’t say for certain. 00:13:21.092 --> 00:13:23.856 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how did you react the moment she died? 00:13:24.246 --> 00:13:28.890 [MILAN]: The moment she died, I burst into tears and ran outside. 00:13:28.890 --> 00:13:31.592 [MILAN]: I have no memory of what happened after that. 00:13:31.592 --> 00:13:40.380 [MILAN]: Gospava eventually died from the complications of that hammer blow, about a year and a half later. 00:13:40.380 --> 00:13:41.701 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how does the story continue? 00:13:41.701 --> 00:13:43.222 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Where did you end up as a child? 00:13:43.757 --> 00:13:49.818 [MILAN]: After her death, her sister Darinka took me to her apartment in Detelinara. 00:13:49.818 --> 00:13:56.540 [MILAN]: Darinka was a large, heavy-set woman, very full of herself. 00:13:56.540 --> 00:14:00.081 [MILAN]: She was about forty-three and already had four children. 00:14:00.081 --> 00:14:07.923 [MILAN]: A daughter from her first marriage and three sons from her second. The youngest was eighteen, and I served as his entertainment. 00:14:09.250 --> 00:14:12.996 [MILAN]: For the two months I spent with them in that apartment. 00:14:12.996 --> 00:14:14.939 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What do you mean by “entertainment”? 00:14:14.939 --> 00:14:22.672 [MILAN]: Well, this eighteen-year-old would lie on the bed, pin my head between his legs, and I would cry out, calling for help. 00:14:23.571 --> 00:14:24.371 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: He tormented you? 00:14:24.371 --> 00:14:25.351 [MILAN]: He did. 00:14:25.351 --> 00:14:31.733 [MILAN]: That was his entertainment. I would call out for Darinka, my aunt. 00:14:31.733 --> 00:14:34.633 [MILAN]: And nothing. Just, “oh, let it be,” and so on—nothing. 00:14:34.633 --> 00:14:47.656 [MILAN]: And finally: “Saša, let him go.” In this whiny, half-hearted voice. She was always finding fault with everyone, preaching about honesty, yet she would slap her adult son. 00:14:47.796 --> 00:14:58.365 [MILAN]: Personally, she couldn’t stand me. I was a constant nuisance to her, as if she saw me as competition because she hadn’t managed to take everything for herself. 00:14:58.365 --> 00:15:05.992 [MILAN]: And when the neighborhood women asked her if I cried when Gospava died, she’d say, “Oh, he cried a little bit, I guess.” 00:15:05.992 --> 00:15:12.878 [MILAN]: When I moved in with Darinka, she enrolled me in the Dositej Obradović Primary School in late April, 00:15:13.855 --> 00:15:18.397 [MILAN]: in the Detelinara neighborhood of Novi Sad. I stayed there until the summer break. 00:15:18.397 --> 00:15:22.019 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did you adjust to the new surroundings, the new school? 00:15:22.019 --> 00:15:28.423 [MILAN]: I managed okay at the new school, but I completely neglected my studies. 00:15:28.423 --> 00:15:39.829 [MILAN]: I had been a straight-A student in first grade, and I was still doing very well in the first half of that year, so those good grades were simply carried over. 00:15:41.024 --> 00:15:45.845 [MILAN]: The teacher just transferred them, but I know I wasn’t studying and I really didn’t know much. 00:15:45.845 --> 00:15:50.126 [MILAN]: I finished the year with top marks, even though, honestly, I didn't deserve them. 00:15:50.126 --> 00:15:56.208 [MILAN]: Then summer break started. That was when Milorad took me back. 00:15:56.208 --> 00:15:57.188 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Who was Milorad? 00:15:57.188 --> 00:16:01.269 [MILAN]: Milorad was working then as a house painter and decorator. 00:16:01.269 --> 00:16:10.732 [MILAN]: I’d be lying if I said whether it was Novkabel or Energoprojekt; I don’t remember the exact name. But he had a job, he was... 00:16:11.298 --> 00:16:21.022 [MILAN]: ...some kind of crew supervisor. This was Gospava’s husband, the one who ran off with the neighbor and moved to Futog. 00:16:21.022 --> 00:16:23.123 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And who did you consider to be your father at that time? 00:16:23.123 --> 00:16:24.603 [MILAN]: Milorad Vasić. 00:16:31.563 --> 00:16:38.906 [MILAN]: While Gospava was still alive, social services sent me to a summer camp in Vela Luka for twenty days. 00:16:38.906 --> 00:16:41.787 [MILAN]: Whether it was in July or August, I don’t remember exactly. 00:16:41.787 --> 00:16:46.969 [MILAN]: His new wife, Rajka, was cold and distant with me. 00:16:46.969 --> 00:16:49.530 [MILAN]: I could feel her hostility. 00:16:49.530 --> 00:16:54.913 [MILAN]: He would snap at me over the slightest thing. 00:16:54.913 --> 00:16:56.613 [MILAN]: He'd beat me. 00:16:56.613 --> 00:17:00.935 [MILAN]: And I was forced to look after their eight-month-old baby girl. 00:17:01.383 --> 00:17:02.424 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And whose baby was that? 00:17:02.424 --> 00:17:03.024 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: His? 00:17:03.024 --> 00:17:05.165 [MILAN]: His and Rajka’s. 00:17:05.165 --> 00:17:08.808 [MILAN]: They never even told me she was my sister—nothing. 00:17:08.808 --> 00:17:12.370 [MILAN]: I had to watch her while she was lying on a regular bed. 00:17:12.370 --> 00:17:15.271 [MILAN]: In a moment of carelessness on my part, she fell and hit her head. 00:17:15.271 --> 00:17:17.773 [MILAN]: Nothing serious, just a small bump. 00:17:17.773 --> 00:17:21.235 [MILAN]: But the beating Milorad gave me over that—I’ll never forget it. 00:17:21.937 --> 00:17:24.319 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did he treat you? 00:17:24.319 --> 00:17:26.101 [MILAN]: Brutally. 00:17:26.101 --> 00:17:29.344 [MILAN]: He beat me with a belt, his fists, his feet—I don’t even know what else. 00:17:29.344 --> 00:17:38.973 [MILAN]: But if there was one silver lining in those two miserable months with him, it was the twenty days I got to spend at a summer camp in Vela Luka. 00:17:38.973 --> 00:17:44.639 [MILAN]: He basically just took me to the bus station and waited for the bus with me. 00:17:44.639 --> 00:17:45.940 [MILAN]: They packed... 00:17:46.160 --> 00:17:54.369 [MILAN]: ...an old travel bag with some underwear and God knows what else—nothing he had actually bought for me, just the things I had brought with me. 00:17:54.369 --> 00:18:01.257 [MILAN]: And I left with the other kids, children who had been sent on holiday through social services—disadvantaged kids. 00:18:01.593 --> 00:18:20.855 [MILAN]: They weren't all from Budisava. Some were from Novi Sad, some from other places. Mostly kids from families struggling financially. 00:18:20.935 --> 00:18:28.858 [MILAN]: There was a whole bus full of us, maybe fifty kids, and that year, in 1983, we spent the summer in Vela Luka, at the Jadran Hotel. 00:18:28.858 --> 00:18:33.681 [MILAN]: As the days passed, the other kids kept crying, saying they wanted to go home. 00:18:33.681 --> 00:18:34.401 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: As soon as possible? 00:18:34.401 --> 00:18:36.982 [MILAN]: As soon as possible. But I had absolutely no desire to go back. 00:18:36.982 --> 00:18:43.265 [MILAN]: I even thought about running off into the woods above Vela Luka, just so the bus would leave without me. 00:18:43.265 --> 00:18:44.565 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Why? 00:18:44.565 --> 00:18:46.626 [MILAN]: Because I couldn't bear the thought of returning to Milorad. 00:18:46.626 --> 00:18:48.387 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Because of the beatings? 00:18:48.387 --> 00:18:50.808 [MILAN]: Not just the beatings. There were many other things, too. 00:18:51.000 --> 00:18:52.661 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Such as? 00:18:52.661 --> 00:18:58.325 [MILAN]: His wife's open hostility toward me. And the hunger. 00:18:58.325 --> 00:18:59.845 [MILAN]: I remember the hunger very clearly. 00:19:01.166 --> 00:19:02.687 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So they were starving you? 00:19:02.687 --> 00:19:06.810 [MILAN]: They were. There was breakfast and lunch, but it was practically nothing. There was this box... 00:19:07.310 --> 00:19:12.293 [MILAN]: ...of ladyfinger cookies in the hanging kitchen cabinet. 00:19:12.293 --> 00:19:17.136 [MILAN]: I saw it. I could have easily eaten the whole box if I wanted to. 00:19:17.136 --> 00:19:22.739 [MILAN]: But knowing how he tracked everything, I would sneak just one cookie a day. 00:19:22.739 --> 00:19:25.080 [MILAN]: Some days I wouldn't even take one. 00:19:25.080 --> 00:19:27.342 [MILAN]: I figured they wouldn’t notice. 00:19:27.342 --> 00:19:27.802 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right, right. 00:19:28.840 --> 00:19:31.962 [MILAN]: That’s how I remember dealing with that unbearable hunger. 00:19:31.962 --> 00:19:38.285 [MILAN]: On a few occasions, when he wasn't home, I asked Rajka for ice cream. 00:19:38.285 --> 00:19:42.207 [MILAN]: All they ever said was that they had no money. "No money, no money." 00:19:42.207 --> 00:19:48.051 [MILAN]: Then one time she took pity on me and gave me seven dinars—I remember it perfectly—for a "Rumenko," the cheapest ice cream they had. 00:19:48.051 --> 00:19:50.152 [MILAN]: That was the only ice cream I ever had there. 00:19:50.636 --> 00:19:56.578 [MILAN]: Later, she complained to him about it, and he laid into me for even asking. 00:19:56.578 --> 00:20:05.602 [MILAN]: Anyway, when I got back from that summer camp, he started inventorying the things I brought back. 00:20:05.602 --> 00:20:07.562 [MILAN]: Checking what he had packed against what I brought home. 00:20:07.562 --> 00:20:09.383 [MILAN]: He noticed a few pairs of underwear were missing. 00:20:10.366 --> 00:20:28.430 [MILAN]: When he realized that, he flew into a rage, calling me every name in the book. I remember he then took me to his landlords in Beočin. They had a nice country house there with a plum orchard. 00:20:29.070 --> 00:20:31.790 [MILAN]: And I ended up staying there. 00:20:31.790 --> 00:20:35.311 [MILAN]: They were exceptionally kind people. They didn’t force me to work or anything. 00:20:35.311 --> 00:20:42.092 [MILAN]: Over the summer break, young people would come there to earn a little money picking plums, and the landlords paid them. 00:20:42.092 --> 00:20:48.213 [MILAN]: A few days later, Milorad showed up and demanded to know why I wasn’t picking plums too... 00:20:48.213 --> 00:20:51.454 [MILAN]: ...so I could earn back the money for the underwear I had lost. 00:20:51.454 --> 00:20:57.455 [MILAN]: He slapped me right in front of the landlords and those young people. 00:20:57.734 --> 00:21:00.775 [MILAN]: No one said a word to him, but they glared at him in absolute disgust. 00:21:00.775 --> 00:21:05.376 [MILAN]: I grabbed a bucket and went out to join the others. 00:21:05.376 --> 00:21:13.078 [MILAN]: Under their breath, they were muttering how they’d love to rip his throat out, and things like that. 00:21:13.078 --> 00:21:18.040 [MILAN]: They were completely horrified that a man could treat a child that way. 00:21:18.040 --> 00:21:18.720 [MILAN]: And then he left. 00:21:19.328 --> 00:21:28.871 [MILAN]: Later, after I came back and had earned the money for the lost underwear, he suddenly said to me, completely out of the blue, “Let me tell you something.” 00:21:28.871 --> 00:21:29.572 [MILAN]: “What?” I asked. 00:21:29.572 --> 00:21:31.012 [MILAN]: “Gospava and I adopted you.” 00:21:48.658 --> 00:22:09.646 [NARRATOR]: Drawn up on June 21, 1979, on the premises of the Self-Governing Community of Social Welfare of Novi Sad, acting as the authorized guardianship authority pursuant to Article 1 of the Decision entrusting guardianship duties to the Self-Governing Community of Social Welfare of Novi Sad, 00:22:09.786 --> 00:22:32.626 [NARRATOR]: Official Gazette of the Municipality of Novi Sad, No. 8/77, in the matter of the full adoption of the minor Miletić Milivoj, born on June 28, 1974, in Novi Sad, by the adoptive parents Vasić Milorad and Vasić Gospava of Budisava, residing at 52 Petefi Šandora Street. 00:22:32.626 --> 00:22:34.688 [NARRATOR]: Proceedings commenced at 8:00 a.m. 00:22:34.848 --> 00:22:51.580 [NARRATOR]: Present at the hearing on the full adoption were: Anđa Gamber, officer of the guardianship authority; Lidija Molnar, recording clerk; Milorad Vasić, adoptive parent; Gospava Vasić, adoptive parent; Vera Radovanović, special guardian. 00:22:51.760 --> 00:23:14.960 [NARRATOR]: The official, Anđa Gamber, notes that all summoned persons were present at the hearing, that it was scheduled at the request of Milorad Vasić and Gospava Vasić of Budisava, as adoptive parents, for the purpose of the full adoption of the minor Miletić Milivoj, in accordance with Article 30 of the Adoption Act, Official Gazette of SAP Vojvodina, No. 24/76. 00:23:15.540 --> 00:23:27.970 [NARRATOR]: In the preliminary proceedings, the guardianship authority established that all legal conditions for a full adoption had been met, and that this adoption was in accordance with Article 24 of the Adoption Act. 00:23:27.970 --> 00:23:40.000 [NARRATOR]: The mother of the minor, Miletić Milivoj, has for a longer period been at an unknown place of residence and, without justified reason, has failed to perform her parental duties, and for those reasons, pursuant to Article 5 00:23:40.360 --> 00:23:59.543 [NARRATOR]: of the Adoption Act, the minor Miletić Milivoj was assigned a special guardian by decision No. UP 03-506/79 of June 2, 1979, in the person of Vera Radovanović, social worker, who gives consent to this adoption. 00:23:59.923 --> 00:24:08.266 [NARRATOR]: It was established that there were no impediments under Articles 10 and 11, and that a positive opinion under Article 15 of the Adoption Act had been given. 00:24:08.266 --> 00:24:26.052 [NARRATOR]: After the parties were informed of the rights and duties of the adoptive parents and the adoptee, the adoptive parents agreed that the adoptee would inherit from their possible estate and enjoy all rights under Article 36 of the Adoption Act, and having been informed of Article 40 of that same Act, 00:24:26.352 --> 00:24:34.000 [NARRATOR]: the adoptive parents expressed the wish that the adoptee should bear the family name of the adoptive parents and be called Vasić Milan. 00:24:34.000 --> 00:24:44.592 [NARRATOR]: Since all legal conditions for full adoption had been fulfilled, the guardianship authority hereby declares the full adoption established, by which Vasić Milorad... 00:24:44.832 --> 00:25:01.796 [NARRATOR]: ...born on February 15, 1941, in Osječani, Municipality of Doboj, and Vasić Gospava, born on August 21, 1932, in Donji Klakar, Municipality of Doboj, both residing in Budisava, at 52 Petefi Šandora Street, adopt the minor Miletić Milivoj. 00:25:01.796 --> 00:25:06.877 [NARRATOR]: The adopted minor, Miletić Milivoj, shall henceforth be called Vasić Milan. 00:25:06.877 --> 00:25:12.078 [NARRATOR]: The report on the full adoption shall be submitted by the guardianship authority to the competent registrar for the entry of the adoptive parents’ details as the parents of the minor Miletić Milivoj. 00:25:12.338 --> 00:25:23.043 [NARRATOR]: Completed at 8:30 a.m. 00:25:23.043 --> 00:25:26.064 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So how did you react to that? 00:25:26.064 --> 00:25:28.045 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: You didn’t even know what it meant? 00:25:28.045 --> 00:25:29.566 [MILAN]: I actually did. 00:25:29.566 --> 00:25:31.407 [MILAN]: Because earlier, while I was still living with Gospava... 00:25:31.407 --> 00:25:37.790 [MILAN]: ...the other kids used to tease me, saying I was adopted. 00:25:37.790 --> 00:25:40.111 [MILAN]: I would run home crying 00:25:40.360 --> 00:25:48.764 [MILAN]: and tell her what they were saying. She would comfort me and say, “They’re lying, they’re making it up.” And I believed her—as my mother. 00:25:48.764 --> 00:25:54.187 [MILAN]: So when Milorad told me I was adopted, it didn't exactly come as a shock. 00:25:54.187 --> 00:25:56.629 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: By then, had you already shut down inside? 00:25:56.629 --> 00:26:05.033 [MILAN]: Not just shut down. With all that cruelty, the way he treated me so inhumanly—it was almost a relief... 00:26:05.848 --> 00:26:06.989 [MILAN]: ...that he was nothing to me. 00:26:06.989 --> 00:26:14.233 [MILAN]: Because it was impossible to fathom a biological father treating his son like that. 00:26:14.233 --> 00:26:26.380 [MILAN]: He just saw me as a burden, an obstacle, a mistake—someone with no blood tie to him who simply had to be gotten rid of. 00:26:26.380 --> 00:26:33.744 [MILAN]: Sometime later—right at the start of the school year, actually—he took me to the Center for Social Work and just left me there. 00:26:34.536 --> 00:26:51.306 [MILAN]: The Center took me in. I remember that Novi Sad had a home for abandoned children right there in the courtyard, with a dining hall on one side, a little park, and a sports field behind it—I spent three days there. 00:26:51.306 --> 00:26:54.749 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So where does your story go from there? 00:26:54.749 --> 00:27:01.593 [MILAN]: After three days at the children's home, one morning I was called in... 00:27:02.572 --> 00:27:21.002 [MILAN]: ...by Vera Radovanović, a social worker from the Center whom I had seen once before. She and a man I didn't know put me in a car, along with another little girl, and drove us to Irig, where we were placed with foster families. 00:27:21.002 --> 00:27:25.965 [MILAN]: They dropped the girl off at one house. I tried to get out too, but they said, “No, no, you stay.” 00:27:26.686 --> 00:27:47.315 [MILAN]: They took me to another house, to a farming family. They had two older daughters, and my job after school was to watch their sow and make sure she didn't get into the flower beds. 00:27:47.435 --> 00:27:53.623 [MILAN]: One day, I went inside to warm up. It was already October, maybe November, and it was freezing. 00:27:53.623 --> 00:27:55.905 [MILAN]: The sow got into the flowers. 00:27:55.905 --> 00:28:03.915 [MILAN]: The woman slapped me hard and yelled, “Get outside! Can’t you see my sow is in the flowers?” 00:28:03.915 --> 00:28:06.518 [MILAN]: In those three months, I didn't taste a single... 00:28:06.943 --> 00:28:18.549 [MILAN]: ...piece of meat. I ate sataraš and potato pie. At first, it tasted disgusting to me, but later I craved it just because I was starving. 00:28:18.549 --> 00:28:28.895 [MILAN]: The most striking thing about the meals was that I wasn't allowed to sit at the table with them. They set up a tiny table and a stool for me... 00:28:30.018 --> 00:28:36.723 [MILAN]: ...about ten meters away. The kitchen and hallway were long, so I was placed way down at the far end to eat by myself, away from them. 00:28:36.723 --> 00:28:39.726 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: They treated you almost like property? 00:28:39.726 --> 00:28:41.467 [MILAN]: More like a servant in the house. 00:28:41.467 --> 00:28:48.813 [MILAN]: One time, for whatever reason, they decided to cook pig’s trotters. 00:28:48.813 --> 00:28:50.775 [MILAN]: To make soup out of them. 00:28:50.775 --> 00:28:51.996 [MILAN]: With noodles. 00:28:51.996 --> 00:28:53.477 [MILAN]: I ate it. 00:28:53.477 --> 00:28:57.160 [MILAN]: But it made me violently sick. 00:28:57.300 --> 00:29:01.744 [MILAN]: Pig’s trotters... I mean, who feeds that to a child? 