Osijek, Croatia — THE town of Osijek, now part of Croatia, quietly dreams away on the Drava River. I didn't intend to come here last month when I visited Serbia, but my travel companion, Polly Platt, had to make a day trip to Osijek, about 150 miles northwest of Belgrade, to attend to some family business.
I like crossing borders, and this one held special interest. It separates westward-looking, largely Roman Catholic Croatia from Orthodox Serbia, the last bastion of the Yugoslav Federation.
On the 3 1/2 -hour bus ride across the great Pannonian Plain -- "splendid words, the flattest I know," British journalist Rebecca West wrote in her 1942 book "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia" -- I read about the war that erupted in the region 15 years ago. Croatia claimed independence from the former Yugoslavia, pitting nationalists against the country's ethnic Serbian population.
Before the 1995 Dayton peace accords ended the conflict, the Serb-led Yugoslav People's Army had joined the battle to support its Croatian Serb comrades; both sides were accused of atrocities and ethnic cleansing; civilians fled their homes, bringing hundreds of thousands of desperate refugees to Balkan cities, including Belgrade.
I wondered whether a fence between the two countries would make them better neighbors. But the border came and went, marked only by a wooden gate where the bus was stopped on both sides for passport inspection.
Polly thought the farm towns in Croatia seemed more prosperous than the ones we had left behind in Serbia. But with their red-tiled-roof houses and gold-domed churches, they all looked alike to me -- except for the bullet holes in buildings on the Croatian side.
Along the way, Polly told me the story of her husband, Alexandre Grchich. He was a Croatian Serb who grew up partly in Osijek, an old Austro-Hungarian garrison town that was fortified to protect the empire from the Turks.
During World War II, Croatia allied itself with Nazi Germany and killed, interned or drove away most of its ethnic Serbian population. Polly said Grchich's family was put in a concentration camp at Jasenovac because it refused to convert from Serbian Orthodox to Roman Catholic.
After the war, he left his homeland and the communist regime then in power to begin a long journey that eventually took him to France and to Polly.
