My great grandfather used to be one of the well-known guys in a very small town Grocka, in a Kingdom of Yugoslavia, near Belgrade. In the lack of proper terminology, I’d say he was one of the elders. And he was kind of rich. He had a lot of land, but when the new regime and the League of Communists of Yugoslavia took over after the WW2, he was left without a piece of land. The process was called expropriation and a big land with the household, well, old house where my father was born, a little stream where children used to play, was cut in half. And it happened not only to him, but to all the people who owned land in that street. Some small money was offered as compensation, but since my great grandfather didn’t care for the Party much, he refused and that gave us, the offspring, a glimpse of hope we might return what he once owned.