00:29:01.744 --> 00:29:01.824 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right. 00:29:01.824 --> 00:29:06.507 [MILAN]: My stomach gave out during the night, while I was in bed. 00:29:06.507 --> 00:29:09.930 [MILAN]: But I was too ashamed to say a word. 00:29:09.930 --> 00:29:24.461 [MILAN]: So in the middle of the night, after I soiled the bed, I sneaked outside in the dark, took off my underwear, hid it under a roof tile, and went back to bed. In the morning, I just put on some track pants. 00:29:25.610 --> 00:29:33.035 [MILAN]: There was no heating in that room. I covered myself with old sheepskins, furs—I don’t even know what it was. 00:29:33.035 --> 00:29:38.619 [MILAN]: It was this massive double bed stuffed with straw or corn husks, who knows. 00:29:38.619 --> 00:29:39.540 [MILAN]: It was miserably uncomfortable. 00:29:39.540 --> 00:29:46.545 [MILAN]: And the window facing the street was constantly being opened and shut, so by November, that room was an absolute icebox. 00:29:46.545 --> 00:29:48.706 [MILAN]: And the mice... I remember the mice very clearly. 00:29:48.706 --> 00:29:51.548 [MILAN]: But they figured it out. 00:29:53.060 --> 00:30:03.750 [MILAN]: Some neighbor or guest was visiting, I don’t even remember who, and once they realized what had happened, they stripped me down in front of them—they all saw everything. 00:30:03.750 --> 00:30:06.313 [MILAN]: “So where are your underpants?” 00:30:06.313 --> 00:30:10.497 [MILAN]: I told them. I showed them where I had hidden them under the tile. "Go get them," they ordered. 00:30:10.497 --> 00:30:15.301 [MILAN]: They just stood in the doorway laughing at me while I dug out the underwear I had hidden. 00:30:15.301 --> 00:30:15.782 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Terrible. 00:30:16.472 --> 00:30:25.240 [MILAN]: I can’t say they forced me to work, but I felt it was better to just go whenever they called me, better to do whatever work there was. 00:30:25.240 --> 00:30:32.466 [MILAN]: Picking corn, gathering plums, unloading corn—whatever needed doing, I did it. 00:30:32.466 --> 00:30:34.108 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did their own children work too? 00:30:34.707 --> 00:30:35.468 [MILAN]: They did. 00:30:35.468 --> 00:30:36.028 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: They did. 00:30:36.028 --> 00:30:36.549 [MILAN]: They did. 00:30:36.549 --> 00:30:39.231 [MILAN]: But I was just a child—nine years old. 00:30:39.231 --> 00:30:48.940 [MILAN]: On December 1st, that same social worker, Vera Radovanović, came again and took me to another foster family. 00:30:48.940 --> 00:30:52.623 [MILAN]: I was terrified when she came for me, and I started crying. 00:30:52.623 --> 00:30:55.806 [MILAN]: Not because I was leaving them, but because I had no idea what was waiting for me next. 00:30:55.806 --> 00:30:57.968 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: It just kept getting worse and worse. 00:30:58.382 --> 00:30:59.002 [MILAN]: Yes. 00:30:59.002 --> 00:31:12.587 [MILAN]: But fortunately, she brought me to a wonderful woman named Jelena Molnar, a widow who worked at the time as a cleaner at the local primary school. 00:31:12.587 --> 00:31:16.208 [MILAN]: The school had the same name as the one in Novi Sad—Dositej Obradović—only this one was in Irig. 00:31:16.208 --> 00:31:23.371 [MILAN]: For the first time in who knows how long, I slept in a real bed with proper bedding, a comfortable bed, right by the stove. 00:31:23.371 --> 00:31:26.332 [MILAN]: But because of everything I had been through... 00:31:26.983 --> 00:31:32.627 [MILAN]: ...over the last year or two, I had started wetting the bed. 00:31:32.627 --> 00:31:35.649 [MILAN]: I was terrified she would throw me out because of it. 00:31:35.649 --> 00:31:36.669 [MILAN]: But she didn’t. 00:31:36.669 --> 00:31:43.214 [MILAN]: She put down plastic sheets, changed everything, cleaned it up, and never complained once. 00:31:43.214 --> 00:31:45.235 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did you begin to see her? 00:31:45.430 --> 00:31:49.512 [MILAN]: She was a woman from Slavonia, and she could do just about anything. 00:31:49.512 --> 00:31:52.854 [MILAN]: Maybe it wasn’t entirely fair, but I called her Grandma Jela. 00:31:52.854 --> 00:31:57.317 [MILAN]: She always wore black because her son had died tragically. 00:31:57.317 --> 00:32:04.101 [MILAN]: She also had two daughters, and they were wonderful. And they were married to wonderful men. 00:32:04.101 --> 00:32:08.564 [MILAN]: Anica Mulaj was married to... 00:32:09.859 --> 00:32:18.763 [MILAN]: ...Peter Mulaj, a Hungarian engineer in Ada. And the other daughter, Marija, was married to Rade in nearby Vrdnik. 00:32:18.763 --> 00:32:28.948 [MILAN]: They were all wonderful people. They would come to visit, bringing me gifts and all sorts of things, because she had told them my story—what my life had been like, what had happened to me. 00:32:28.948 --> 00:32:33.990 [MILAN]: Sometimes she would joke with me and say, “One day, you’ll talk about me the way you talk about them...” And I would say, “Never.” 00:32:33.990 --> 00:32:39.573 [MILAN]: I’ll share just one quick story to show you how well she cooked. 00:32:40.510 --> 00:32:45.914 [MILAN]: She made this incredible bean stew, and just then a boy came calling me out to play. 00:32:45.914 --> 00:32:52.579 [MILAN]: And I remember standing there, thinking: should I go out and play, or stay inside? The bean stew or playing? And I said, “I’m not going out to play—I want to eat the bean stew.” 00:32:52.579 --> 00:32:53.940 [MILAN]: That’s how good it was. 00:32:53.940 --> 00:32:55.041 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right, right. 00:32:55.041 --> 00:33:00.345 [MILAN]: But there was an older woman living nearby. Her name was Marica. 00:33:00.345 --> 00:33:01.666 [MILAN]: And she was running... 00:33:02.748 --> 00:33:05.709 [MILAN]: ...what I can only describe as a for-profit foster home. 00:33:05.709 --> 00:33:08.290 [MILAN]: She had five or six children there at any given time. 00:33:08.290 --> 00:33:19.053 [MILAN]: Back then, the monthly foster allowance was small—about 390,000 old dinars—while a standard pension was maybe 1.3 or 1.4 million. 00:33:19.053 --> 00:33:25.074 [MILAN]: But Marica had done the math: taking in five or six kids brought in more than a pension. 00:33:25.074 --> 00:33:25.654 [MILAN]: And why did she do it? 00:33:25.654 --> 00:33:27.835 [MILAN]: To financially support her own daughter. 00:33:28.314 --> 00:33:33.115 [MILAN]: To me, Marica was a terrifying woman. 00:33:33.115 --> 00:33:37.677 [MILAN]: Some kind of monster, really—like a villain straight out of the Smurfs. 00:33:37.677 --> 00:33:38.437 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Like out of a fairy tale. 00:33:38.437 --> 00:33:40.057 [MILAN]: Yes, exactly like that. 00:33:40.057 --> 00:33:51.040 [MILAN]: I used to play outside with the other kids. In Vojvodina, the houses sit right up against the street, with the sidewalk in front, and one afternoon I was jumping around in front of her house. 00:33:51.040 --> 00:33:52.461 [MILAN]: She came outside. 00:33:52.461 --> 00:33:54.921 [MILAN]: And she just slapped me across the face, out of nowhere. 00:33:54.921 --> 00:33:57.802 [MILAN]: She had absolutely no authority over me whatsoever... 00:33:58.362 --> 00:34:01.872 [MILAN]: ...so I can only imagine the hell those poor kids went through living under her roof. 00:34:02.647 --> 00:34:07.850 [MILAN]: I complained to Grandma Jela about it, and she just said, “Let it go. Just stay away from her,” and that was the end of it. 00:34:07.850 --> 00:34:15.255 [MILAN]: I stayed with her for nine months. And once again, through social services, I was sent on another summer trip—fifteen days in Pula. 00:34:15.255 --> 00:34:18.938 [MILAN]: We stayed at the Stoja Primary School. 00:34:18.938 --> 00:34:30.365 [MILAN]: Honestly, I wouldn’t even know the name of the place today if it weren’t for Google Maps and Street View. I looked it up years later and figured out it was Stoja, right by Valkane Beach—everything matched my memories. 00:34:31.558 --> 00:34:41.447 [MILAN]: During the summer break, they would move all the desks and chairs down to the basement and set up military cots. 00:34:41.447 --> 00:34:44.250 [MILAN]: So the classrooms were basically converted into sleeping quarters. 00:34:44.250 --> 00:34:53.999 [MILAN]: And really, after everything, what more could a kid ask for? A safe place to sleep, a solid breakfast, a snack, lunch, another snack, dinner. 00:34:55.782 --> 00:34:56.763 [MILAN]: It was wonderful. 00:34:56.763 --> 00:35:00.424 [MILAN]: The beach in the morning, the beach in the afternoon. 00:35:00.424 --> 00:35:01.664 [MILAN]: Fifteen whole days. 00:35:01.664 --> 00:35:03.145 [MILAN]: I had a genuinely great time. 00:35:03.145 --> 00:35:05.466 [MILAN]: That would have been sometime in August. 00:35:05.466 --> 00:35:08.947 [MILAN]: When I got back from that summer trip, 00:35:09.128 --> 00:35:16.575 [MILAN]: Grandma Jela told me, basically: “Some people from Kragujevac are coming to adopt you.” 00:35:16.575 --> 00:35:19.598 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Now, this is where things stop making sense to me. 00:35:19.598 --> 00:35:23.262 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: You had already been adopted by one family. 00:35:23.262 --> 00:35:27.706 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Legally speaking, can a child even be adopted twice? 00:35:27.706 --> 00:35:28.367 [MILAN]: Back then... 00:35:29.395 --> 00:35:31.016 [MILAN]: ...to me, it all seemed completely normal. 00:35:31.016 --> 00:35:39.802 [MILAN]: It wasn’t until years later, when I looked up the 1976 Adoption Act and the current 2005 Family Law, 00:35:39.802 --> 00:35:48.287 [MILAN]: that I realized both laws are crystal clear: a person cannot be adopted by more than one set of parents unless those parents are married to each other. 00:35:48.287 --> 00:35:50.969 [MILAN]: The Vasić family and the Petrović family had absolutely nothing to do with each other. 00:35:50.969 --> 00:35:56.572 [MILAN]: The Vasićs were originally from Bosnia, while the Petrovićs were from the Kragujevac area—from Šumadija, from Gruža. 00:35:56.730 --> 00:35:58.291 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So how was that even possible? 00:35:58.291 --> 00:36:00.693 [MILAN]: It was only possible by breaking the law. 00:36:00.693 --> 00:36:01.914 [MILAN]: It was a blatant violation of the law. 00:36:01.914 --> 00:36:09.660 [MILAN]: Before the new adopters arrived, Grandma Jela warned me not to mention that I had already been adopted once before. 00:36:09.660 --> 00:36:20.929 [MILAN]: She thought it might make me look like a "problem child"—that if the first family didn't want me, these ones might not either. So, basically... 00:36:22.423 --> 00:36:24.185 [MILAN]: ...I was supposed to keep it a secret. 00:36:24.185 --> 00:36:25.966 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Like it was something to be ashamed of. 00:36:25.966 --> 00:36:27.928 [MILAN]: A secret. A source of shame. 00:36:27.928 --> 00:36:41.800 [MILAN]: Then, on September 4th, 1984—we knew exactly what day they were coming—Grandma Jela told me, “Put on your best clothes, get cleaned up, and keep an eye on the gate.” 00:36:41.800 --> 00:36:45.543 [MILAN]: She said, “They’ll be coming with Vera. Vera Radovanović is bringing them.” 00:36:46.054 --> 00:36:46.754 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right. 00:36:46.754 --> 00:36:53.957 [MILAN]: It was a large wooden gate. I kept cracking it open to peek out, and after about half an hour, I saw three people approaching. 00:36:53.957 --> 00:37:01.559 [MILAN]: Grandma Jela said, “Take this basin, fill it with water, and go water the flowers.” 00:37:01.559 --> 00:37:04.440 [MILAN]: She told me, “Wait until they open the gate.” 00:37:04.440 --> 00:37:08.661 [MILAN]: So I waited for the gate to open, and then I started watering the flowers. 00:37:08.661 --> 00:37:10.362 [MILAN]: Why did she have me do that? 00:37:10.362 --> 00:37:11.262 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So you would look hardworking. 00:37:11.486 --> 00:37:16.250 [MILAN]: Exactly. So they could see they were getting a "good, hardworking boy." 00:37:16.250 --> 00:37:34.086 [MILAN]: The gate opened, someone called out, “Come in,” and in walked Vera Radovanović, followed by the new adoptive mother—who bore a striking resemblance to my first... well, mother, Gospava. 00:37:34.086 --> 00:37:38.630 [MILAN]: And then Periša walked in, the new adoptive father. 00:37:39.097 --> 00:37:46.000 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how did you feel, seeing these two new people who were supposed to become your parents—especially since the woman reminded you of... 00:37:48.097 --> 00:37:56.841 [MILAN]: I had conflicting feelings about Gorgina, because she reminded me of Gospava in a way. 00:37:56.841 --> 00:37:59.221 [MILAN]: But Periša... Periša terrified me. 00:38:00.441 --> 00:38:03.702 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Why? 00:38:03.702 --> 00:38:05.243 [MILAN]: I didn’t want a father. 00:38:05.243 --> 00:38:08.243 [MILAN]: Not after what I had gone through with Milorad. 00:38:08.243 --> 00:38:08.703 [MILAN]: A father was the one thing that frightened me most. 00:38:09.131 --> 00:38:10.852 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What did Periša look like? 00:38:10.852 --> 00:38:17.936 [MILAN]: Periša was a solidly built man, average height, and already quite bald. 00:38:17.936 --> 00:38:22.879 [MILAN]: He was fifty-nine, but he looked at least ten years older. 00:38:22.879 --> 00:38:25.201 [MILAN]: Even back then, he always walked with his nose in the air. 00:38:25.201 --> 00:38:26.342 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: A bit arrogant? 00:38:26.342 --> 00:38:28.363 [MILAN]: Very arrogant. 00:38:28.363 --> 00:38:30.244 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did he size you up when he walked in? 00:38:30.613 --> 00:38:40.315 [MILAN]: He did, but he was discreet about it. Gorgina, on the other hand, couldn't hide it—she was devouring me with her eyes, assessing me. 00:38:40.315 --> 00:38:41.776 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Her future child. 00:38:41.776 --> 00:38:42.496 [MILAN]: Yes. 00:38:42.496 --> 00:38:50.678 [MILAN]: And the social worker was there too, already singing my praises—how I was an "exceptional child," and so on. 00:38:50.678 --> 00:38:52.118 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: There he is, watering the flowers. 00:38:52.118 --> 00:38:58.180 [MILAN]: Exactly. But I don’t think that act alone really impressed them. 00:38:58.180 --> 00:39:00.020 [MILAN]: However, right around that time... 00:39:00.896 --> 00:39:08.762 [MILAN]: ...the doctor from the local clinic also arrived to bring my medical file. 00:39:08.762 --> 00:39:09.903 [MILAN]: She knew me very well. 00:39:11.088 --> 00:39:14.030 [MILAN]: And then she began speaking about me. 00:39:14.030 --> 00:39:21.775 [MILAN]: “Do you know what kind of child you’re taking? Such an exceptional child,” and so on—she spoke only in superlatives. 00:39:21.775 --> 00:39:26.798 [MILAN]: That clearly reassured them. Periša started smiling, and Gorgina looked pleased. 00:39:26.798 --> 00:39:33.103 [MILAN]: This all happened in the yard. They had brought out chairs, everyone sat down, and the talking had already started. 00:39:33.103 --> 00:39:34.604 [MILAN]: I forgot to mention... 00:39:35.761 --> 00:39:45.245 [MILAN]: ...Grandma Jela’s younger daughter was there from Vrdnik with her little girl, who adored me and wouldn’t leave my side. 00:39:45.245 --> 00:39:47.506 [MILAN]: She was just a child, maybe five years old. 00:39:47.506 --> 00:39:50.387 [MILAN]: And after a while, she started to cry. 00:39:50.387 --> 00:39:54.729 [MILAN]: Even at that age, she understood they were taking me away. 00:39:54.729 --> 00:40:03.993 [MILAN]: All the attention shifted to her because she was wailing. Her mother picked her up and said, “Don't worry, they’ll bring Milan back.” And they all chimed in, “We’ll bring him back, we’ll bring him back.” 00:40:05.951 --> 00:40:18.691 [MILAN]: My things were already packed—my school bag and a travel bag. Periša took the travel bag, I threw my school bag on my back, and we went out to the street to say our goodbyes. 00:40:19.210 --> 00:40:28.498 [MILAN]: That child was screaming in her mother’s arms as we slowly disappeared down the road toward the bus station in Irig. 00:40:28.498 --> 00:40:36.225 [MILAN]: That morning, on September 4th, 1984, we set off by bus from Irig to Novi Sad. 00:40:36.225 --> 00:40:44.712 [MILAN]: We arrived in Novi Sad and said our goodbyes to Vera Radovanović. She headed back, and then we waited for the bus to Kragujevac. 00:40:45.113 --> 00:40:49.257 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Vera Radovanović, the social worker from Novi Sad. 00:40:49.257 --> 00:40:56.703 [MILAN]: We boarded the bus, and since I had the window seat, I just stared out at all these completely unfamiliar places passing by. 00:40:56.703 --> 00:41:05.350 [MILAN]: When we arrived at the Kragujevac bus station, we got off and went to the parking lot where Periša had left his little Zastava. We all piled into the car. 00:41:05.550 --> 00:41:08.513 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What did it feel like, coming to a big city? 00:41:08.513 --> 00:41:12.497 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: I imagine that after Irig, arriving here must have felt like landing in New York. 00:41:12.497 --> 00:41:16.520 [MILAN]: In a way, yes. I already knew what a city looked like since I’d spent some time in Novi Sad, 00:41:17.662 --> 00:41:25.746 [MILAN]: but Kragujevac still felt like a major city to me. Certain images from that day are still burned into my memory. 00:41:25.746 --> 00:41:33.370 [MILAN]: The first thing I remember is that wide road leading from the station toward Kraljevo. 00:41:33.370 --> 00:41:42.554 [MILAN]: Then we pulled up in front of the house. I remember a massive wooden fence, about two meters high, and a gray, unpainted house. 00:41:42.554 --> 00:41:45.296 [MILAN]: We walked in, and once again, a crowd of people had gathered. 00:41:46.403 --> 00:42:06.113 [MILAN]: They were there to offer their congratulations. Their godmother, Dragina, was there, and she immediately started with that same old story: “Your parents were working away...” Then she said he already knows he’s adopted—which was beside the point—but she was just trying to say something. 00:42:06.763 --> 00:42:08.024 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right, right—just filling the silence. 00:42:08.024 --> 00:42:09.144 [MILAN]: Exactly. Just saying whatever came to mind. 00:42:09.144 --> 00:42:24.511 [MILAN]: And so it was. September 4th. Later that same month, we had to travel back to Novi Sad to sign the official adoption papers. I had just turned ten, and by law, an adoptee over the age of ten... 00:42:24.631 --> 00:42:25.792 [MILAN]: ...must provide their own signature. 00:42:25.792 --> 00:42:34.878 [MILAN]: This was an "incomplete adoption." Legally, that meant the adoptee retained the rights connected to their biological parents, as well as their names in the records. 