On that day, the 18th of January, he was arrested and taken from Vukovar to a concentration camp in Srijemska Mitrovica. He had expected something like that to happen after the town was occupied – either he was going to get arrested or shot. There was often no other option for men who did not want to leave a besieged city. There was no other option for his wife either. They were both taken to the camp. Only a few months earlier, he’d had no inkling of any of this. He was a mechanical engineer in a managerial position at the Borovo factory, and he also worked as a lecturer at the technical school. When fewer students started to turn up for school in 1991, he didn’t understand what was happening. His work relationships were good, as usual, and he didn’t notice that the workers were leaving. At least, they weren’t leaving the machinery unit where he worked. It was only in June that he realised that hard times were coming.
When he returned on the 19th of August 1996, accompanied by the UNTAES (United Nations Transitional Administration for Eastern Slavonia, Baranja and Western Sirmium), they went for talks at the Borovo factory. His notes read: “The first meeting with the Borovo representatives from the occupied territory.” Ivan was one of the representatives of the Borovo factory, along with two others, and another three people were noted from the Borovo holding. Ivan was the assistant director of the organisation of returnees to Vukovar at the time. They were not really talks, he says. There was nothing to negotiate. It was about agreeing on the takeover of the factory. He knew what he might find. He had remained in Vukovar “until the bitter end.”
He knew what the millions of shells had done to the city. Still, as they arrived at the Trpinje road, he didn’t know where they were. He was five minutes away from the factory he’d worked at, but he couldn’t recognise where he was. It was a wasteland.
They met their former Borovo colleagues at the Danube Hotel. The talks were correct and concrete. They talked about the state of the equipment, the infrastructure, the workers and jobs, and about production.
He had only been back in Koprivnica, his post war home where he had settled with his family, for only a few hours after returning from Vukovar that evening when the phone rang. It was the wife of a colleague with whom he’d gone to Vukovar. “Ivo, how are you?” she asked. “I’m fine, why?” Ivan replied. “My husband is feeling very bad. They poisoned you today.” Ivan didn’t believe in such a possibility. He knew that it was her stress talking. He had felt it too.
Seven months later, on the 21st of April 1997, he went inside Borovo and looked around the factory. That former giant looked defeated, but it was still better than the rest of the city. The most crumbled buildings had been removed in the preceding years. Some of the roofs and windows had been fixed. There was some production going on. The factory had been so amply equipped when it was at full capacity that even after all the destruction enough machines had remained to keep production going, at least for footwear and v-belts. It was the time of big preparations. It was time for the return of the newold management. They were planning basic renovations, job positions, and there were hopes for new investment.
Six months later Ivan moved to the Borovo Hotel forsingle people and went to work from there every day
until 2000. That year, his wife joined him and they moved into a house. Peaceful reintegration, for Ivan, means exactly that: returning home and returning to Borovo…although neither the town nor the factory will ever be the same again.
