How ‘Hotel Tito’ Became Croatian Women’s Refuge from War

"The story, first and foremost, is told by women," declared Croatian dramatist Jelena Kovacic as she outlined the themes of the play 'The Hotel Tito', which opened earlier this month at Zagreb's Gavella Drama Theatre.

"It was important to us because women are - during war but also in peacetime - always somehow on the sidelines and are expected to bear the heaviest burden; they are raising these families that often end up fatherless," Kovacic told BIRN.

"It was important to us to hear that other side, this so-called intimate side of history, the one that official history somehow always sidesteps," she added.

'The Hotel Tito' ('Hotel Zagorje' in the Croatian version) tells the story of Croatian women who fled the eastern Croatian town of Vukovar during the 1990s war as it was besieged and destroyed by the Yugoslav People's Army and Serbian paramilitaries and ended up as refugees in Croatia's Zagorje region.

It follows women and girls of all ages as they suffer separation from family members who have been left behind in Vukovar and the despair of waiting for news from the war-ravaged town.

The play was adapted by Kovacic and director Anica Tomic from the novel of the same name, published in 2010 by prominent Croatian writer Ivana Bodrozic, who was nine years old when her mother took her and her brother and fled occupied Vukovar, settling first in Zagreb and then in a building used to house war-displaced people in the village of Kumrovec.

The young Bodrozic, whose father remained in Vukovar during the siege and has since been classified by the authorities as 'disappeared', is also a central character in the novel, which recounts how she grew up in the improvised refuge near Kumrovec, where Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito was born.<...