00:42:34.878 --> 00:42:35.678 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And the surname stays the same too? 00:42:35.678 --> 00:42:36.419 [MILAN]: No, not the surname. 00:42:36.419 --> 00:42:42.483 [MILAN]: The surname is changed, but they are not permitted to create a brand-new entry for the child in the birth registry. 00:42:42.951 --> 00:43:02.235 [NARRATOR]: Center for Social Work of the City of Novi Sad, Case No. UP 02-987/84. Dated September 26, 1984, Novi Sad. Official Record of Adoption, executed on September 26, 1984, 00:43:02.475 --> 00:43:08.257 [NARRATOR]: on the premises of the Center for Social Work of the City of Novi Sad, acting in its capacity as the authorized guardianship authority. 00:43:08.257 --> 00:43:26.765 [NARRATOR]: Pursuant to Article 3 of the Guardianship Act (SAPV No. 24/71) and the Decision delegating guardianship functions to the Center for Social Work in Novi Sad, as adopted by the Municipal Assemblies of Stari Grad, Liman, Podunavlje, Detelinara, Slavija, Petrovaradin, and Sremski Karlovci, 00:43:27.085 --> 00:43:40.153 [NARRATOR]: Official Gazette of the City of Novi Sad, Nos. 21/83, 7/83, 6/83, 13/83, 7/83, and 7/83. 00:43:40.153 --> 00:43:56.523 [NARRATOR]: In the matter of the adoption of the minor Vasić Milan, born on June 28, 1974, in Novi Sad, by the adoptive parents Petrović Periša and Petrović Gorgina of Kragujevac, residing at 110 Kraljevačkog bataljona Street. 00:43:57.043 --> 00:44:13.372 [NARRATOR]: Proceedings commenced at 10:00 a.m. Present at the adoption hearing were: Anđa Gamber, Case Officer; Jasmina Jovičić, Recording Clerk; Periša Petrović, Adoptive Parent; Gorgina Petrović, Adoptive Parent; Vasić Milan, Adoptee. 00:44:13.623 --> 00:44:32.930 [NARRATOR]: The presiding official, Anđa Gamber, notes that all summoned parties were present. The hearing was convened at the request of the adoptive parents, Periša Petrović and Gorgina Petrović, for the purpose of the adoption of the minor Vasić Milan, pursuant to Article 4 of the Adoption Act of SAP Vojvodina, 00:44:32.930 --> 00:44:37.032 [NARRATOR]: Official Gazette of SAPV, No. 24/76. 00:44:37.692 --> 00:44:51.543 [NARRATOR]: During the preliminary proceedings, and pursuant to Article 14 of the Adoption Act, the guardianship authority established that all legal requirements for this adoption have been met and that no impediments exist under Article 2 of said Act. 00:44:51.543 --> 00:45:03.052 [NARRATOR]: It was further established that no impediments exist under Article 4 of the Adoption Act. Given that the minor Vasić Milan is over the age of ten, he has personally provided his consent to this adoption. 00:45:03.212 --> 00:45:11.520 [NARRATOR]: It was also verified that no impediments exist under Articles 10 and 11, and a favorable opinion was issued pursuant to Article 15 of the same Act. 00:45:11.520 --> 00:45:19.108 [NARRATOR]: The father of the minor, Vasić Milan, provided his consent for this adoption on September 12, 1984, 00:45:19.348 --> 00:45:30.131 [NARRATOR]: on the premises of the Center for Social Work in Novi Sad. He further waived his right to attend the adoption hearing and was therefore not summoned. 00:45:30.131 --> 00:45:42.235 [NARRATOR]: The adoptive parents, having been specifically informed of their duties under Article 20 of the Adoption Act, declared that the minor Vasić Milan shall hold equal inheritance rights to their estate. 00:45:42.375 --> 00:45:55.011 [NARRATOR]: Pursuant to Article 21, the adoptive parents expressed the wish that the minor Vasić Milan assume their family surname and henceforth be known as Petrović Milan. 00:45:55.011 --> 00:45:58.435 [NARRATOR]: All legal requirements for the adoption having been fulfilled, 00:45:58.695 --> 00:46:28.318 [NARRATOR]: the guardianship authority hereby declares the establishment of adoption, whereby Periša Petrović, citizen of SFRY, born on November 14, 1925, in Pasijević, Knić, and Petrović (née Miljković) Gorgina, citizen of SFRY, born on July 22, 1935, in Toponica, Knić, both residing in Kragujevac at 110 Kraljevačkog bataljona Street, adopt the minor Vasić Milan. 00:46:28.518 --> 00:46:34.022 [NARRATOR]: The adopted minor, Vasić Milan, shall henceforth use the personal name Petrović Milan. 00:46:34.022 --> 00:46:43.889 [NARRATOR]: This adoption record shall be submitted to the competent Registrar for entry of the required particulars in the official records. Proceedings concluded at 10:30 a.m. 00:46:43.889 --> 00:46:49.313 [MILAN]: Generally speaking, Periša’s feelings toward me were complicated. He cared about me, and yet he didn’t. 00:46:49.313 --> 00:46:54.276 [MILAN]: There was a cold calculation behind why they wanted to adopt a child. 00:46:54.276 --> 00:46:55.777 [MILAN]: Gorgina was driven by fear. 00:46:56.384 --> 00:47:06.534 [MILAN]: Since Periša was ten years older, she was afraid that if he died, someone from his family would come and claim half the house. 00:47:06.534 --> 00:47:09.136 [MILAN]: Half the property, half of everything they had. 00:47:09.136 --> 00:47:14.001 [MILAN]: To protect herself, she insisted on adopting a child as a legal safeguard. 00:47:14.001 --> 00:47:18.946 [MILAN]: Periša, on the other hand, went along with whatever she wanted... 00:47:19.688 --> 00:47:21.769 [MILAN]: ...even when her demands were very strange. 00:47:21.769 --> 00:47:30.232 [MILAN]: Once, she made him haul a cast-iron stove back and forth to the village six times. Six separate trips. 00:47:30.232 --> 00:47:33.193 [MILAN]: And he did it all without question. 00:47:33.193 --> 00:47:47.279 [MILAN]: I started fourth grade. By then, I was becoming very withdrawn, and the teacher often pointed that out at parent-teacher meetings: “If only all my students were like Milan, I’d be singing.” 00:47:48.450 --> 00:47:53.651 [MILAN]: In reality, she didn’t realize that my silence was actually the result of being traumatized by so many things. 00:47:53.651 --> 00:47:55.692 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how did the other kids accept you at first? 00:47:55.692 --> 00:48:15.376 [MILAN]: Around here, everyone knew I was adopted. Kids being kids—on average, they weren’t the best or the worst. Some were good, some were bad. I don’t have any major complaints. There was teasing, of course, this and that, but I always just kept to myself. 00:48:15.376 --> 00:48:16.396 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did you have a nickname? 00:48:16.873 --> 00:48:20.955 [MILAN]: I had one, but it kept changing. Even they didn’t quite know what to call me. 00:48:20.955 --> 00:48:25.397 [MILAN]: Most of them didn’t really know where I came from or what my story was. 00:48:25.397 --> 00:48:28.138 [MILAN]: They just weren’t interested. 00:48:28.138 --> 00:48:32.740 [MILAN]: They were children; they cared about football, basketball... 00:48:32.740 --> 00:48:37.242 [MILAN]: I wasn’t exactly a natural talent, so I was always stuck in defense, and that was that. 00:48:37.242 --> 00:48:40.663 [MILAN]: Some teachers liked talking to me. 00:48:40.663 --> 00:48:42.444 [MILAN]: Only a few, I mean. 00:48:42.444 --> 00:48:45.005 [MILAN]: I stood out because of certain thoughts I had... 00:48:46.965 --> 00:48:50.448 [MILAN]: ...thoughts you’d expect more from an older person. 00:48:50.448 --> 00:48:52.029 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Which subject did you like the most? 00:48:52.029 --> 00:49:01.317 [MILAN]: I liked history and geography the most, and a certain biology teacher even had a real soft spot for me. 00:49:01.317 --> 00:49:07.602 [MILAN]: She would often ask a logical question that the whole class couldn’t answer, and I’d be the only one who could. 00:49:07.602 --> 00:49:10.304 [MILAN]: I got top marks simply because I could figure things out on the spot. 00:49:10.933 --> 00:49:14.214 [MILAN]: For problem-solving, and for paying attention in class. 00:49:14.214 --> 00:49:18.514 [MILAN]: I really focused—probably more than any of the other kids. 00:49:18.514 --> 00:49:26.116 [MILAN]: I never really studied at home... but whatever I had written in my notebook, I could always repeat in the next lesson. 00:49:26.116 --> 00:49:28.916 [MILAN]: I wasn’t a top student. I was a very good student. 00:49:28.916 --> 00:49:30.017 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: That’s still an excellent result. 00:49:30.017 --> 00:49:30.757 [MILAN]: Yes. 00:49:30.757 --> 00:49:35.838 [MILAN]: Periša and Gorgina lived off his disability pension. 00:49:35.838 --> 00:49:37.078 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And what did he do for a living before that? 00:49:38.150 --> 00:49:44.571 [MILAN]: He had been a mechanic’s assistant. He retired on a disability pension—a minimal one. 00:49:44.571 --> 00:49:48.372 [MILAN]: It simply wasn't enough to support three people. 00:49:48.372 --> 00:49:53.453 [MILAN]: We had a small estate in the village of Pajsić, near Gruža, with some plum trees. 00:49:53.453 --> 00:49:59.534 [MILAN]: The stress of everything nearly caused him to have a stroke; his blood pressure shot up to abnormal levels. 00:49:59.534 --> 00:50:03.855 [MILAN]: He was already diabetic on top of that. 00:50:03.855 --> 00:50:05.715 [MILAN]: It all just piled up. 00:50:06.473 --> 00:50:17.080 [MILAN]: He finally ended up in the hospital right when his rakija still arrived by train. He actually blamed me for his stroke. 00:50:17.634 --> 00:50:39.320 [MILAN]: He recovered somehow, and by October he was already out there working with that still. From September through December, as long as there were plums to distill—the local varieties like ranka, mađarka, and požegača—he would travel around the Gruža region, taking his cut as the distiller... 00:50:39.440 --> 00:50:43.401 [MILAN]: Besides our own plums, they sold that rakija. They were constantly scrambling for money. 00:50:43.401 --> 00:50:44.562 [MILAN]: One way or another. 00:50:44.562 --> 00:50:50.683 [MILAN]: As part of that "scrambling," they got me a job at the age of thirteen, working at the cold-storage plant in Knić. 00:50:50.683 --> 00:50:53.444 [MILAN]: It started exactly on my birthday, June 28th. 00:50:53.444 --> 00:50:54.605 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: At thirteen? 00:50:54.605 --> 00:50:56.685 [MILAN]: Yes, thirteen years old, in 1987. 00:50:56.685 --> 00:50:59.646 [MILAN]: And they put me on the night shift, sorting sour cherries. 00:50:59.646 --> 00:51:03.127 [MILAN]: I only lasted maybe three or four nights like that. 00:51:03.127 --> 00:51:05.748 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Was it a state-owned plant or private? 00:51:05.748 --> 00:51:06.048 [MILAN]: State-owned. 00:51:07.682 --> 00:51:08.322 [MILAN]: It was called "Ribeš." 00:51:08.322 --> 00:51:12.725 [MILAN]: I worked there for a few nights until the supervisors noticed me. 00:51:12.725 --> 00:51:16.587 [MILAN]: When they asked how old I was, I would lie and say fifteen. 00:51:16.587 --> 00:51:18.728 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: I see. 00:51:18.728 --> 00:51:26.932 [MILAN]: They knew the truth and looked the other way for a bit, but eventually, they told Gorgina: "You can't bring this child here for the night shift. He's going to fall asleep on the conveyor belt." 00:51:26.932 --> 00:51:29.614 [MILAN]: So after that, I was moved to the morning and afternoon shifts. 00:51:29.614 --> 00:51:32.155 [MILAN]: It was a rotation. 00:51:32.893 --> 00:51:35.795 [MILAN]: Two days on the first shift, two on the second, and two on the third. 00:51:35.795 --> 00:51:38.197 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: But this was only during your summer break? 00:51:38.197 --> 00:51:39.478 [MILAN]: The entire break. 00:51:39.478 --> 00:51:43.541 [MILAN]: Later on, I worked four days on and four days off. 00:51:43.541 --> 00:51:47.203 [MILAN]: So, this was all happening in 1987. 00:51:47.203 --> 00:51:57.251 [MILAN]: Periša decided to buy his own rakija still because he had been using his father's. He wanted his own to distill rakija from our orchard and for the rest of the village. 00:51:57.251 --> 00:51:59.172 [MILAN]: But he didn't have enough money. 00:51:59.691 --> 00:52:06.477 [MILAN]: For those two months of work, I earned about 16.5 million old dinars. 00:52:06.477 --> 00:52:13.103 [MILAN]: I gave them 13 million of that. The still cost 65 million—I remember those figures perfectly. 00:52:13.103 --> 00:52:13.964 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right. 00:52:13.964 --> 00:52:17.887 [MILAN]: With the remaining 3.5 million, I bought myself some clothes and went back to school. 00:52:18.565 --> 00:52:27.790 [MILAN]: The kids at school would brag about where they’d been... because back then, Kragujevac had its own resort at the seaside, in a place called Gradac. 00:52:27.790 --> 00:52:33.193 [MILAN]: So in September, they’d all be boasting about the coast, while I kept my mouth shut about the cold-storage plant. 00:52:33.193 --> 00:52:34.153 [MILAN]: Some of the kids would overhear things and make cracks about it. 00:52:34.153 --> 00:52:35.234 [MILAN]: Eventually, word got back to the school... 00:52:36.030 --> 00:52:37.651 [MILAN]: ...to the principal and the secretary. 00:52:37.651 --> 00:52:38.972 [MILAN]: They called me in. 00:52:38.972 --> 00:52:43.674 [MILAN]: They asked, “Were you working somewhere over the summer break?” 00:52:43.674 --> 00:52:45.575 [MILAN]: And I just felt this overwhelming shame. 00:52:45.575 --> 00:52:46.716 [MILAN]: Not shame for them—my own shame. 00:52:46.716 --> 00:52:48.837 [MILAN]: I said, “No, I didn’t work anywhere.” 00:52:48.837 --> 00:52:51.459 [MILAN]: I insisted. “I definitely didn’t work anywhere.” 00:52:51.459 --> 00:52:54.020 [MILAN]: I knew that even if I had told the truth, 00:52:54.020 --> 00:52:55.821 [MILAN]: it would only have made things worse for me. 00:52:55.821 --> 00:52:58.723 [MILAN]: What would happen? I’d just end up back in the hands of the Center for Social Work. 00:52:58.723 --> 00:52:59.323 [MILAN]: You understand? 00:52:59.323 --> 00:53:02.465 [MILAN]: I realized that sometimes it was better to just stay silent. 00:53:02.465 --> 00:53:05.947 [MILAN]: So, I finished sixth grade and moved into seventh. 00:53:06.445 --> 00:53:20.476 [MILAN]: Then I started eighth grade. I’ll give them credit for this: every year they paid for my school trips. In fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grade, I went on every single excursion. 00:53:20.476 --> 00:53:25.040 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Were they under some kind of legal obligation from social services to do that? 00:53:25.040 --> 00:53:29.763 [MILAN]: No. Social services had absolutely no contact with them anymore. 00:53:29.763 --> 00:53:32.205 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So they paid for you as their own child? 00:53:32.205 --> 00:53:35.748 [MILAN]: As their own child, yes—but only because Gorgina insisted on it. 00:53:37.162 --> 00:53:39.944 [MILAN]: If it had been up to Periša, he would never have paid for any of it. 00:53:39.944 --> 00:53:48.309 [MILAN]: In the meantime, she had found a job too. As I said, she even worked at the cold-storage plant, because it was simply impossible to survive on his pension alone. 00:53:48.309 --> 00:53:54.213 [MILAN]: It’s like someone giving you 120 euros today and saying, “Here, make this last for the whole month.” 00:53:54.213 --> 00:53:55.234 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: That’s impossible. 00:53:55.234 --> 00:53:56.355 [MILAN]: Completely impossible. 00:53:56.355 --> 00:54:04.780 [MILAN]: I finished primary school and enrolled in high school in Knić—a quiet town about twenty kilometers from here. 00:54:04.780 --> 00:54:05.741 [MILAN]: Because in Kragujevac... 00:54:06.827 --> 00:54:18.157 [MILAN]: ...I didn’t really have the means for a grammar school, and I didn’t want to go to a massive vocational school with three thousand different students. I didn't want that kind of chaos. 00:54:18.157 --> 00:54:31.590 [MILAN]: I fit in well in Knić. I often missed classes, but the teachers tolerated it; in a way, they understood my situation and the life I was dealing with. 00:54:32.795 --> 00:54:36.838 [MILAN]: I finished high school there, and later I was called up for military service. 00:54:36.838 --> 00:54:39.660 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Where did you serve? 00:54:39.660 --> 00:54:45.645 [MILAN]: In '96 and '97, I served in Priština, in air defense. 00:54:45.645 --> 00:54:47.046 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What are your memories of that time? 00:54:47.046 --> 00:54:53.071 [MILAN]: I still have some friends from those days on Facebook. They remember me—I was known as "Corporal Joe." 00:54:54.502 --> 00:54:56.243 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Oh, so you were a corporal. 00:54:56.243 --> 00:54:57.684 [MILAN]: A corporal, yes. 00:54:57.684 --> 00:55:05.410 [MILAN]: Though, as one captain put it: "You're the worst corporal I've ever seen." 00:55:05.410 --> 00:55:10.373 [MILAN]: If there was ever an ounce of democracy in the army, it came from me. 00:55:10.373 --> 00:55:17.858 [MILAN]: I believed every human being was reasonable and that everything could be settled through agreement. I was wrong about that. 00:55:19.110 --> 00:55:26.553 [MILAN]: Anyway, I have some fond memories. I worked in the office too; I managed to become a clerk alongside my duties as a corporal. 00:55:26.553 --> 00:55:39.177 [MILAN]: That came with perks. I could write city leave passes for anyone who needed them. I could even write them for myself... but you know how it is, when you're a soldier, you need money to actually go anywhere. 00:55:39.177 --> 00:55:44.639 [MILAN]: And without money, what’s the point of walking around? 00:55:44.892 --> 00:55:54.499 [MILAN]: Inside the "Kosovski Junaci" barracks, there was a tavern, a grill, a burek shop—everything was right there. 00:55:54.499 --> 00:55:55.900 [MILAN]: You just needed money. 00:55:55.900 --> 00:56:03.446 [MILAN]: Before I left for the army, Periša and Gorgina had started selling produce and that rakija at the market. 00:56:03.446 --> 00:56:06.348 [MILAN]: Periša died while I was serving, on November 24, 1996. 00:56:06.348 --> 00:56:13.193 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did you handle that news while you were in the service? 00:56:13.687 --> 00:56:19.010 [MILAN]: It was hard for me at first. 00:56:19.010 --> 00:56:24.173 [MILAN]: Whatever disagreements we'd had, I put them all aside because it hit me incredibly hard. 00:56:24.173 --> 00:56:33.938 [MILAN]: The army usually didn't allow it... some soldiers were forbidden from wearing mourning bands, but no one stopped me. 00:56:33.938 --> 00:56:36.880 [MILAN]: I wore that black ribbon for my entire service, until I was discharged. 00:56:36.880 --> 00:56:38.681 [MILAN]: After I got out of the army, 00:56:39.301 --> 00:56:41.021 [MILAN]: around mid-1997... 00:56:41.021 --> 00:56:55.405 [MILAN]: ...since I had my driver’s license and we had an old Yugo, I started sourcing produce from the wholesale market for Gorgina to sell, because she knew the customers and the trade. 00:56:55.405 --> 00:56:58.906 [MILAN]: Then I came up with the idea of building my own greenhouses. 00:56:59.897 --> 00:57:03.738 [MILAN]: Right on this plateau, where the conditions for growing were actually very poor. 00:57:03.738 --> 00:57:07.638 [MILAN]: However, in 1999, the bombing started. 00:57:07.638 --> 00:57:13.639 [MILAN]: And somehow, while everyone else who had a job stayed behind, I was the one they mobilized. 