Grandmother Selena

My grandmother Selena (Ćirilović) was a great fighter all her life. She lived through two world wars. She held the family together; she had a daughter, Angelina — my mother — and four sons. But, as the fate of mothers in this part of the world has always been marked by misfortune and tragedy, at the very end of the Second World War, in 1945, she lost her eldest son, Janko. He was twenty-five, and he was killed on the second day of Christmas, on the Syrmian Front, at Vinkovci. Three and a half decades later she went to join her Janko, surrounded by six grandchildren and one great-grandchild.