Ivana Bodrožić’s autobiographical novel The Hotel Tito is one of the most powerful Croatian novels written about the war of the 1990s. It won the Zagreb Kiklop and the Banja Luka-Belgrade Kočićevo pero awards when it was published in 2010. The next year it appeared in a Serbian edition with Rende books in Belgrade, and has since been translated into Czech, Danish, French, German, Macedonian, Slovenian, and Turkish. Bodrožić also writes poetry and short stories, and her most recent novel, The Hole, was published in Zagreb in 2016. The Hotel Tito, called Hotel Zagorje in the original, describes the experience of the author’s family. Bodrožić was born in the town of Vukovar, on the Croatian bank of the Danube River, on the border with Serbia. She and her brother were dispatched to an island on the Dalmatian coast during the summer of 1991 as hostilities began to intensify, and their mother joined them there while their father remained behind to defend Vukovar. That autumn, the Yugoslav People’s Army besieged Vukovar for eighty-seven days, held off by fighters like the narrator’s father. When the army broke the siege and the army and Serbian forces occupied the city, people came up out of the basements where they’d been sheltering from the shelling; women and children were allowed out and a few men managed to break through and escape, but the army took some four hundred men prisoner at the Vukovar hospital and bused them to the Ovčara farm on the outskirts, where soldiers and Serbian paramilitaries massacred the hostages over several days. Ivana Bodrožić’s father was one of those who was captured and murdered; her experiences during the months and years that followed form the core of the novel. After fleeing the Vukovar war zone, the mother and two children in the novel are accommodated as displaced persons at a large conference center and hotel, known as the Political School, in the village of Kumrovec, the birthplace of Josip Broz Tito, president of Yugoslavia for forty years. Before the war the Political School and accompanying hotel facilities were frequently used for Communist Party meetings and other major conferences. For years the family share a single hotel room just large enough for their three beds, waiting to hear whether their father and husband has survived and when they’ll be granted an apartment of their own.
Geography plays a key role in The Hotel Tito. Vukovar sits on the spot where the Vuka River flows into the Danube. The Danube forms the border between Croatia and Serbia, and it is many miles from Croatia’s capital, Zagreb. When the children travel to the coast they traverse almost all of Croatia by bus. Then they move—first to Zagreb, in the center of Croatia, and, ultimately, to Kumrovec, just a short bus ride outside of Zagreb. Vukovar was far from Zagreb not only in miles, but in sympathy. The narrator is eloquent in her description of her sense of apartness as a displaced person. When the novel first came out it was read in Zagreb as a scathing indictment of the indifference manifested by Zagreb politicians, teachers, and schoolchildren to the plight of the Vukovar people. There was sympathy for a time, but the people of Vukovar were displaced from 1991 until 1997, when their city and the outlying areas were finally re-integrated into Croatia and many of them returned and rebuilt their homes. In the years after 1995, the limbo they were consigned to no longer concerned many of the people they interacted with on a daily basis.