00:57:13.639 --> 00:57:15.820 [MILAN]: Me, and just a few other guys. 00:57:15.820 --> 00:57:27.982 [MILAN]: I was sent up with the air defense unit, north of Kragujevac, to the villages of Veliko Krčmare and Gornje Jarušice. 00:57:27.982 --> 00:57:29.602 [MILAN]: That was where I met my wife. 00:57:30.022 --> 00:57:35.785 [MILAN]: I brought her home even before the war was over. 00:57:35.785 --> 00:57:41.188 [MILAN]: Fortunately, the war ended on June 10, 1999, and I was demobilized on June 24. 00:57:41.188 --> 00:57:51.053 [MILAN]: The two of us worked at the market together. I had already built some greenhouses, and we were selling goods, scraping by however we could, but it still wasn’t enough. 00:57:51.053 --> 00:57:51.893 [MILAN]: The wedding... 00:57:52.695 --> 00:57:53.956 [MILAN]: ...happened because Gorgina insisted on it. 00:57:53.956 --> 00:58:06.065 [MILAN]: I was against it, but she said, “I went to everyone’s weddings, so now people should return the favor,” which I thought was complete nonsense. But in the end, we went along with it. 00:58:06.065 --> 00:58:15.432 [MILAN]: We had the wedding and got married, both civilly and in church, on September 26, 1999. 00:58:15.432 --> 00:58:19.636 [MILAN]: Our son was born on July 31st, 2000. 00:58:20.762 --> 00:58:24.427 [MILAN]: And our daughter on October 10th, 2002. 00:58:24.427 --> 00:58:28.513 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And what was it like for you, finally becoming a father? 00:58:28.513 --> 00:58:34.161 [MILAN]: It was an incredible feeling, but also a massive sense of responsibility. 00:58:34.161 --> 00:58:35.803 [MILAN]: Because up until then, I had been led to believe... 00:58:36.686 --> 00:58:48.718 [MILAN]: ...that I was the child of irresponsible parents who had just tossed me away. It made me think back to a phone call I had in 1991 with my first adopter, Milorad Vasić. 00:58:48.718 --> 00:58:53.302 [MILAN]: I was seventeen when I called him and asked: 00:58:53.513 --> 00:59:09.446 [MILAN]: “Can you tell me anything about where I come from? Since you adopted me, do you know who I am, or where I’m from?” He said, “They only told me you were found somewhere near Subotica.” I said, “Fine, but I was born on June 28th, 1974.” 00:59:09.446 --> 00:59:13.649 [MILAN]: “No,” he said, “that’s just the date of birth we gave you.” 00:59:13.649 --> 00:59:18.473 [MILAN]: And in that moment, I thought: if that's true, then not even my birthday is real. 00:59:19.555 --> 00:59:20.896 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Not even your ID number? 00:59:20.896 --> 00:59:22.558 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Nothing was real. 00:59:22.558 --> 00:59:29.284 [MILAN]: It was a terrifying realization. 00:59:29.284 --> 00:59:30.905 [MILAN]: And it scared me... 00:59:30.905 --> 00:59:33.087 [MILAN]: ...scared me off from even trying to look for the truth. 00:59:33.087 --> 00:59:37.111 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: But now, with the birth of your children, did you find a new kind of strength? 00:59:37.111 --> 00:59:42.916 [MILAN]: Later, when my children were born and I saw how much I cared for them... 00:59:43.922 --> 00:59:46.242 [MILAN]: ...I started thinking: something doesn't add up here. 00:59:46.242 --> 00:59:51.123 [MILAN]: If my biological parents were really that irresponsible, wouldn't I be too? 00:59:51.123 --> 00:59:54.724 [MILAN]: I gave everything to my children. 00:59:54.724 --> 01:00:03.026 [MILAN]: I know a mother is usually seen as the primary parent, but I was... I was as much of a mother to them as I was a father. 01:00:03.026 --> 01:00:06.566 [MILAN]: And they confirmed that to me a hundred times over. 01:00:06.566 --> 01:00:07.346 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: As their dad? 01:00:07.346 --> 01:00:10.707 [MILAN]: As their dad. They were so proud of me whenever I’d show up at school. 01:00:11.692 --> 01:00:19.095 [MILAN]: We’d talk and they’d tell me: “All the other kids are embarrassed by their parents, but we’re not.” 01:00:19.095 --> 01:00:22.337 [MILAN]: That really meant the world to me. 01:00:22.337 --> 01:00:25.939 [MILAN]: And I thought: is it even possible... 01:00:25.939 --> 01:00:32.862 [MILAN]: ...since traits and genes are passed down—is it possible for me to be such a responsible parent if I came from people who weren't? 01:00:32.862 --> 01:00:39.385 [MILAN]: Could someone like me really have come from people who were that irresponsible? 01:00:40.495 --> 01:00:48.517 [MILAN]: I couldn’t find any peace, so I decided to start investigating at the Center for Social Work in Novi Sad myself. 01:00:48.517 --> 01:00:49.337 [MILAN]: 2004. 01:00:49.337 --> 01:00:51.918 [MILAN]: 2005. 01:00:51.918 --> 01:00:55.339 [MILAN]: They finally agreed to see me. 01:00:55.339 --> 01:01:05.101 [MILAN]: I was received by Anđa Gamber and another woman—I may be mistaken, but I think it was Ljiljana Ristić—when I asked about my mother and father. 01:01:05.101 --> 01:01:08.982 [MILAN]: They brought out this massive stack of papers... 01:01:20.040 --> 01:01:25.121 [MILAN]: ...and pulled out a photocopy of my mother’s ID card. 01:01:25.121 --> 01:01:27.221 [MILAN]: They said, “This is your mother.” 01:01:27.221 --> 01:01:30.241 [MILAN]: At first, it was overwhelming. 01:01:30.241 --> 01:01:33.362 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Was that the first time you’d ever seen her face? 01:01:33.362 --> 01:01:33.662 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:01:33.662 --> 01:01:37.783 [MILAN]: I immediately recognized the family resemblance in her features. 01:01:37.783 --> 01:01:38.643 [MILAN]: But... 01:01:39.711 --> 01:01:44.592 [MILAN]: I may forget trivial things, but the important details—I remember those very well. 01:01:44.592 --> 01:01:55.155 [MILAN]: I read it from the photocopy: Cvita Miletić, Bila Vlaka, Benkovac. Born in 1931. 01:01:55.155 --> 01:02:00.636 [MILAN]: Then they started reading out various diagnoses to me. 01:02:00.636 --> 01:02:06.537 [MILAN]: Things like this and that... “be quiet there”... as if they were reading from some conversation with a psychiatrist. 01:02:06.537 --> 01:02:09.538 [MILAN]: Yellowed papers—but they wouldn’t let me hold them. 01:02:10.057 --> 01:02:12.298 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And those were supposed to be your mother’s records? 01:02:12.298 --> 01:02:18.900 [MILAN]: According to them, yes. But I couldn’t verify it. They wouldn’t let me see who the file actually belonged to. 01:02:18.900 --> 01:02:28.282 [MILAN]: I walked out of that center with one crucial piece of information burned into my memory: Cvita Miletić was born in Bila Vlaka. 01:02:28.282 --> 01:02:34.764 [MILAN]: I went online—paying for dial-up back then—and opened the Croatian phone directory. 01:02:35.139 --> 01:02:41.041 [MILAN]: I typed in “Bila Vlaka, Miletić,” and quite a few names came up. 01:02:41.041 --> 01:03:01.229 [MILAN]: I called one of them and said, “My mother is Cvita Miletić from Bila Vlaka.” The man said, “I know your uncle, Cvita’s own brother. Here’s his number. His name is Stipe. Call him.” So I did. 01:03:01.421 --> 01:03:08.947 [MILAN]: I said, “Good afternoon, this is Milan Petrović from Kragujevac. I am your sister Cvita’s son.” 01:03:08.947 --> 01:03:11.269 [MILAN]: The man was in total shock. 01:03:11.269 --> 01:03:13.590 [MILAN]: The first thing he asked was what had happened to Cvita. 01:03:13.590 --> 01:03:17.433 [MILAN]: I told him, “I don’t know. I was adopted. I’ve never seen her in my life.” 01:03:17.433 --> 01:03:20.616 [MILAN]: He was suspicious, wondering if this was some kind of setup. 01:03:20.616 --> 01:03:22.257 [MILAN]: He asked, “Would you come here?” 01:03:22.257 --> 01:03:24.159 [MILAN]: I said I would, but I didn’t have the money. 01:03:24.159 --> 01:03:25.900 [MILAN]: I was in very bad financial shape back then. 01:03:26.240 --> 01:03:33.244 [MILAN]: He said, “We knew Cvita had given birth to a child,” and things began to connect. 01:03:33.244 --> 01:03:34.925 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Are they Serbs or Croats? 01:03:34.925 --> 01:03:36.306 [MILAN]: Croats. 01:03:36.306 --> 01:03:43.450 [MILAN]: But he told me, “We looked for her through the Red Cross and never found out anything. We thought she had been killed.” 01:03:44.287 --> 01:03:46.008 [MILAN]: I told him, “I can’t tell you that.” 01:03:46.008 --> 01:03:48.690 [MILAN]: “But would I come?” Of course I would. Why wouldn’t I? 01:03:48.690 --> 01:03:50.651 [MILAN]: That was in 2005. 01:03:50.651 --> 01:03:57.816 [MILAN]: Somehow I managed to scrape together some funds—I don’t even remember how—barely a hundred euros. 01:03:57.816 --> 01:04:01.179 [MILAN]: A round-trip ticket to Knin cost fifty euros. 01:04:01.179 --> 01:04:10.445 [MILAN]: In the summer of 2006, I went. We had spoken on the phone, and Stipe’s sons, Marin and Goran, came to meet me in Knin. 01:04:10.445 --> 01:04:11.686 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What was that first encounter like? 01:04:12.426 --> 01:04:13.326 [MILAN]: That’s the most fascinating part. 01:04:13.326 --> 01:04:16.587 [MILAN]: As the passengers were getting off the bus, the two of them walked straight up to me. 01:04:16.587 --> 01:04:17.387 [MILAN]: They said, “Are you Milan?” 01:04:17.387 --> 01:04:17.688 [MILAN]: I said, “I am.” 01:04:17.688 --> 01:04:21.389 [MILAN]: They said, “We recognized you instantly among all those people.” 01:04:21.389 --> 01:04:21.729 [MILAN]: I said, “Come on.” 01:04:21.729 --> 01:04:27.070 [MILAN]: We got in the car and drove from Knin to the village of Bila Vlaka. My uncle brought out some pršut and started slicing it. 01:04:34.826 --> 01:04:58.328 [MILAN]: He served me Dalmatian wine so strong I had to cut it with water. They hosted me wonderfully for five days. And of course, during all that hospitality, I wanted to know everything about my mother. My aunt Peka, who remembered her well, said, “She was...” 01:04:59.663 --> 01:05:06.627 [MILAN]: “...a striking beauty,” she said, “with long black hair. Boys would turn around to look at her.” 01:05:06.627 --> 01:05:15.332 [MILAN]: But she said they were desperately poor, so her father, my grandfather Jure, went to Bosnia to find work. 01:05:15.332 --> 01:05:17.654 [MILAN]: She was only seven or eight then, before the war. 01:05:17.654 --> 01:05:20.115 [MILAN]: That’s where she grew up. 01:05:20.115 --> 01:05:24.898 [MILAN]: She ended up with a man named Petar Mikulić. 01:05:24.898 --> 01:05:28.480 [MILAN]: And they had a son out of wedlock. 01:05:29.097 --> 01:05:33.340 [MILAN]: Marinko Miletić, my maternal half-brother. 01:05:33.340 --> 01:05:53.617 [MILAN]: But Petar was a harsh man—he drank and beat them. When Marinko was ten, she fled Bosnia and went to Šibenik to find work. Marinko grew up without a father’s firm hand; she was too gentle, they said, too quiet. 01:05:53.617 --> 01:05:57.320 [MILAN]: According to my aunt, he fell in with the wrong crowd. 01:05:58.001 --> 01:06:00.822 [MILAN]: He started getting into trouble, even stealing. 01:06:00.822 --> 01:06:02.262 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What year was Marinko born? 01:06:02.262 --> 01:06:06.123 [MILAN]: 1954. He’s twenty years older than me. 01:06:06.123 --> 01:06:11.684 [MILAN]: Anyway, when Marinko was eighteen, around 1972, 01:06:11.684 --> 01:06:15.104 [MILAN]: my aunt Peka was in the hospital, in intensive care. 01:06:15.104 --> 01:06:22.506 [MILAN]: She said Cvita came to visit with a man—he wore a short-sleeved white shirt, 01:06:23.677 --> 01:06:27.878 [MILAN]: with neatly trimmed, slightly fair, slicked-back hair. 01:06:27.878 --> 01:06:31.739 [MILAN]: She said he didn’t say much, and Cvita told her, “This is my husband.” 01:06:31.739 --> 01:06:35.140 [MILAN]: And they left for Novi Sad together. 01:06:35.140 --> 01:06:37.561 [MILAN]: After that, they more or less lost all contact. 01:06:37.561 --> 01:06:37.881 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: With the family? 01:06:37.881 --> 01:06:42.242 [MILAN]: With the family back in Croatia, yes. 01:06:42.242 --> 01:06:43.422 [MILAN]: My aunt told me... 01:06:44.268 --> 01:06:59.757 [MILAN]: ...they assumed she had been killed during the war because she was Croatian. But she wasn’t. I eventually learned from another woman that she had lived in Temerin, on Žarka Zrenjanina Street. 01:07:00.836 --> 01:07:03.477 [MILAN]: And that she died sometime in the early 2000s. 01:07:03.477 --> 01:07:05.558 [MILAN]: I didn’t know the exact date yet. 01:07:05.558 --> 01:07:10.959 [MILAN]: They asked if I wanted them to take me to Šibenik to meet my brother. 01:07:10.959 --> 01:07:14.241 [MILAN]: I readily agreed. Of course I wanted to see my brother. 01:07:14.241 --> 01:07:18.602 [MILAN]: We parked in Šibenik, somewhere by the sea where there was a parking lot. 01:07:18.602 --> 01:07:22.063 [MILAN]: We walked up a hill, following one of the streets. 01:07:22.063 --> 01:07:25.804 [MILAN]: It seemed like a main road, though I don’t know Šibenik well enough to be sure. 01:07:25.804 --> 01:07:26.925 [MILAN]: So we headed up. 01:07:27.971 --> 01:07:36.217 [MILAN]: To the left, toward the old town—I’d never find it again on my own—there was a narrow alleyway. My aunt pointed and said he lived there. 01:07:36.217 --> 01:07:38.139 [MILAN]: But there was no one home. 01:07:38.139 --> 01:07:40.520 [MILAN]: My aunt said, “Don’t worry, I know where he is.” 01:07:40.520 --> 01:07:41.641 [MILAN]: “He’s at the market,” she said. 01:07:41.641 --> 01:07:49.267 [MILAN]: We went to the market and found him. My aunt said, “This is your brother—Cvita’s son.” 01:07:49.267 --> 01:07:50.948 [MILAN]: He just stared at me, his eyes wide with shock. 01:07:51.803 --> 01:07:53.204 [MILAN]: “What happened to Mom?” he asked. 01:07:53.204 --> 01:07:57.947 [MILAN]: I said, “I don’t know. I know she passed away, but I was adopted—how would I know what happened to her?” 01:07:57.947 --> 01:08:00.229 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What did Marinko look like? 01:08:00.229 --> 01:08:19.362 [MILAN]: Marinko was a bit portly, sweaty, gray-haired... the type who clearly enjoyed a drink. He was there with some skinny drinking buddy of his. He seemed confused... he spent most of the time just looking bewildered. 01:08:19.362 --> 01:08:20.723 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Maybe ashamed, too? 01:08:21.153 --> 01:08:22.094 [MILAN]: Possibly. 01:08:22.094 --> 01:08:26.117 [MILAN]: He kept asking about our mother—this and that. I just kept saying, “I don’t know, I really don’t know.” 01:08:26.117 --> 01:08:28.219 [MILAN]: Then he started telling me his side of the story. 01:08:28.219 --> 01:08:39.207 [MILAN]: He said, “In ’78, I was on my way to military service in Bitola.” He was traveling by train and stopped in Novi Sad to see our mother. 01:08:39.207 --> 01:08:43.630 [MILAN]: “I begged her to come back home,” he said, “but she wouldn’t do it.” 01:08:43.630 --> 01:08:46.192 [MILAN]: And that, he told me, was the last time he ever saw her. 01:08:46.192 --> 01:08:50.836 [MILAN]: We talked a bit more—I don’t even remember what about, to be honest—and then we said our goodbyes. 01:08:51.448 --> 01:08:53.409 [MILAN]: We embraced and kissed goodbye warmly. 01:08:53.409 --> 01:08:56.250 [MILAN]: I was there for five days in total. 01:08:56.250 --> 01:08:59.131 [MILAN]: My cousins took me back to the bus station. 01:08:59.131 --> 01:09:04.493 [MILAN]: We said our farewells, and I made my way to Belgrade, and then from Belgrade back home to Kragujevac. 01:09:04.493 --> 01:09:11.076 [MILAN]: Later, I stayed in touch with my cousin Marin—we’d write to each other and keep in contact. 01:09:11.076 --> 01:09:12.937 [MILAN]: And that’s how the years went by. 01:09:12.937 --> 01:09:15.658 [MILAN]: In the meantime, I had found a stable job. 01:09:15.658 --> 01:09:20.360 [MILAN]: I didn’t have to break my back anymore with those greenhouses. They had become unprofitable, especially on my plot... 01:09:20.636 --> 01:09:27.998 [MILAN]: ...which was on a slope. Between the water costs and everything else, it just wasn’t working. And the children were growing up. 01:09:27.998 --> 01:09:47.622 [MILAN]: I might have let it all go. I didn’t really want to dig much deeper, because I had developed this fear—this idea that maybe my mother had been raped, had fled in shame, given birth there, and left me. I didn’t have much to challenge that version. 01:09:47.622 --> 01:09:47.822 [MILAN]: But... 01:09:48.945 --> 01:09:51.866 [MILAN]: I thought, even if I don’t dig, maybe that’s exactly what I’ll find. 01:09:51.866 --> 01:09:56.288 [MILAN]: But by then, my children were curious. 01:09:56.288 --> 01:09:57.228 [MILAN]: “Who are we? What are we?” they’d ask. 01:09:57.228 --> 01:10:00.769 [MILAN]: They knew their identity on their mother’s side. 01:10:00.769 --> 01:10:02.210 [MILAN]: My son especially. 01:10:02.210 --> 01:10:09.232 [MILAN]: “Fine, Grandma Cvita... but who was your father? Where do you come from?” 01:10:09.232 --> 01:10:13.333 [MILAN]: And I’d just think: “Just leave it alone. Don’t make this harder for me.” 01:10:13.333 --> 01:10:14.814 [MILAN]: I was only saying that to myself, of course. 01:10:14.814 --> 01:10:17.735 [MILAN]: I realized, “God, I have to find something. I have to dig this up, and then...” 01:10:18.847 --> 01:10:21.289 [MILAN]: “...then we’ll all be screaming out loud in this house.” 01:10:21.289 --> 01:10:23.690 [MILAN]: But I gathered my courage. 01:10:23.690 --> 01:10:30.315 [MILAN]: On June 8, 2021, I had to go to Novi Sad on business. 01:10:30.315 --> 01:10:31.535 [MILAN]: And I decided: 01:10:31.535 --> 01:10:33.817 [MILAN]: I’m going back to that Center for Social Work. 01:10:34.143 --> 01:10:37.364 [MILAN]: I’m going to file a formal request. 01:10:37.364 --> 01:10:51.529 [MILAN]: I wrote a request asking for all data on my mother and father, and for the record of that first adoption. I used the argument that if my mother was Croatian, I wanted to seek citizenship. 01:10:51.529 --> 01:10:56.070 [MILAN]: They were more than happy to agree, thinking it would be the easiest way to finally get rid of me. 01:10:57.110 --> 01:11:06.773 [MILAN]: But before I actually went to see them, their lawyer, Milica Ljubičić, called me and gave me an interesting lead. 01:11:06.773 --> 01:11:18.636 [MILAN]: She said, “I’m looking at your file right now. It says here that before your adoption, you were with some Julka Bizmek. I can’t quite make out the name.” 01:11:18.636 --> 01:11:21.317 [MILAN]: I burned that name into my memory: Julka Bizmek. 01:11:21.317 --> 01:11:24.138 [MILAN]: This was happening sometime in August. 01:11:24.828 --> 01:11:39.441 [MILAN]: Back in June, when I was in Novi Sad, I’d gone back to Irig to see an old school friend, Jova. He barely recognized me, but his mother, Ilonka, remembered me perfectly. 01:11:39.441 --> 01:11:43.704 [MILAN]: I brought some gifts, and Jova and I went out to a café. 01:11:44.670 --> 01:11:47.612 [MILAN]: We had a drink—coffee for me—and just caught up. 01:11:47.612 --> 01:11:49.454 [MILAN]: We stayed in touch. 01:11:49.454 --> 01:11:52.956 [MILAN]: And I made sure to get Aunt Ilonka’s phone number. 01:11:52.956 --> 01:11:55.838 [MILAN]: So I called her to ask a question. 01:11:55.838 --> 01:11:58.520 [MILAN]: “Is there a Bizmek family in Irig?” 01:11:58.520 --> 01:12:07.187 [MILAN]: Now, Ilonka is Hungarian, married to a Serb, so she knows Hungarian surnames inside and out. She said, “It’s not Bizmek. It’s Vizmeg.” 