Serb Follows His Heart to His Homeland

Several months ago, Milenko Mrvos had grown so dispirited, so depressed, over the sad stories from his homeland that his daughter thought he might need professional help. Then Sandra Mrvos heard about a psychotherapist who was also an immigrant from Yugoslavia.

Perhaps this doctor would understand.

She called. But when she told the doctor her father was a Serb, the conversation turned chilly. The doctor didn’t like Serbs.

Now her father has found a calling that Sandra figures will do him more good than any therapist. Moved by a sense of duty, 73-year-old Milenko Mrvos responded to a U.S. Army request for volunteers to serve as translators for American troops on their peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.

Six weeks ago, he was living at Leisure World in Seal Beach. Since then he’s gone through interviews in Washington and training in Fort Benning, Ga. Sandra figures her father is in Germany now, awaiting assignment.

Sandra was all for it. “I told my dad that I knew if he were to die stepping on a land mine, he would die happy.”

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He would be happy, Sandra figures, because he would be satisfied in knowing that he did what he could to make a difference, and that he had fulfilled a sense of patriotic and familial duty. He would do his job for the U.S. Army, she says, but no doubt he would also--politely, diplomatically--try to convey the Serbian point of view.

It’s not a popular perspective. Sandra, a 37-year-old Sherman Oaks resident, knows this all too well. This lunch was her way of fulfilling her own sense of duty.

It was Monday. The Times carried this front page headline: “U.S. Official Sees Atrocity Evidence in Bosnia.” Tracy Wilkinson’s story told how a senior human rights official toured “snow-covered fields thought to hold the bodies of thousands of massacred Muslims and indicated that evidence is mounting to substantiate allegations of the deadliest atrocity in the Bosnian war.”

Up to 7,000 people are missing and feared massacred from the Muslim enclave in Srebrenica that was overrun by the Bosnian Serb army.

Sandra understands that many Americans are at a loss to understand the confusing, multi-sided conflict pitting Serbs, Croatians and Bosnian Muslims. If they try to sort it out, they understand that the Serbs are commonly portrayed as the aggressors, the bullies whose leaders have ominously advocated policies of “ethnic cleansing.”

Sandra says her father and his Serbian friends in America often complain that press coverage has been biased against the Serbs. They complain that historic context is often lacking in the coverage.

Her father’s Serbian pride was shaped by his own experience. During World War II, the Croatians became allies of the invading Nazi troops. Milenko Mrvos and his brother were young men who managed to escape. Their father, Nikola--the grandfather Sandra never knew--was taken prisoner.

He was a physician and, as such, was treated better than most prisoners, at least temporarily. But in the end, he too was executed.

Three years ago, Sandra joined her father at a ceremony opening the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. Her grandfather is listed among the victims.

It was a bleak, rainy day. Sandra Mrvos remembers seeing a small group of protesters who claimed the Holocaust was a hoax.

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Milenko Mrvos had lived in the United States since the late 1940s, having immigrated here with his Italian bride. He was an architect and raised a family in Lakewood. Sandra says, until recent years, she had identified more with her Italian roots, since her parents spoke that language at home.

Several years ago, not long before the fall of the Berlin Wall and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union, her father visited Yugoslavia. He returned home worried, Sandra says, as if fearing that a dormant volcano could erupt. The ethnic strife goes back centuries.

Sandra now envisions her father telling U.S. soldiers the stories he told her over the years. He’d do it off-duty, she says, “over a beer.” No doubt other Croatians and Muslims who enlisted would be telling their stories too.

Perhaps he will also tell about his own evolution. Milenko Mrvos, Sandra says, had always preferred a united Yugoslavia. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, he hoped that different peoples would be able to live together.

But once the Balkans again became Balkanized, he felt the need to choose sides. And he was, and is, a Serb.

“He wanted to have unity. He felt no animosity toward Muslims or Croatians that I ever saw . . . He said the hardest thing for him was to let go of his dream of his country being unified.

“That seemed to be his biggest heartbreak.”

Scott Harris’ column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Readers may write to Harris at the Times Valley Edition, 20000 Prairie St., Chatsworth 91311. Please include a phone number.