01:12:08.227 --> 01:12:10.128 [MILAN]: That was it. That made everything easier. 01:12:10.128 --> 01:12:19.293 [MILAN]: I opened the online White Pages again. Several Vizmags came up, but absolutely nothing for Bizmek. 01:12:19.293 --> 01:12:30.839 [MILAN]: I found a man named Ivan Vizmeg. I called him and asked if they had a Julka in the family. He said, “Yes, she’s my aunt.” 01:12:30.839 --> 01:12:33.120 [MILAN]: “Can I come to Irig to talk to you?” 01:12:33.120 --> 01:12:34.321 [MILAN]: “Sure, why not.” 01:12:34.958 --> 01:12:39.779 [MILAN]: I stopped by on September 3rd. 01:12:39.779 --> 01:12:39.979 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: In 2021? 01:12:39.979 --> 01:12:41.940 [MILAN]: In 2021. 01:12:41.940 --> 01:12:47.882 [MILAN]: It was the day before my appointment at the Center for Social Work. 01:12:47.882 --> 01:12:52.383 [MILAN]: I was coming through Ruma and asked, “So where is she?” 01:12:52.383 --> 01:12:54.204 [MILAN]: He said, “On the main street.” 01:12:54.204 --> 01:12:55.144 [MILAN]: “And Karlo?” 01:12:55.144 --> 01:12:57.464 [MILAN]: He said, “Karlo is my relative.” 01:12:57.464 --> 01:12:58.945 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And who was Karlo? 01:12:59.710 --> 01:13:07.076 [MILAN]: Karlo was a man I remembered from the very first time I was placed in Irig. 01:13:07.076 --> 01:13:08.137 [MILAN]: How? 01:13:08.137 --> 01:13:16.863 [MILAN]: Karlo was a very colorful character. He liked his liquor, but in a good way, not a bad one. 01:13:16.863 --> 01:13:19.065 [MILAN]: He was great with children. 01:13:19.065 --> 01:13:24.970 [MILAN]: One time, when I was very small—maybe three or four years old—I was heading down into the cellar. 01:13:25.664 --> 01:13:34.188 [MILAN]: That’s where he was, drinking and siphoning wine with a hose. The whole cellar smelled of alcohol. 01:13:34.188 --> 01:13:36.569 [MILAN]: The stairs were incredibly steep. 01:13:36.569 --> 01:13:44.313 [MILAN]: That evening, he came upstairs with his hands tied up with that hose. 01:13:44.313 --> 01:13:48.315 [MILAN]: He walked in like that, and I just stared at him. 01:13:49.513 --> 01:13:50.854 [MILAN]: I asked, “What is that?” 01:13:50.854 --> 01:13:54.094 [MILAN]: He said, “There’s a turtle downstairs. It tied my hands.” 01:13:54.094 --> 01:14:03.437 [MILAN]: It wasn’t until I was much older that I realized he was just trying to scare me so I wouldn’t go down there and break my neck on those stairs. 01:14:03.437 --> 01:14:09.038 [MILAN]: He could talk for hours. To a child, he was like Santa Claus. 01:14:09.038 --> 01:14:13.820 [MILAN]: He was like a mix of Santa Claus and Čkalja. 01:14:13.820 --> 01:14:18.541 [MILAN]: Little kids never forget people like that, or their names. 01:14:19.060 --> 01:14:28.630 [MILAN]: So, thanks to the memory of Karlo, I asked Ivan: “And Karlo?” He said, “Oh, he had a wife named Julka.” 01:14:28.630 --> 01:14:35.838 [MILAN]: I asked, “So Julka wasn’t your aunt?” He said, “No, no—he had a wife, Juliška.” 01:14:35.838 --> 01:14:38.821 [MILAN]: I said, “That’s exactly who I’m asking about. So where are they?” 01:14:38.821 --> 01:14:40.403 [MILAN]: He said, “Well...” 01:14:41.318 --> 01:14:44.820 [MILAN]: “They had four daughters. Three moved abroad.” 01:14:44.820 --> 01:14:49.263 [MILAN]: “They sold the house in the eighties and moved to Subotica.” 01:14:49.263 --> 01:14:56.488 [MILAN]: “And Verica lives on a farm near Subotica. I don’t know exactly where. Her surname is Pejić.” 01:14:56.488 --> 01:14:57.849 [MILAN]: Verica Pejić. 01:14:57.849 --> 01:15:01.151 [MILAN]: That same day, I went back to the Center for Social Work. 01:15:01.151 --> 01:15:07.435 [MILAN]: Once again, they started in with those diagnoses, but this time they gave me more. 01:15:08.206 --> 01:15:11.869 [MILAN]: They gave me the record of the first adoption. I already had the second one. 01:15:11.869 --> 01:15:17.333 [MILAN]: They gave me a photocopy of my mother’s ID card, and I don’t even know what else. 01:15:17.333 --> 01:15:18.754 [MILAN]: For the first time, at least, something. 01:15:18.754 --> 01:15:23.737 [MILAN]: But they kept reading those diagnoses out loud—classic scare tactics. 01:15:23.737 --> 01:15:27.680 [MILAN]: My wife was waiting for me outside the center because they wouldn’t let her in. 01:15:27.680 --> 01:15:36.166 [MILAN]: I came out with that folder, with those three or four papers, and I told her: “I’m not digging into this anymore...” 01:15:36.732 --> 01:15:40.533 [MILAN]: “About Cvita—they told me all sorts of things.” 01:15:40.533 --> 01:15:41.874 [MILAN]: She stopped and looked at me. 01:15:41.874 --> 01:15:43.595 [MILAN]: “Just to scare you?” 01:15:43.595 --> 01:15:44.875 [MILAN]: “Did they scare you?” 01:15:44.875 --> 01:15:46.496 [MILAN]: “More like they’re hiding something?” 01:15:46.496 --> 01:15:47.176 [MILAN]: “You really think so?” 01:15:47.176 --> 01:15:48.897 [MILAN]: “I’m sure of it.” 01:15:48.897 --> 01:15:50.557 [MILAN]: “Then we go all the way.” We did. 01:15:50.557 --> 01:16:02.922 [MILAN]: We drove back the same way. It was a beautiful September day. We stopped at Iriški Venac for coffee, and I started leafing through the papers, looking at this and that. 01:16:03.607 --> 01:16:09.751 [MILAN]: But that conversation with Ivan stayed with me, and so did that memory. 01:16:09.751 --> 01:16:15.015 [MILAN]: Even before that, I had asked him, and we became Facebook friends. He accepted me, no problem. 01:16:15.015 --> 01:16:24.041 [MILAN]: When I got home, I started calling this person and that one—I don’t even remember anymore. Dead ends, mostly. 01:16:24.041 --> 01:16:30.605 [MILAN]: But then a few days later, I looked at Ivan’s profile and saw someone named Aleks Lakatoš, so I left him a comment— 01:16:30.820 --> 01:16:36.942 [MILAN]: a man in Australia: “Did you know my sister Juliška and her husband Karlo?” 01:16:36.942 --> 01:16:41.063 [MILAN]: I wasn’t about to let it go, so I sent the man a message in English. 01:16:41.063 --> 01:16:43.164 [MILAN]: He wrote back, “You can write in our language.” 01:16:43.164 --> 01:16:47.565 [MILAN]: So I started questioning him, asking whether he had known a certain man. 01:16:47.565 --> 01:16:50.306 [MILAN]: I asked, “What about Juliška?” He said, “She’s my own sister.” 01:16:50.306 --> 01:16:52.947 [MILAN]: “And you knew Karlo?” He said, “He was my brother-in-law.” 01:16:53.659 --> 01:16:56.802 [MILAN]: I asked, “All right, and who else is there—brothers and sisters?” 01:16:56.802 --> 01:17:01.667 [MILAN]: He started telling me about relatives in Canada, Adam, this one and that one. 01:17:01.667 --> 01:17:12.857 [MILAN]: Then I asked Aleks Lakatoš: “Did anyone in your family own a white Fiat 1100T van?” 01:17:12.997 --> 01:17:26.600 [MILAN]: He told me, “No. I left for Canada in ’76 and lost touch with everyone.” Then he just listed the brothers who were still alive. 01:17:26.600 --> 01:17:28.220 [MILAN]: Just rattling them off. 01:17:28.220 --> 01:17:32.461 [MILAN]: I was asking him so many questions that I probably started to annoy him. 01:17:32.461 --> 01:17:38.122 [MILAN]: But then I remembered what Ivan had told me about the Pejić family, so I asked: 01:17:38.122 --> 01:17:41.603 [MILAN]: “Your sister Juliška had four daughters, right?” 01:17:42.275 --> 01:17:50.607 [MILAN]: “Ivan told me the youngest, Verica, got married and lives somewhere near Subotica. Can you tell me exactly where?” 01:17:50.607 --> 01:17:51.689 [MILAN]: He said, “Bikovo.” 01:17:52.349 --> 01:17:53.190 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Bikovo. 01:17:53.190 --> 01:17:53.931 [MILAN]: Exactly. 01:17:53.931 --> 01:18:05.101 [MILAN]: I searched the White Pages for the name Pejić. More than three hundred results came up—an impossible task. But in the village of Bikovo, there were only three. 01:18:05.101 --> 01:18:10.185 [MILAN]: It was September 29th, 2021. 01:18:10.185 --> 01:18:16.191 [MILAN]: I called in the morning. After a long time, a man finally answered. 01:18:16.761 --> 01:18:17.862 [MILAN]: Josip. 01:18:17.862 --> 01:18:26.211 [MILAN]: I started telling him what I remembered—about Karlo, the horse, how he liked to drink. 01:18:26.211 --> 01:18:35.541 [MILAN]: He told me later he had been wondering who on earth I was and was about to hang up on me. But the details kept matching what he knew. 01:18:35.541 --> 01:18:37.643 [MILAN]: He said, “All right, look...” 01:18:38.540 --> 01:18:47.144 [MILAN]: “The best thing is to call my wife, Verica. We’ve had a death in the family, but she’ll be here tonight at 8:30.” 01:18:47.144 --> 01:18:52.127 [MILAN]: I waited until 8:30 and called. No answer. 01:18:52.127 --> 01:18:57.229 [MILAN]: I called again at 9:30. It rang, and Verica picked up. 01:18:57.229 --> 01:18:58.670 [MILAN]: Hello, hello. 01:18:58.670 --> 01:19:02.292 [MILAN]: I asked, “Did you live in Irig? Was your father Karlo?” 01:19:02.292 --> 01:19:02.952 [MILAN]: “Yes,” she said. 01:19:03.093 --> 01:19:06.134 [MILAN]: “Do you remember a man with a white van?” 01:19:06.134 --> 01:19:08.214 [MILAN]: She said, “I do.” 01:19:08.214 --> 01:19:09.754 [MILAN]: Then she said, “That was my uncle.” 01:19:09.754 --> 01:19:12.895 [MILAN]: “Well... I used to be at your house.” 01:19:12.895 --> 01:19:14.915 [MILAN]: And I started reciting the details. 01:19:14.915 --> 01:19:17.476 [MILAN]: And suddenly, it clicked. She knew exactly who I was. 01:19:17.476 --> 01:19:19.716 [MILAN]: She said, “Why, you’re little Palika.” 01:19:19.716 --> 01:19:21.517 [MILAN]: “You’re my cousin through my uncle.” 01:19:21.517 --> 01:19:23.217 [MILAN]: I had the speakerphone on. 01:19:23.217 --> 01:19:26.938 [MILAN]: I’d leaned the phone against the computer monitor, and my wife was standing right behind me. 01:19:28.308 --> 01:19:32.089 [MILAN]: My jaw dropped. I slumped back into my chair, though I didn’t fall. 01:19:32.089 --> 01:19:35.509 [MILAN]: The tears just started flowing. My wife began to cry too. 01:19:36.790 --> 01:19:38.390 [MILAN]: Could it be possible? 01:19:38.390 --> 01:19:43.111 [MILAN]: Could it really be true? 01:19:38.390 --> 01:19:43.111 [MILAN]: After more than forty years, I finally found out who my father was. 01:19:43.111 --> 01:19:48.792 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: When she said “little Palika,” she was referring to your father—to your father’s name. 01:19:48.792 --> 01:19:53.413 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So what was “big Palika’s” actual name—your father’s name? 01:19:53.413 --> 01:19:57.614 [MILAN]: Officially, his name was Pavle Lakatoš. In Hungarian: Pál Lakatoš. 01:19:58.233 --> 01:19:59.414 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And where was he from? 01:19:59.414 --> 01:20:05.777 [MILAN]: He was born in Hrtkovci, on January 25, 1928. 01:20:05.777 --> 01:20:07.078 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And he is officially your father? 01:20:07.078 --> 01:20:07.438 [MILAN]: Officially. 01:20:07.438 --> 01:20:15.982 [MILAN]: Juliška Vizmeg was my father’s biological sister. She was my aunt. 01:20:15.982 --> 01:20:16.523 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Your aunt. 01:20:16.523 --> 01:20:18.704 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Which means Karlo was your uncle by marriage. 01:20:18.704 --> 01:20:20.305 [MILAN]: Exactly. 01:20:20.305 --> 01:20:23.446 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: The key figure you had remembered all along. 01:20:23.446 --> 01:20:24.147 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:20:24.147 --> 01:20:24.747 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: The man from the cellar. 01:20:25.210 --> 01:20:32.253 [MILAN]: From the cellar. He stayed with me as a vivid memory my whole life. 01:20:32.253 --> 01:20:33.293 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Like a Santa Claus figure. 01:20:33.293 --> 01:20:35.814 [MILAN]: Exactly like Santa Claus. 01:20:35.814 --> 01:20:38.135 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And in the end, he really did turn out to be your Santa Claus. 01:20:38.135 --> 01:20:39.535 [MILAN]: He really did. 01:20:39.535 --> 01:20:40.436 [MILAN]: That’s when I started asking more questions. 01:20:40.436 --> 01:20:41.936 [MILAN]: I didn’t even know where to start. 01:20:41.936 --> 01:20:43.257 [MILAN]: Then she began rattling them off: 01:20:43.257 --> 01:20:44.237 [MILAN]: “You have this one, you have that one...” 01:20:44.237 --> 01:20:47.178 [MILAN]: I said, “Please, wait a second—I need a pen and paper. 01:20:47.178 --> 01:20:50.139 [MILAN]: I need to write all this down and draw a diagram of everyone I have.” 01:20:50.139 --> 01:20:53.881 [MILAN]: She said, “You have a sister, Roža. You have...” 01:20:54.836 --> 01:21:10.308 [MILAN]: “...a sister named Iren, a brother named Pišta, István, and an uncle named Šandor, Šanjika.” I had actually been talking to him on Facebook the whole time—so much so that he was about to block me—and then she told me, “That’s your uncle.” 01:21:10.685 --> 01:21:23.232 [MILAN]: “Then there’s Uncle Adam. They’re all abroad, and my daughters are abroad too. I remember you well, because I was eighteen when I left that house in Irig.” 01:21:23.232 --> 01:21:33.658 [MILAN]: I said, “Wait, let me ask you one thing—did you have an Iskra hair dryer, the white one with the blower?” And she said, “Yes.” I told her, “I remember sitting next to you while you were drying your hair.” 01:21:33.658 --> 01:21:35.680 [MILAN]: “Yes, I remember that too,” she said. 01:21:35.680 --> 01:21:36.300 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Unbelievable. 01:21:37.020 --> 01:21:48.002 [MILAN]: “Here,” she said, “this is Roža’s Facebook profile. She has a few of them. Just search for Roža Babić Lakatoš—God knows how many results will come up.” 01:21:48.002 --> 01:21:53.423 [MILAN]: She added, “The one in Budapest, that’s her... I don’t think she’ll answer you, but give it a try.” 01:21:53.423 --> 01:21:58.364 [MILAN]: I thanked her, and we agreed to talk the next day. 01:21:58.364 --> 01:22:03.065 [MILAN]: My wife was right there with me, but honestly, I couldn’t even process everything I’d just heard. 01:22:03.065 --> 01:22:04.285 [MILAN]: I just had to keep writing it all down. 01:22:06.005 --> 01:22:14.790 [MILAN]: I didn’t waste any time. Even though it was already past one or two in the morning, I started searching for Roža Babić Lakatoš. I found several profiles and sent a message to every single one. 01:22:14.790 --> 01:22:16.931 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What did the message say? 01:22:16.931 --> 01:22:20.833 [MILAN]: “I am your brother on your father’s side.” 01:22:20.833 --> 01:22:22.674 [MILAN]: That was the whole message. 01:22:22.674 --> 01:22:34.801 [MILAN]: The next morning, September 30th, I was at the supermarket. I had my basket, my phone in my pocket, and then I heard it—ping. 01:22:35.125 --> 01:22:38.127 [MILAN]: I checked it. A Messenger notification. 01:22:38.127 --> 01:22:42.110 [MILAN]: I opened it immediately. It was Roža. 01:22:42.110 --> 01:22:45.472 [MILAN]: “Oh, your face looks strangely familiar to me.” 01:22:45.472 --> 01:22:59.122 [MILAN]: I just dropped the basket and everything in it. I had to go back later and explain it to the cashiers, but at that moment I ran out to the parking lot and made an audio call. She answered. 01:22:59.122 --> 01:22:59.582 [MILAN]: I said... 01:23:00.677 --> 01:23:05.259 [MILAN]: I started with, “Dear sister, I am your brother,” and then came the cold shower. 01:23:05.259 --> 01:23:07.420 [MILAN]: “No, you are not my brother.” 01:23:07.420 --> 01:23:08.601 [MILAN]: “I’m sorry, what?” 01:23:08.601 --> 01:23:12.182 [MILAN]: She said, “Your mother was Cvita, that much is true.” 01:23:12.182 --> 01:23:21.486 [MILAN]: “Cvita was a day laborer for my father. She gave birth to you there and then left you with him.” 01:23:21.486 --> 01:23:27.189 [MILAN]: “And since he was such a good man, he took care of you. He even paid Cvita...” 01:23:28.655 --> 01:23:40.663 [MILAN]: “...to nurse you. He paid her regularly, gave her support, paid for everything properly, but she still didn’t want it. I was the one chasing after her, trying to get her to nurse you.” 01:23:40.663 --> 01:23:47.067 [MILAN]: “The story was that she had been in love with some Milivoj, a railway switchman, and that’s why she gave you his name.” 01:23:47.067 --> 01:23:49.988 [MILAN]: My heart just sank. 01:23:49.988 --> 01:23:57.353 [MILAN]: I sat there in the car, and I couldn’t even find first gear, second gear, the clutch... nothing. I spent ten minutes just sitting there, shaking. 01:23:58.693 --> 01:24:05.278 [MILAN]: Then I thought to myself: if you’ve made it this far, see it through to the end. 01:24:05.278 --> 01:24:16.806 [MILAN]: Fortunately, there was DNA. Roža had some court hearing in Novi Sad in early October, but she was living in Germany—we forgot to mention that—and she had to come for that hearing. 01:24:16.806 --> 01:24:20.849 [MILAN]: I said, “Roža, let’s settle this doubt once and for all. Let’s do a DNA test.” 01:24:20.849 --> 01:24:22.570 [MILAN]: She said, “I don’t have the money for that, I really don’t.” 01:24:23.512 --> 01:24:45.384 [MILAN]: I called a DNA center in Belgrade and asked which method would be best. I had already been looking into genetics a bit, and before that I had wanted to do my own haplotype because there had been a special offer—7,000 dinars instead of 13,000. Since I also knew I had that half-brother, Pišta, I thought we should do a comparative Y-chromosome analysis, the two of us. 01:24:46.144 --> 01:24:52.309 [MILAN]: She said to me, “Pišta won’t do it. He’s ill. He won’t go along with you.” 01:24:52.309 --> 01:25:10.102 [MILAN]: I said, “No problem, Roža. I’ll buy a buccal swab, or we’ll buy one together, take his sample in my presence, seal it in an envelope, go to Belgrade, hand over that envelope, and then they can take mine in your presence.” 01:25:11.096 --> 01:25:16.838 [MILAN]: “And I’ll pay the 25,000 dinars, and they’ll give us the result.” 01:25:16.838 --> 01:25:18.299 [MILAN]: She said, “All right.” 01:25:18.299 --> 01:25:23.121 [MILAN]: So we agreed it would be on October 12, 2021. 01:25:23.121 --> 01:25:28.043 [MILAN]: I was supposed to be in front of her apartment at seven in the morning. 01:25:28.043 --> 01:25:30.144 [MILAN]: I left Kragujevac in the dark. 01:25:30.144 --> 01:25:32.244 [MILAN]: I got there by six. 01:25:32.244 --> 01:25:36.106 [MILAN]: I figured it was better to be there an hour early than get caught in traffic. 01:25:37.516 --> 01:25:41.778 [MILAN]: I arrived in front of her apartment, where she had told me to come, near Đanović. 01:25:41.778 --> 01:25:45.779 [MILAN]: There was that parking area there, a little space where you could park for free. 01:25:45.779 --> 01:25:55.743 [MILAN]: And I thought, while she’s getting ready, I’m not going to bang on her door and wake her up. I’ll wait until exactly seven. I had also brought gifts, flowers, and I don’t know what else. 01:25:55.743 --> 01:26:06.627 [MILAN]: Because she had been telling me how she had looked after me, how she had taken care of me. And even if she wasn’t my sister after all—if she was nothing to me, still, such a good woman... 01:26:07.935 --> 01:26:10.457 [MILAN]: ...I felt I had to repay her somehow. 01:26:10.457 --> 01:26:14.560 [MILAN]: According to her own story, she was wonderful, fantastic, this and that. 01:26:14.560 --> 01:26:21.265 [MILAN]: And it truly bothered me. I thought, what kind of man are you if you just show up to someone like that empty-handed and then goodbye. 01:26:21.265 --> 01:26:22.166 [MILAN]: You understand? 01:26:22.166 --> 01:26:27.510 [MILAN]: According to her story, he was some great man, a great humanitarian, and who knows what else. 01:26:27.510 --> 01:26:34.375 [MILAN]: And the idea was that if the DNA didn’t come back positive, we would still stay in touch, and maybe she could help me keep looking for my father. 01:26:34.708 --> 01:26:41.856 [MILAN]: But I’ll never forget it, because she started right away with how she had taken care of me, how she had done this and that. 01:26:41.856 --> 01:26:51.265 [MILAN]: So on the 12th I arrived, and she appeared from somewhere in front of her building. I handed her the gifts, and we kissed in greeting. 01:26:51.265 --> 01:26:53.568 [MILAN]: She said, “Pišta isn’t here. We have to go pick him up.” 01:26:55.067 --> 01:26:57.729 [MILAN]: She said that because, yes, Pišta had agreed to come with us. 01:26:57.729 --> 01:26:58.549 [MILAN]: Great, even better. 01:26:58.549 --> 01:27:04.873 [MILAN]: She got into the car with me and started directing me: turn here, here... and I saw that we were heading to Detelinara. 01:27:04.873 --> 01:27:14.439 [MILAN]: We stopped next to some apartment block, by that vehicle entrance, because the parking area was inside the block, and she took her phone out of her pocket. 01:27:14.439 --> 01:27:18.142 [MILAN]: That was when Pišta came out through that entrance. 01:27:24.062 --> 01:27:34.604 [MILAN]: I got out and rushed over, opened the back door, and he sat down. But before that, she had scared me by saying he was schizophrenic and all that, so I wasn’t exactly at ease myself. 01:27:34.604 --> 01:27:42.606 [MILAN]: He sat behind her, and then I knew the route—onto the highway and straight to Belgrade. 01:27:42.606 --> 01:27:45.967 [MILAN]: The appointment for the testing was at ten o’clock. 01:27:45.967 --> 01:27:50.508 [MILAN]: While I was driving the whole time, I kept glancing into the rearview mirror, 01:27:51.382 --> 01:27:52.383 [MILAN]: to see how he was behaving. 01:27:52.383 --> 01:27:57.347 [MILAN]: The whole time he just stared out the window and said nothing. 01:27:57.347 --> 01:28:00.510 [MILAN]: But there was one interesting detail. 01:28:00.510 --> 01:28:06.896 [MILAN]: At one point I had to stop, for myself, at a rest area. 01:28:06.896 --> 01:28:09.679 [MILAN]: I came back to the car and Roža commented on something. 01:28:09.679 --> 01:28:12.301 [MILAN]: I had just taken a piss and said, “What, Roža?” 01:28:12.634 --> 01:28:15.915 [MILAN]: And she said, “Look at him—he walks exactly like our grandfather.” 01:28:15.915 --> 01:28:19.157 [MILAN]: Then, with the traffic in Belgrade, it was some boulevard. 01:28:19.157 --> 01:28:27.320 [MILAN]: And I was looking for where to park when suddenly—as if God himself had drawn it for me—there it was, one open parking spot shining at me, and I slipped the car right in. 01:28:27.643 --> 01:28:43.412 [MILAN]: She paid for the parking by SMS. So we wouldn’t just stand around, there was some café across the street, so we sat down and had coffee. We stayed there a little while, and I said, “All right, we’ve got ten minutes left, and it’s not even fifty meters to the DNA center. Let’s go.” 01:28:43.412 --> 01:28:56.238 [MILAN]: We arrived exactly at ten o’clock. I said to the woman at the desk, “Petrović, appointment at ten.” “Yes, yes, please come in, have a seat. Your ID card?” I handed over mine. Pišta said, “I didn’t bring mine,” and I said, 01:28:57.997 --> 01:29:07.043 [MILAN]: “It doesn’t matter. We’re doing this for personal purposes. And besides, this lady is his guardian, so take the details from her.” 01:29:07.043 --> 01:29:12.627 [MILAN]: They took my phone number and email, and from Roža only her email. 01:29:12.627 --> 01:29:23.935 [MILAN]: They took two buccal swabs from me first, then from Pišta. I paid the 25,000 dinars, and they said the result would be ready in three days. 01:29:24.256 --> 01:29:29.777 [MILAN]: “Would you like us to notify you by phone?” I said, “By phone—just tell me that you’ve sent it by email.” 01:29:29.777 --> 01:29:32.718 [MILAN]: “Then I’ll read it in peace.” 01:29:32.718 --> 01:29:40.160 [MILAN]: Because a man needs a glass of water, some sugar, something to calm him down, you understand, to prepare himself before opening that email. 01:29:40.160 --> 01:29:52.303 [MILAN]: I took two Lexiliums, just so they’d kick in after ten or fifteen minutes before I opened it, so that if it was a disappointment, it wouldn’t crush me, because I’d never had any health problem before. 01:29:52.303 --> 01:29:53.403 [MILAN]: And that’s exactly what I did. 01:29:54.114 --> 01:29:56.476 [MILAN]: Though it did leave me a bit groggy. 01:29:56.476 --> 01:30:09.507 [MILAN]: I opened the email. It said, “Your haplogroup is...” because I had already asked them to do that too—this I2A1B3—and attached was the PDF document with the DNA result. 01:30:09.507 --> 01:30:17.474 [MILAN]: I opened it. First page: Milan Petrović, Person 2, and then a table, twenty-three loci. 01:30:17.474 --> 01:30:19.075 [MILAN]: I looked. Nothing was registering. 01:30:19.075 --> 01:30:19.876 [MILAN]: Nothing. 01:30:20.284 --> 01:30:32.489 [MILAN]: Then I looked lower down, at the conclusion, looked and looked and looked, and finally—barely—I understood: kinship through an unbroken male line is confirmed. 01:30:32.489 --> 01:30:48.296 [MILAN]: I grabbed the phone, called Roža, and said, “Did your email arrive? Open it.” “Oh my God, I’ve got a brother, oh...” Then my wife said, “Welcome to the family, sister-in-law.” 01:30:49.920 --> 01:30:53.703 [MILAN]: God knows what kind of happiness. She shouted, “Now I’m going to get drunk.” 01:30:53.703 --> 01:30:59.968 [MILAN]: I said, “I will too—as soon as this medicine wears off, I’m knocking back three of my own rakijas.” 01:30:59.968 --> 01:31:01.790 [MILAN]: Happiness beyond anything. 01:31:01.790 --> 01:31:05.153 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And what did you feel in that moment? 01:31:05.153 --> 01:31:12.039 [MILAN]: I was overjoyed that I had a sister, another sister, and a brother. 01:31:12.039 --> 01:31:14.080 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: In other words, you weren’t a rootless pumpkin after all. 01:31:14.080 --> 01:31:16.222 [MILAN]: No, I wasn’t a rootless pumpkin. 01:31:17.294 --> 01:31:25.824 [MILAN]: Because I know how many times people behind my back would say, who knows whose child he is, this and that. 01:31:25.824 --> 01:31:35.614 [MILAN]: And I was especially glad when Roža mentioned that our father had bought an Opel Olympia as early as 1962. 01:31:35.614 --> 01:31:38.918 [MILAN]: At a time when there weren’t even fifty of them in all of Yugoslavia. 01:31:39.252 --> 01:31:46.477 [MILAN]: Because a lot of people looked at me as if I were some kind of—I don’t even know how to put it—lower category. 01:31:46.477 --> 01:31:49.139 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: As someone who had simply sprung up from nowhere? 01:31:49.139 --> 01:31:52.401 [MILAN]: Like something that wasn’t worth anything, let’s put it that way. 01:31:52.401 --> 01:31:57.365 [MILAN]: I had that feeling so many times, in society, among people. 01:31:57.365 --> 01:32:03.069 [MILAN]: Nobody said bastard to my face, not directly, but I could feel it. 01:32:03.069 --> 01:32:03.669 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: You could feel it. 01:32:03.669 --> 01:32:04.890 [MILAN]: Oh, I could feel it all right. 01:32:05.523 --> 01:32:11.727 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how did the detective work progress when it came to who your father was and where he came from? 01:32:11.727 --> 01:32:17.991 [MILAN]: My father was born on January 25, 1928, in Hrtkovci. 01:32:17.991 --> 01:32:18.812 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Right. 01:32:18.812 --> 01:32:29.579 [MILAN]: As a child, he often did very hard day labor because he was the oldest of eight other brothers and sisters. 01:32:29.579 --> 01:32:32.281 [MILAN]: He threshed grain, did all sorts of work. 01:32:32.281 --> 01:32:34.943 [MILAN]: He married in 1951... 01:32:35.820 --> 01:32:39.741 [MILAN]: ...to Vera Terezija Guljaš. 01:32:39.741 --> 01:32:46.483 [MILAN]: With her, he had his first son, Tibor, in 1952. 01:32:46.483 --> 01:32:47.564 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: That was your half-brother? 01:32:47.564 --> 01:32:54.906 [MILAN]: That was my half-brother who, tragically, drowned in the lime pit in 1954. 01:32:54.906 --> 01:32:58.267 [MILAN]: He was eight months old, while my father was at work. 01:32:59.635 --> 01:33:03.296 [MILAN]: Later, my father sold that house and never wanted to live in it again. 01:33:03.296 --> 01:33:12.880 [MILAN]: How that child came to drown, I can only guess, while he was at work, and who was supposed to be watching the child. 01:33:12.880 --> 01:33:16.301 [MILAN]: Then his daughter Roža was born, in 1955. 01:33:16.301 --> 01:33:17.722 [MILAN]: Daughter Iren, in 1957. 01:33:18.076 --> 01:33:24.442 [MILAN]: And István, known as Pišta, in 1962. 01:33:24.442 --> 01:33:33.871 [MILAN]: From 1968 onward, he stopped living with his legal wife. They remained connected only on paper. 01:33:34.738 --> 01:33:42.300 [MILAN]: On paper, she took over the house, the corn mill he had started, and all the income from that mill. 01:33:42.300 --> 01:33:46.961 [MILAN]: In the beginning, when he first started it, he was processing more than two tons of corn a day. 01:33:46.961 --> 01:33:51.623 [MILAN]: Later that grew even more, and the income became very large. 01:33:51.623 --> 01:33:56.264 [MILAN]: That first wife, acting on her own authority, decided who got what. 01:33:56.648 --> 01:34:04.073 [MILAN]: He was left to work land that he himself had bought, land whose yield often went to her, and to get by however he knew how. 01:34:04.073 --> 01:34:18.083 [MILAN]: She took the profitable mill, and even that was not enough. She demanded that the corn harvested from the fields be brought to her place, and when he needed cracked corn for feed, she sold it back to him. 01:34:18.360 --> 01:34:25.041 [MILAN]: She demanded well-fed pigs, which she received, and gave nothing in return. 01:34:25.041 --> 01:34:29.122 [MILAN]: She would lend him money, yes, but he had to pay it back. 01:34:29.122 --> 01:34:33.983 [MILAN]: That relationship became purely transactional, full of resentment. 01:34:33.983 --> 01:34:35.524 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And how long did that last? 01:34:35.524 --> 01:34:40.865 [MILAN]: That lasted, as I said, until 1968, when they split up. 01:34:41.718 --> 01:34:56.704 [MILAN]: Later, he was forced to build himself a kind of farm shack out in the field, made of mud and wattle, with two rooms, and that was where he lived. 01:34:56.704 --> 01:35:03.747 [MILAN]: No one brought him food. He cooked for himself, washed himself, did everything alone. 01:35:04.057 --> 01:35:08.521 [MILAN]: In 1972, my mother came to live with him there, to help him. 01:35:08.521 --> 01:35:10.222 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did he meet your mother? 01:35:10.222 --> 01:35:20.531 [MILAN]: According to the incomplete information I have, they met in Šibenik, sometime in the winter of 1971 to 1972. 01:35:20.531 --> 01:35:20.611 [MILAN]: 1972. 01:35:21.532 --> 01:35:23.653 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Your father was staying down there? 01:35:23.653 --> 01:35:30.998 [MILAN]: Yes, because he used to go there to buy southern fruit, so he could have goods to sell at the Futoška market over the winter. 01:35:30.998 --> 01:35:39.643 [MILAN]: She went back with him, they settled into life together on that farmstead, and then he underwent surgery in the spring of 1973. 01:35:39.643 --> 01:35:43.606 [MILAN]: In the summer, he was discharged from the hospital. 01:35:46.082 --> 01:35:51.487 [MILAN]: He stayed there with my mother. The children were on school break, and he kept away from everyone. 01:35:51.487 --> 01:35:59.195 [MILAN]: Somewhere around late September or early October, to put it plainly, I was conceived. 01:35:59.195 --> 01:36:07.163 [MILAN]: Those were very harsh, unfit living conditions in that hut. My mother wintered there with him. 01:36:07.497 --> 01:36:13.619 [MILAN]: She carried the pregnancy to term and gave birth to me the following year, on June 28, 1974. 01:36:13.619 --> 01:36:36.585 [MILAN]: She left the maternity ward on July 3, brought me there, my father was working and she was working there too, and someone was looking after me—I can’t say exactly who. Then in 1975, around June or July, Roža was deported from Germany, because she had gone there illegally in 1973. 01:36:38.048 --> 01:36:43.212 [MILAN]: So her story about chasing after my mother to make her breastfeed me falls apart. 01:36:43.212 --> 01:36:53.841 [MILAN]: Around September or October, my father asked my sister Roža to look after me, because she already had two children by then— 01:36:53.841 --> 01:36:59.606 [MILAN]: a daughter born in 1973 and a son in 1975—so she was to look after her own children and me as well. 01:37:01.808 --> 01:37:06.312 [MILAN]: And of course he paid her for it. 01:37:06.312 --> 01:37:15.876 [MILAN]: At that time it was one thousand new dinars, or one hundred thousand old ones— 01:37:07.309 --> 01:37:15.876 [MILAN]: recalculated by exchange rate and inflation and all the parameters, that would come to around 330 euros today. 01:37:15.876 --> 01:37:27.305 [MILAN]: Naturally, she agreed. According to her, her husband was earning 165,000 at the time, while paying rent to his maternal grandfather. 01:37:27.305 --> 01:37:36.653 [MILAN]: In 1975 and 1976, my father spent time in the hospital, undergoing surgery, and that first wife came to visit him. 01:37:37.994 --> 01:37:50.737 [MILAN]: And she asked him, “What are you going to leave me?” Which makes no sense—to ask a man lying in the shock ward, “I can see you’re going to die, so what are you going to leave me?” 01:37:50.737 --> 01:37:54.138 [MILAN]: He told her, “Get the hell out of here.” 01:37:54.138 --> 01:38:01.080 [MILAN]: After he was moved out of the shock ward to another department, she came again, but this time she had changed her tone and said: 01:38:02.997 --> 01:38:11.983 [MILAN]: “All right, I know I made mistakes. Can we mend things between us? Can our relationship go back to what it was before?” 01:38:11.983 --> 01:38:14.965 [MILAN]: He answered, “No, there is no fixing this relationship.” 01:38:14.965 --> 01:38:16.686 [MILAN]: And she left. 01:38:16.686 --> 01:38:25.232 [MILAN]: Then she sued him for divorce, in 1976. 01:38:25.232 --> 01:38:28.354 [MILAN]: After that failed attempt of hers to reconcile, 01:38:29.429 --> 01:38:31.810 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So that means he was still legally married to her? 01:38:31.810 --> 01:38:37.493 [MILAN]: Yes, legally, but by then he had not lived with her at all for a good eight years. 01:38:37.493 --> 01:38:47.118 [MILAN]: He appears in court, and one point in her complaint says: “Lived with another woman and fathered a child.” 01:38:47.118 --> 01:38:49.920 [MILAN]: To which he replied: 01:38:49.920 --> 01:38:55.963 [MILAN]: “I fathered a child with Cvita Miletić because I was forced into it.” 01:38:55.963 --> 01:38:58.124 [MILAN]: My sister Roža also testified there. 01:38:59.102 --> 01:39:10.791 [MILAN]: I know that she sued him over the fact that he had taken up with a female day laborer on his land, fathered a child with her, fallen in love with her, and was paying her that amount I mentioned earlier. 01:39:10.791 --> 01:39:14.134 [MILAN]: And on top of that, he was giving her fruit, vegetables, and meat. 01:39:14.134 --> 01:39:18.037 [MILAN]: Around that time, in 1977, I was roughly with that sister. 01:39:18.037 --> 01:39:25.403 [MILAN]: Then somewhere near the end of that year, he came out of the hospital. Since he had already bought a house in Bački Vinogradi, 01:39:26.965 --> 01:39:37.834 [MILAN]: he took me there, and the two of us lived there until his death, on November 7, 1978. 01:39:37.834 --> 01:39:40.516 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So how long did you live together? 01:39:40.516 --> 01:39:44.400 [MILAN]: Well, according to what my sister Roža says, 01:39:45.606 --> 01:39:54.730 [MILAN]: it turns out I was with her more. But in my own memory, I remember my father much more clearly, and I barely remember her. 01:39:54.730 --> 01:39:59.852 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So up to what age were you with your father? 01:39:59.852 --> 01:40:03.394 [MILAN]: Until November 7, 1978. 01:40:03.394 --> 01:40:05.155 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How old were you at that moment? 01:40:05.155 --> 01:40:08.656 [MILAN]: Not quite four and a half. 01:40:08.656 --> 01:40:10.397 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Old enough to remember your father? 01:40:10.397 --> 01:40:11.237 [MILAN]: Very well. 01:40:11.237 --> 01:40:12.218 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How do you remember him? 01:40:13.048 --> 01:40:26.337 [MILAN]: I remember a man who had already declined a lot, with slicked-back hair, slightly hunched, always in a white short-sleeved shirt, very neat. 01:40:26.337 --> 01:40:31.381 [MILAN]: That is the image I remember from the one time he brought me to my grandfather, in Subotica, to be looked after. 01:40:31.381 --> 01:40:32.942 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What was your grandfather’s name? 01:40:32.942 --> 01:40:36.944 [MILAN]: My grandfather’s name was István, officially Stjepan. 01:40:36.944 --> 01:40:39.926 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Do you remember your father kissing you? 01:40:39.926 --> 01:40:41.367 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:40:41.367 --> 01:40:42.428 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Tell me about that. 01:40:43.170 --> 01:41:06.422 [MILAN]: I remember that when he was taking me somewhere, when he had to go away for treatment—whether he was taking me to my sister’s or to my grandfather’s—in that van he used for transporting goods, he had made a little bed where I slept during those long journeys. There were no highways then, only local roads, so a trip from Subotica to Irig took a long time. 01:41:06.422 --> 01:41:07.983 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: That famous van? 01:41:08.368 --> 01:41:09.649 [MILAN]: The van, yes. 01:41:09.649 --> 01:41:27.466 [MILAN]: According to my sister, when he brought me to her to be looked after, they would put me to sleep in bed, and then he would try to slip away quietly, so I wouldn’t hear him leaving. 01:41:27.466 --> 01:41:33.612 [MILAN]: But when he started the van, I knew the sound of his van, and I jumped up, 01:41:35.014 --> 01:41:41.319 [MILAN]: tore the curtains, and shouted, “Apu, apu, apu,” which in Hungarian means daddy, daddy, daddy. 01:41:41.319 --> 01:41:42.240 [MILAN]: Do you understand? 01:41:42.240 --> 01:41:44.101 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Yes, yes, yes. All right. 01:41:44.101 --> 01:41:47.804 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So the communication was in your mother tongue, in Hungarian. 01:41:47.804 --> 01:41:48.304 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:41:48.304 --> 01:41:57.952 [MILAN]: I spoke only Hungarian with my father, exclusively Hungarian, and that was confirmed to me by my sister, Aunt Verica, because she was often present during our conversations. 01:41:58.272 --> 01:42:00.813 [MILAN]: And she herself spent some time in Bački Vinogradi. 01:42:00.813 --> 01:42:03.454 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: You said you served in the army in Priština. 01:42:03.454 --> 01:42:04.055 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:42:04.055 --> 01:42:05.595 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: There were Hungarians in the army then. 01:42:05.595 --> 01:42:06.476 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:42:06.476 --> 01:42:10.057 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did you feel close to them when they spoke Hungarian among themselves? 01:42:10.057 --> 01:42:11.558 [MILAN]: I understood nothing. I didn’t know Hungarian anymore. 01:42:11.558 --> 01:42:16.800 [MILAN]: I only remembered how to count to five and how to say “Jó napot,” good day. 01:42:16.800 --> 01:42:23.003 [MILAN]: And to say “víz” for water, “kenyér” for bread, “cukor” for candy or sugar. 01:42:23.162 --> 01:42:26.524 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So nothing came back from childhood? 01:42:26.524 --> 01:42:32.088 [MILAN]: Because at the age of five, my Hungarian language was cut off and I was forbidden to speak it. 01:42:32.088 --> 01:42:34.209 [MILAN]: I used to speak both languages. 01:42:34.209 --> 01:42:39.652 [MILAN]: Our local language, Serbian if you like, and Hungarian. 01:42:39.652 --> 01:42:43.335 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And in that period of living with your father, you don’t remember your mother? 01:42:43.335 --> 01:42:47.918 [MILAN]: Two or three times, while we were in Bački Vinogradi. 01:42:47.918 --> 01:42:51.120 [MILAN]: I remember that he was very happy and would say, “Mama is coming.” 01:42:52.662 --> 01:42:53.543 [MILAN]: A woman would come. 01:42:53.543 --> 01:42:54.483 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Your father said that? 01:42:54.483 --> 01:42:55.264 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:42:55.264 --> 01:43:04.330 [MILAN]: A woman would come—the same woman I later recognized when I found her ID card. 01:43:04.330 --> 01:43:14.176 [MILAN]: Only in that memory, not as worn down as in the ID photo: with long beautiful black hair, in a white nightgown, and I was sleeping in the middle, between them. 01:43:14.176 --> 01:43:16.198 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And that is your most beautiful childhood memory? 01:43:16.198 --> 01:43:16.598 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:43:16.598 --> 01:43:18.579 [MILAN]: The next morning, there was no one there. 01:43:18.579 --> 01:43:19.700 [MILAN]: What happened, I don’t know. 01:43:23.505 --> 01:43:25.367 [MILAN]: What exactly were they doing? 01:43:25.367 --> 01:43:26.569 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What kind of relationship was that? 01:43:26.569 --> 01:43:28.511 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: For you, it remains a total mystery. 01:43:28.511 --> 01:43:30.133 [MILAN]: Why did she just disappear? 01:43:30.133 --> 01:43:32.836 [MILAN]: Who else was involved in all of that? 01:43:32.836 --> 01:43:35.399 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: During that period when you were living with your father. 01:43:36.510 --> 01:43:38.752 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Your mother would appear from time to time. 01:43:38.752 --> 01:43:39.512 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:43:39.512 --> 01:43:52.063 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: During your investigation—first into her family in Croatia, and later into your father’s family—did it start to bother you 01:43:52.063 --> 01:43:57.207 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: where your mother had actually been during the time you were living with your father, and why she wasn’t there? 01:43:57.207 --> 01:43:57.847 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What was happening with Cvita? 01:43:57.847 --> 01:44:01.290 [MILAN]: I don’t have any clear information about what happened to Cvita. 01:44:01.290 --> 01:44:06.194 [MILAN]: Except for a few... 01:44:07.648 --> 01:44:31.506 [MILAN]: ...fragments I managed to uncover. Her ID card from 1987 was issued to an address at 42 Veselina Masleše Street in Novi Sad. And her last known residence was in Temerin, at 130 Žarka Zrenjanina Street—or some number around there—with a certain Damjan and Roža Đukić, where she was living with some... 01:44:31.913 --> 01:44:34.135 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: With some man, in a common-law relationship. 01:44:34.135 --> 01:44:36.276 [MILAN]: Yes, with some man in a common-law relationship. 01:44:36.276 --> 01:44:39.218 [MILAN]: That is the only thing I know. 01:44:44.648 --> 01:44:56.732 [NARRATOR]: Based on the request of Milan Petrović of Kragujevac, 110 Kraljevačkog bataljona Street, submitted on July 28, 2004, a search procedure was conducted for his biological mother. 01:44:56.732 --> 01:45:02.354 [NARRATOR]: Over a longer period of time, and in a number of ways, checks were carried out, but without a positive result. 01:45:02.494 --> 01:45:16.129 [NARRATOR]: No data were found concerning Miletić Cvita, born on March 23, 1931, in the village of Bila Vlaka, in Benkovac, Croatia, that would indicate where she is located today. 01:45:16.129 --> 01:45:18.031 [NARRATOR]: The following checks were carried out. 01:45:18.131 --> 01:45:26.416 [NARRATOR]: In the records of the Novi Sad Secretariat of Internal Affairs, the address 42 Veselina Masleše Street, Novi Sad, was registered, where the named person is not located. 01:45:26.416 --> 01:45:36.783 [NARRATOR]: In the territory of Temerin, her address was registered as 138 Žarka Zrenjanina Street; upon verification by police patrol, Cvita was not known at that address. 01:45:36.783 --> 01:45:43.867 [NARRATOR]: At the Center for Social Work in Temerin, the named person is not registered as a beneficiary of measures and services of social protection. 01:45:44.007 --> 01:45:50.015 [NARRATOR]: In the records of the municipal registry office in Temerin, the registers of deaths were checked. 01:45:50.015 --> 01:45:51.237 [NARRATOR]: She is not registered. 01:45:51.237 --> 01:45:59.948 [NARRATOR]: In the records of the registrar of the City of Novi Sad, from June 1, 1998 to the present day, Cvita is not registered as deceased. 01:46:00.108 --> 01:46:09.962 [NARRATOR]: At the funeral company Lisje of Novi Sad, there are no records that Cvita was buried in the cemeteries of Novi Sad, Petrovaradin, Sremska Kamenica, or Futog. 01:46:09.962 --> 01:46:17.532 [NARRATOR]: In the records of the Novi Sad Secretariat of Internal Affairs, passport service, it was verified that Cvita never had a travel document of Serbia. 01:46:17.732 --> 01:46:32.279 [NARRATOR]: Bearing in mind that Cvita had, many years ago, been a recipient of social assistance from the Center for Social Work in Novi Sad and that she had mentally altered behavior, a search was also carried out in the psychiatric hospitals in Vršac and Kovin. 01:46:32.279 --> 01:46:35.420 [NARRATOR]: The named person is not in the records of these hospitals. 01:46:35.604 --> 01:46:42.207 [NARRATOR]: In contact with the Secretariat of Internal Affairs in Vršac, a check was carried out of the records of residence and deceased persons in the territory of Vršac. 01:46:42.207 --> 01:46:43.467 [NARRATOR]: She is not registered. 01:46:43.467 --> 01:46:55.373 [NARRATOR]: Through the helpfulness of officials, a check was carried out of the records of persons under the names Cvita and Cveta throughout the whole of Serbia, but not a single Miletić Cvita of similar age was found. 01:46:55.373 --> 01:47:00.995 [NARRATOR]: In the search, use was also made of the information that the named person had been in a common-law relationship with Kojić Čedom. 01:47:00.995 --> 01:47:05.137 [NARRATOR]: By verification with the Novi Sad Secretariat of Internal Affairs, information was registered that he had died. 01:47:05.317 --> 01:47:08.439 [NARRATOR]: At his last address, 8 Futoški put, there is now the Jugoalat factory. 01:47:08.439 --> 01:47:11.761 [NARRATOR]: In the factory personnel office, information was obtained regarding a person of the same surname. 01:47:11.761 --> 01:47:14.463 [NARRATOR]: It concerned a Jugoalat pensioner at 50 Cara Dušana Street. 01:47:14.463 --> 01:47:19.326 [NARRATOR]: Since a new building is being constructed at that address, information was obtained from neighbors that the family of the person in question is in Kovilj. 01:47:19.326 --> 01:47:21.588 [NARRATOR]: Contact with them established that they are not related to Čedo. 01:47:30.974 --> 01:47:41.126 [NARRATOR]: The address 19 Koste Racina Street, at which Cvita and Čedo had previously lived, is likewise no longer in use, because business premises have been built at that location. 01:47:41.126 --> 01:47:50.658 [NARRATOR]: In the records of the pension and disability insurance service, a check was carried out as to whether there were beneficiaries of Čedo’s pension, but here too the answer was negative. 01:47:51.058 --> 01:47:57.781 [NARRATOR]: At the shelter for adults attached to the Gerontology Center in Belgrade, as of today there is no person matching the one sought. 01:47:57.781 --> 01:48:17.888 [NARRATOR]: The final attempt to obtain data from the birth registers of Benkovac, where Cvita was born, through the competent ministry, was unsuccessful due to the fact that, since the war in the territories of the former republics, data are not forwarded on persons who originate from Bosnia and Herzegovina and are located in, or died in, Serbia. 01:48:18.328 --> 01:48:26.673 [NARRATOR]: On the basis of the data presented, it may be concluded that further attempts to search for Miletić Cvita exceed the capacities of this authority. 01:48:26.673 --> 01:48:37.599 [NARRATOR]: It should also be borne in mind that Cvita was in a very poor psychophysical and socio-economic condition at the time when she was receiving protection from the Center for Social Work in Novi Sad. 01:48:37.599 --> 01:48:43.463 [NARRATOR]: The assessment is that she is not in a better condition today either, which substantially conditions the response to her son’s request. 01:48:44.143 --> 01:48:52.266 [NARRATOR]: It is my opinion that this meeting between the biological mother and the adopted son should not take place, and that any further search for Cvita should be discontinued. 01:48:52.266 --> 01:48:55.467 [NARRATOR]: Novi Sad, March 9, 2005. 01:48:55.467 --> 01:48:58.188 [NARRATOR]: Social Worker Ljiljana Ristić. 01:48:58.188 --> 01:48:59.948 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: In what year did she die? 01:48:59.948 --> 01:49:03.269 [MILAN]: She died on June 15, 1997. 01:49:03.269 --> 01:49:05.790 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: How did you find out that she died that year? 01:49:05.790 --> 01:49:13.533 [MILAN]: Because that information was given to me at the Center for Social Work on September 3, 2021. 01:49:14.017 --> 01:49:17.198 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: After your father’s death, did your mother ask about you? About where you were? 01:49:17.638 --> 01:49:22.020 [MILAN]: When I asked, back in 2005, 01:49:22.020 --> 01:49:25.581 [MILAN]: Anđa Gamber at the Center for Social Work: 01:49:25.581 --> 01:49:28.162 [MILAN]: “And where is my mother? What happened to her?” 01:49:28.162 --> 01:49:30.503 [MILAN]: She answered me: 01:49:30.503 --> 01:49:36.565 [MILAN]: "Cvita used to come asking for social assistance and say, 'I have a son in a children's home.'" 01:49:36.565 --> 01:49:38.746 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: "She thought you were in a children's home." 01:49:38.746 --> 01:49:39.666 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:49:39.666 --> 01:49:43.087 [MILAN]: Another time, my sister herself complained 01:49:43.917 --> 01:49:56.619 [MILAN]: that when she came to visit her mother, she found my mother and her mother talking over the fence of the house where her mother lived. 01:49:56.619 --> 01:50:09.822 [MILAN]: At that moment, Cvita turned toward Roža and aggressively confronted her: "Is it because of you that my son ended up in a home for abandoned children?" And I should point out 01:50:10.798 --> 01:50:15.401 [MILAN]: that by then I had already been illegally adopted twice. 01:50:15.401 --> 01:50:16.762 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Without the mother’s consent? 01:50:16.762 --> 01:50:18.964 [MILAN]: Without the mother’s consent. 01:50:18.964 --> 01:50:21.666 [MILAN]: So what did they tell my mother? 01:50:21.666 --> 01:50:25.809 [MILAN]: “Your son is in a children's home. He doesn’t want to see you.” 01:50:25.809 --> 01:50:29.591 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And did you go to Temerin to look for your mother? 01:49:29.591 --> 01:50:39.879 [MILAN]: I did, because through other channels I found out that her last known residence was on Žarka Zrenjanina Street in Temerin. 01:50:41.143 --> 01:50:50.210 [MILAN]: I went straight to that house, and I found a man there who told me that Cvita had lived there with another man. 01:50:50.210 --> 01:50:55.094 [MILAN]: They came there, I think he said, sometime in the autumn of ’96. 01:50:55.094 --> 01:50:58.957 [MILAN]: In the spring of ’97, she fell ill. 01:50:58.957 --> 01:51:05.983 [MILAN]: They took her to the sanatorium, the Melenci treatment center, and we heard that she died two months later. 01:51:05.983 --> 01:51:07.544 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: So she died in the sanatorium? 01:51:07.544 --> 01:51:08.525 [MILAN]: In the sanatorium. 01:51:08.700 --> 01:51:12.322 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: That is for lung diseases, if I’m not mistaken. 01:51:12.322 --> 01:51:23.186 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did you go to Melenci, to the sanatorium, to ask where your mother was buried and to look into it more closely? 01:51:23.407 --> 01:51:27.811 [MILAN]: Unfortunately, I still haven’t gone, but I did have several phone conversations. 01:51:27.811 --> 01:51:37.278 [MILAN]: I called them directly and they said, “Well, that was back in ’97. I don’t think anyone remembers that anymore. Call the local community office in Melenci.” 01:51:37.278 --> 01:51:38.099 [MILAN]: So I called. 01:51:38.099 --> 01:51:41.522 [MILAN]: Then they gave me the number of some gravedigger to call. 01:51:41.522 --> 01:51:44.124 [MILAN]: He said, “That was a long time ago. Nobody remembers that anymore.” 01:51:44.124 --> 01:51:46.906 [MILAN]: Basically, nobody knows where she is buried. 01:51:47.218 --> 01:51:54.142 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: But isn’t the Melenci sanatorium under the local jurisdiction of the municipality of Zrenjanin? 01:51:54.142 --> 01:51:58.445 [MILAN]: They were just passing the buck from one place to another, and nobody knew anything. 01:51:58.445 --> 01:52:05.709 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: From everything I’ve heard in this story, I’ve come to the conclusion that your parents loved each other. 01:52:05.709 --> 01:52:14.395 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Regardless of the fact that they were not legally married, there was love there, and in the end, you are the child of that love. 01:52:14.395 --> 01:52:15.495 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What I still don’t understand is 01:52:16.596 --> 01:52:22.379 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: why you had to be given up for adoption at all, even the first time. 01:52:22.379 --> 01:52:24.361 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Why did it have to come to that? 01:52:24.361 --> 01:52:29.744 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: At that time, both your parents were alive, both your father and your mother. 01:52:29.744 --> 01:52:33.626 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: In your view, what was decisive in your being given up for adoption? 01:52:33.626 --> 01:52:38.289 [MILAN]: The trigger for everything was the probate hearing after my late father’s death. 01:52:38.289 --> 01:52:43.512 [MILAN]: When the first three heirs appeared before the court, 01:52:44.860 --> 01:52:57.646 [MILAN]: one of my sisters brought in my father’s lawyer, the same one who had represented him in the divorce case, Helena Uzelac, and said: “There is one more heir.” 01:53:06.790 --> 01:53:24.646 [NARRATOR]: Record drawn up before the Municipal Court in Novi Sad, by Judge Mara Prica, in the probate matter of the late Pavle Lakatoš, formerly of Novi Sad, born in 1928 and deceased on November 7, 1978. 01:53:24.746 --> 01:53:42.531 [NARRATOR]: Present on behalf of the court: Mara Prica, Judge; Ružica Savić, Recording Clerk. On behalf of the parties: Roža Kopljan, daughter, 25 Zadružna Street, Novi Sad; the party’s attorney Helena Uzelac, attorney-at-law from Novi Sad; Vera Lakatoš as the legal representative of the minor István Lakatoš. 01:53:44.772 --> 01:53:51.518 [NARRATOR]: It is noted that Irena Beker did not appear at the hearing, although service of the summons was duly proven. 01:53:51.518 --> 01:54:02.167 [NARRATOR]: The heirs present are acquainted with the probate file and declare that the probate file, with regard to the estate, has been accurately compiled, and that the estate consists of real estate in the cadastral municipalities of... 01:54:02.167 --> 01:54:03.448 [NARRATOR]: ...Novi Sad, cadastral municipality... 01:54:03.448 --> 01:54:04.549 [NARRATOR]: ...Futog, and cadastral municipality... 01:54:04.549 --> 01:54:09.053 [NARRATOR]: ...Bački Vinogradi, as well as one Fiat van and one motor cultivator. 01:54:09.193 --> 01:54:18.778 [NARRATOR]: The liabilities of the estate consist of the amount of 60,000 dinars, which the deceased remained indebted to Julijana Vizmeg of Bački Vinogradi. 01:54:18.778 --> 01:54:28.143 [NARRATOR]: The heirs are informed of their right of inheritance and declare: “I, Roža Kopljan, accept the inheritance in the share belonging to me by law.” 01:54:28.143 --> 01:54:35.287 [NARRATOR]: “I, Vera Lakatoš, in the name of my minor son István Lakatoš, accept the inheritance in the share belonging to us by law.” 01:54:35.747 --> 01:54:55.048 [NARRATOR]: Attorney Helena Uzelac states that, in addition to the reported heirs, there is also the minor Milivoj Miletić, five years of age, for whom it has not been judicially established that the deceased is his father, but whom he acknowledged, and the minor Milivoj is currently residing with his grandmother and grandfather, that is, the parents of the deceased. 01:54:55.448 --> 01:55:02.352 [NARRATOR]: Therefore, the Center for Social Work shall accordingly be requested to appoint a guardian for the purpose of representing his interests. 01:55:02.352 --> 01:55:08.656 [NARRATOR]: The court issues the following ruling: today’s hearing is concluded; the next one shall be scheduled in writing. 01:55:09.026 --> 01:55:13.830 [NARRATOR]: Municipal Court Novi Sad, estate of the late Pavle Lakatoš. 01:55:13.830 --> 01:55:17.913 [NARRATOR]: Submission, No. 03-17/79. 01:55:17.913 --> 01:55:25.979 [NARRATOR]: In the legal matter under the above number, attorney Helena Uzelac represented Roža Kopljan, heir of the late Pavle Lakatoš. 01:55:25.979 --> 01:55:38.828 [NARRATOR]: The party and the attorney agreed to terminate the power of attorney by mutual consent, and the attorney therefore informs the court that as of April 3, 1979, she will no longer represent Roža Kopljan. 01:55:39.093 --> 01:55:43.856 [MILAN]: Within ten days, her power of attorney was revoked—just like that. 01:55:43.856 --> 01:55:59.347 [MILAN]: Then that sister took the lawyer retained by her stepmother—the one representing the minor Ištvan, Irena, and now Roža as well: Jovan Pervas. 01:55:59.347 --> 01:56:02.550 [MILAN]: That was in April 1979. 01:56:02.550 --> 01:56:07.533 [MILAN]: And the probate proceedings were now underway. 01:56:08.855 --> 01:56:20.086 [MILAN]: The ruling recognizing me as an heir came in November 1979, while the adoption took place on June 21, 1979. 01:56:20.086 --> 01:56:26.292 [MILAN]: The first meeting with the adopters took place on June 12, 01:56:28.001 --> 01:56:35.487 [MILAN]: the meeting with the pedagogue on June 18, with the psychologist on June 19, and the adoption order on June 21. 01:56:35.487 --> 01:56:37.649 [MILAN]: Nine days. 01:56:37.649 --> 01:56:45.776 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: In other words, if I understand correctly, you were effectively surplus to requirements when it came to dividing the property among the sisters. 01:56:45.776 --> 01:56:45.856 [MILAN]: Yes. 01:56:46.096 --> 01:56:54.302 [NARRATOR]: Municipal Court Novi Sad, No. O.317/79, dated April 11, 1979. 01:56:54.302 --> 01:57:12.316 [NARRATOR]: Record drawn up before the Municipal Court in Novi Sad in the probate matter of the late Pavle Lakatoš, former resident of Novi Sad, born in 1928 and deceased on November 7, 1978, without a testamentary disposition. 01:57:12.376 --> 01:57:19.439 [NARRATOR]: Present on behalf of the court: Judge Mara Prica, professional associate Draginja Jovičić, recording clerk Ljubica Stefanoski. 01:57:19.439 --> 01:57:25.341 [NARRATOR]: On behalf of the parties: Roža Kopljan, daughter, Novi Sad, Slana Bara, 25 Zadružna Street; Iren Beker, daughter, Novi Sad, Trg Majke Jevrosime No. 01:57:25.341 --> 01:57:29.023 [NARRATOR]: 3; Verona Lakatoš, Novi Sad, Trg Majke Jevrosime No. 01:57:29.023 --> 01:57:30.644 [NARRATOR]: 3, guardian of the minor heir István Lakatoš. 01:57:38.727 --> 01:57:59.043 [NARRATOR]: It is noted that the summoned heirs appeared at today’s hearing, and they state that the probate proceedings in respect of the late Pavle Lakatoš are being conducted before this court under No. O.196/79, and that the heirs Roža Kopljan and Vera Lakatoš, on behalf of her minor son István, have already made their inheritance declarations. 01:57:59.143 --> 01:58:11.793 [NARRATOR]: It is noted that Julijška Vizmeg of Irig, 75 Lole Ribara Street, is also present at the hearing, and she states that the deceased owed her 60,000 dinars, and she reports this amount as a liability of the estate. 01:58:11.793 --> 01:58:21.721 [NARRATOR]: The heirs present, Roža Kopljan, Lakatoš née Beker Iren, and Verona Lakatoš on behalf of the minor István Lakatoš, declare that they acknowledge this amount claimed by Julijška Vizmeg as a liability of the estate. 01:58:26.885 --> 01:58:36.830 [NARRATOR]: Thereafter, the present Beker Iren declares: “I, Beker Iren, accept the inheritance that belongs to me by law after the late deceased.” 01:58:36.830 --> 01:58:51.357 [NARRATOR]: The court issues the following ruling: case No. O.196/79 shall be joined with case No. O.317/79, and the proceedings shall hereafter continue under No. O.196/79. 01:58:51.977 --> 01:58:58.462 [NARRATOR]: The court issues the following ruling: today’s hearing is concluded; the next one shall be scheduled in writing. 01:58:58.462 --> 01:59:11.872 [MILAN]: What is also interesting is that, under the procedure for child adoption, the child is supposed to be placed in another locality under the jurisdiction of a different Center for Social Work. 01:59:11.872 --> 01:59:12.973 [MILAN]: Not here. 01:59:12.973 --> 01:59:13.954 [MILAN]: Because Budisava 01:59:15.105 --> 01:59:19.670 [MILAN]: falls under Novi Sad, and so does Budisava. 01:59:19.670 --> 01:59:29.259 [MILAN]: In order to conceal the entire corrupt operation, the adoption was carried out in their own backyard. 01:59:29.259 --> 01:59:38.909 [MILAN]: A regulation was broken there—you cannot remove someone who is already within the circle of inheritance by means of adoption. 01:59:39.452 --> 01:59:40.813 [MILAN]: That is exactly what they did. 01:59:40.813 --> 01:59:54.018 [MILAN]: At that time, the law on full and incomplete adoption was in force, and it stated explicitly that only a child under the age of five could be fully adopted. 01:59:54.018 --> 01:59:57.920 [MILAN]: My problem was those seven days. 01:59:57.920 --> 02:00:00.661 [MILAN]: They had to finish it before June 28. 02:00:01.727 --> 02:00:07.329 [MILAN]: There was also a procedure called adjustment, and it was never applied. 02:00:07.329 --> 02:00:15.693 [MILAN]: The psychologist could not even carry out proper testing with the first adoptive mother because she was illiterate—that is written in the file. 02:00:15.693 --> 02:00:21.515 [MILAN]: Then there was a whole series of lies about their living in a harmonious marriage, and so on. 02:00:21.515 --> 02:00:26.617 [MILAN]: And that Milorad was nine years older than the lady. [Note: The correct fact is that Gospava was nine years older than Milorad.] 02:00:26.617 --> 02:00:28.758 [MILAN]: I remember that perfectly from her own story. 02:00:30.117 --> 02:00:45.790 [MILAN]: He was prone to womanizing; she mentioned some nurse named Angelina and so on. In any case, he was not especially bright either. In other words, they were unfit for adoption—far from suitable. 02:00:45.790 --> 02:00:47.472 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And in your assessment, what kind of property are we talking about? 02:00:47.472 --> 02:00:57.440 [MILAN]: Well, we have about one and a half hectares of farm land, we have Donje Sajlovo in Novi Sad, which according to the spatial plan, by 2030, 02:00:58.619 --> 02:01:02.302 [MILAN]: is supposed to be acquired for the expansion of the New Cemetery. 02:01:02.302 --> 02:01:05.203 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: One and a half hectares—so your share would be one quarter. 02:01:05.203 --> 02:01:06.324 [MILAN]: One quarter. 02:01:06.324 --> 02:01:09.266 [MILAN]: Sixty ares in Klisa. 02:01:09.266 --> 02:01:10.887 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: That is all urban land now. 02:01:10.887 --> 02:01:12.869 [MILAN]: Yes. 02:01:12.869 --> 02:01:16.231 [MILAN]: Two jutra with a house. 02:01:16.231 --> 02:01:17.612 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: What does one jutro mean? 02:01:17.612 --> 02:01:18.613 [MILAN]: Almost sixty ares. 02:01:18.613 --> 02:01:20.594 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Sixty ares—so two jutra is one hectare and twenty. 02:01:21.043 --> 02:01:23.544 [MILAN]: Let’s say one hectare and ten. 02:01:23.544 --> 02:01:31.487 [MILAN]: And a house of 277 square meters, built during the Austro-Hungarian period, extremely solid—as if some count had built it. 02:01:31.487 --> 02:01:37.789 [MILAN]: My father had bought only half of that house, and he planned to buy the other half, but death overtook him first. 02:01:37.789 --> 02:01:50.534 [MILAN]: Then there was the house in Detelinara, which has now been demolished and given to a developer who is now building 2,500 square meters of usable space there. 02:01:51.884 --> 02:02:00.654 [MILAN]: The house had dimensions of eight by twenty-four meters, with 195 square meters of usable space. 02:02:00.654 --> 02:02:06.780 [MILAN]: There I had an obstacle, because half of it belonged to other people. 02:02:06.780 --> 02:02:11.446 [MILAN]: They sold the house in Bački Vinogradi. They sold the property in Klisa. 02:02:13.688 --> 02:02:17.231 [MILAN]: That was handed over to the developer to be built on. Only this remained. 02:02:17.231 --> 02:02:23.596 [MILAN]: And they would sell that too, if they could, but they cannot because of the expropriation, or whatever it is. 02:02:23.596 --> 02:02:38.628 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And now that you have learned who your father was and what he owned, and now that you know who your relatives are on your father’s side, does your fight continue in terms of enforcing your right to your father’s property—to your patrimony? 02:02:40.181 --> 02:02:43.283 [MILAN]: What is interesting is that people always focus on the material side. 02:02:43.283 --> 02:02:54.491 [MILAN]: My fight is for my father’s name and my mother’s name to be written in the civil records—not some Milorad and Vasić, not the names of mad people. 02:02:54.491 --> 02:02:55.552 [MILAN]: Do you understand me? 02:02:55.552 --> 02:02:59.755 [MILAN]: May God rest their souls, both of them are dead, but I do not want their names 02:03:00.285 --> 02:03:03.348 [MILAN]: to pass my lips ever again. 02:03:03.348 --> 02:03:09.933 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: But this material side—does it exist, are you pursuing it or not? 02:03:09.933 --> 02:03:22.644 [MILAN]: First of all, I want it entered properly. I want the right to my father’s grave, I want the property right to that plot, so I can raise him a dignified monument. 02:03:22.644 --> 02:03:27.228 [MILAN]: As for the rest of the property, let God’s will be done. 02:03:28.565 --> 02:03:32.186 [MILAN]: As people say: what is stolen is cursed. 02:03:32.186 --> 02:03:40.068 [MILAN]: By law, I had the right to demand things from those Vasićs, do you understand? 02:03:40.068 --> 02:03:49.351 [MILAN]: I did not want so much as a single matchstick from them, because I do not regard any of that as mine, nor would I take it. I would only bring a curse upon myself, because I do not recognize that adoption. 02:03:50.650 --> 02:04:03.986 [MILAN]: If I were to claim anything from that side, it would mean I recognize it. For me, that was an illegal adoption, and I would never ask for anything from it. I ask for every link with those people to be erased. 02:04:03.986 --> 02:04:08.531 [MILAN]: I want my father and my mother. Nothing more. 02:04:08.531 --> 02:04:10.073 [MILAN]: And as for the property—we shall see. 02:04:10.468 --> 02:04:14.571 [MILAN]: I leave that for the state, for the judiciary, to think about. 02:04:14.571 --> 02:04:16.873 [MILAN]: Of course, we will go there as well. 02:04:16.873 --> 02:04:20.935 [MILAN]: What is most telling is that in two years my sister never once said: 02:04:20.935 --> 02:04:24.618 [MILAN]: “Come on, brother, let’s see what belongs to you.” 02:04:24.618 --> 02:04:25.339 [MILAN]: No. 02:04:25.339 --> 02:04:29.561 [MILAN]: She said to me: “You’ll get compensation.” 02:04:29.561 --> 02:04:38.828 [MILAN]: Woman, please... She is guardian to my brother, the one who has two apartments. 02:04:39.344 --> 02:04:46.888 [MILAN]: He has no children, no one, supposedly suffers from schizophrenia, and that too should be examined—what is really going on with him. 02:04:46.888 --> 02:04:50.229 [MILAN]: So that she could take those two apartments from that brother too. 02:04:50.229 --> 02:04:52.450 [MILAN]: I love this region. 02:04:52.450 --> 02:04:54.311 [MILAN]: Some would call it backward. 02:04:54.311 --> 02:04:59.454 [MILAN]: But there is such a thing as customary law. 02:04:59.454 --> 02:05:04.116 [MILAN]: Both sets of my adopters did the same thing. 02:05:04.116 --> 02:05:06.537 [MILAN]: Sisters give up property to their brother. 02:05:07.114 --> 02:05:11.676 [MILAN]: Periša, the man who adopted me, had four sisters, and all of them yielded everything to their brother. 02:05:11.676 --> 02:05:17.998 [MILAN]: Gorgina also gave what she had to her brothers. 02:05:17.998 --> 02:05:21.059 [MILAN]: Women are meant to be given their share, of course, but these ones turned it upside down. 02:05:21.059 --> 02:05:24.020 [MILAN]: In other words, one brother 02:05:25.204 --> 02:05:36.769 [MILAN]: they made complicit in a crime, because they were not the decision-making authority; someone else was, and that authority accommodated them—I do not know in what way. 02:05:36.769 --> 02:05:45.133 [MILAN]: And now this other brother is only useful as long as he lives, and after that they want to take that too. 02:05:45.133 --> 02:05:46.774 [MILAN]: That is the story. 02:05:46.774 --> 02:05:54.598 [MILAN]: If I had not started probing into this property, she would quietly have ended up with two apartments and a third of that parcel of one hectare and... 02:05:55.119 --> 02:05:58.881 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Did you hire a lawyer to represent you? 02:05:58.881 --> 02:06:08.365 [MILAN]: I did, and then I revoked the power of attorney, because he went straight for the property first. That is not how it should be done. 02:06:08.365 --> 02:06:09.585 [MILAN]: There is a procedure. 02:06:09.585 --> 02:06:17.289 [MILAN]: Legally speaking, I was born as Milivoj Miletić, from a non-marital union, which is why I bore my mother’s surname. 02:06:17.289 --> 02:06:19.109 [MILAN]: My father’s was Lakatoš. 02:06:19.109 --> 02:06:22.231 [MILAN]: That Milivoj Miletić suffered a civil death. 02:06:22.990 --> 02:06:28.434 [MILAN]: And then they created—what should I even call it— 02:06:28.434 --> 02:06:31.877 [MILAN]: Milan Vasić, Milan Petrović: a legal mutant. 02:06:31.877 --> 02:06:34.739 [MILAN]: An unlawful and unnatural creation. 02:06:34.739 --> 02:06:42.125 [MILAN]: All I want is for that five-year-old child—whose heart is still beating here, that five-year-old who refuses to grow up— 02:06:43.619 --> 02:07:02.084 [MILAN]: to be brought back to life, to be restored as Milivoj Miletić Lakatoš. Milan may remain, perhaps, but when I am entered in the records, when my grandchildren and great-grandchildren one day ask who we are and where we come from, let them not search in Doboj or Bosnia for their ancestors, but find them 02:07:02.084 --> 02:07:06.205 [MILAN]: in Hrtkovci, in Bačka Topola, perhaps even in Slovakia, wherever the line had reached. 02:07:06.205 --> 02:07:10.026 [MILAN]: I want what everyone else has a right to. That is what I want. 02:07:10.026 --> 02:07:13.267 [MILAN]: I have no interest at all in that civil kinship. 02:07:13.933 --> 02:07:17.455 [MILAN]: That invented, unnatural legal notion. 02:07:17.455 --> 02:07:21.457 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Milan, your story is deeply moving. 02:07:21.457 --> 02:07:32.502 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: I believe it will touch many viewers, and I would like, if you have one, to ask you for a closing message to them. 02:07:32.502 --> 02:07:37.904 [MILAN]: They took forty-five years of life from me, and no one can give that back. 02:07:37.904 --> 02:07:43.407 [MILAN]: But my message would be this: these things are still happening. Let us stop them. 02:07:45.228 --> 02:07:49.129 [MILAN]: Let us stop the illegal acts of those so-called 02:07:49.129 --> 02:07:56.252 [MILAN]: Centers for Social Work, which operate like a state within a state, without any sanctions, without any control. 02:07:56.252 --> 02:07:59.453 [MILAN]: So that they stop destroying families and human lives. 02:07:59.453 --> 02:08:09.956 [MILAN]: Time and again—you can find it in the articles: bribed, caught with 10,000, extorted a father for 10,000 euros. 02:08:09.956 --> 02:08:13.057 [MILAN]: The act of adoption must no longer remain an official secret. 02:08:14.987 --> 02:08:19.952 [MILAN]: The erasure of biological ties must be removed from the law. 02:08:19.952 --> 02:08:20.853 [MILAN]: Why? 02:08:20.853 --> 02:08:27.019 [MILAN]: Because tomorrow relatives may run into each other and enter into marriages or other relationships. 02:08:27.019 --> 02:08:28.180 [MILAN]: That is incest. 02:08:28.180 --> 02:08:35.408 [MILAN]: When a child is born—and I am talking even about a child truly born out of wedlock, unwanted by mother and father— 02:08:35.408 --> 02:08:36.749 [MILAN]: the child did not choose to be born. 02:08:37.777 --> 02:08:42.439 [MILAN]: Those who created that child are the ones responsible, and they should bear those consequences for life. 02:08:42.439 --> 02:08:44.040 [MILAN]: They should have thought of that. 02:08:44.040 --> 02:08:57.067 [MILAN]: That provision in the law—the abolition of biological ties with relatives and the abolition of all rights and obligations—is, to me, something utterly monstrous. 02:08:57.707 --> 02:09:04.392 [MILAN]: Official secrecy, the registry service, the Center for Social Work— 02:09:04.392 --> 02:09:05.934 [MILAN]: are they above the state? 02:09:05.934 --> 02:09:08.416 [MILAN]: Everything must be transparent. 02:09:08.416 --> 02:09:09.877 [MILAN]: Where do the children go? 02:09:09.877 --> 02:09:12.899 [MILAN]: Who is the person deciding their fate? 02:09:12.899 --> 02:09:15.461 [MILAN]: Has anyone examined that person? 02:09:15.461 --> 02:09:22.807 [MILAN]: But no, because many of those social workers, clearly, are full of vanity, full of their own problems, and they take revenge. 02:09:22.807 --> 02:09:23.708 [MILAN]: What kind of people are those? 02:09:24.518 --> 02:09:29.320 [MILAN]: My message is that the state must deal seriously with those institutions. 02:09:29.320 --> 02:09:32.881 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: In other words, a reorganization of the institutions. 02:09:32.881 --> 02:09:38.424 [MILAN]: Reorganization, yes—but together with investigations and criminal complaints. 02:09:38.424 --> 02:09:43.726 [MILAN]: Because believe me, I am sure there is a great deal of material there. 02:09:43.726 --> 02:09:47.767 [MILAN]: I cannot get those forty-five years back, I already said that. 02:09:47.767 --> 02:09:52.129 [MILAN]: But if I can help prevent someone else from losing those same forty-five years, I will be overjoyed. 02:09:53.658 --> 02:09:55.319 [MILAN]: Then I will know I did something worthwhile in life. 02:09:55.319 --> 02:09:58.321 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: I hope that in the end you will be happy. 02:09:58.321 --> 02:10:00.342 [MILAN]: I hope so too. 02:10:00.342 --> 02:10:04.344 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: Thank you, Milivoj, for sharing your life story with us. 02:10:04.344 --> 02:10:12.689 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And for allowing us to hear events that were truly instructive, though deeply sad. 02:10:12.689 --> 02:10:20.733 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: And I hope this will encourage many viewers, if they are facing anything similar. 02:10:21.488 --> 02:10:26.590 [MILAN]: I would thank you as well. I smiled just now because you called me Milivoj. 02:10:26.590 --> 02:10:28.911 [MILAN]: Which is what I am. 02:10:28.911 --> 02:10:32.093 [DETECTIVE BRACA]: It was a pleasure. You were an excellent interlocutor. 02:10:32.093 --> 02:10:32.513 [MILAN]: The pleasure was even greater on my side. 02:10:34.870 --> 02:10:43.696 [NARRATOR]: This was the life story of Milivoj Miletić Lakatoš, a brave man who never gave up searching for the truth about his real origin. 02:10:43.696 --> 02:10:50.061 [NARRATOR]: And if you too are searching for your biological parents and your true name, do not give up. 02:10:50.061 --> 02:10:56.285 [NARRATOR]: Somewhere in this world, there is still someone thinking of you and wondering whether you are alive, and whether you are happy.