Nineteen forty-eight
Told by David on 10 September 2026 and sharpened the same day: they went **to leave the country**. Every claim here is lore until a record says otherwise.
This is the first page in this archive built out of something somebody remembers rather than something a clerk wrote. It is kept separate for that reason, and graded lore throughout.
Lore is not worthless — it is usually the only thing that knows why. A register will tell you that a man moved; it will never tell you he was afraid. But lore compresses. Dates slide, two departures become one, and a surname heard in a second language turns into a different surname altogether. So each of the four claims below is set against what this archive already holds, and where they disagree, the disagreement is the finding.
I«Ivan and Hedviga went in 1948.» — and, asked what went meant: «They went to leave the country in 1948.»
lore · window now fixed
Then it was an attempt, not a departure — and the archive can now put a window round it.
Their son was born at Senj on 17 December 1951, at 11h50 in the town hospital; this archive holds the certified extract, register 152/1954, page 252, ordinal 110, with the father entered as Defranceski Ivan, born 25 June 1925 at Crikvenica, electro-mechanic. Working back from that birth, they were on that coast again by about March 1951. And Ivan died at Senj on 30 October 1995 and is buried there.
So the shape of it is settled even though not one document of it has been found:
They left in 1948. They were home inside about two and a half years. They never got out. Hedviga reached Johannesburg in the end and died there in 2001; Ivan never did.
- doc — Gone by 1948, back by early 1951. Both ends are fixed: the family's testimony at one end, a Senj hospital birth at the other.
- inf — A failed exit leaves no Yugoslav paper and may leave foreign paper. Nothing in a Croatian register records a citizen who tried to go and came back. If anything survives it is in a camp file, a screening record or a border-police file, and this archive has been looking in the wrong country.
- lore — Why they came back is not known and is not guessed at here. Refused, repatriated, out of money, out of time, or called home — the page will not choose.
What would settle it The Arolsen Archives, now the single highest-value request this project has open — see the route below for why the ask has changed.
II«a post-war migration offering better and safer conditions»
lore
The year is exactly right for that feeling, and the reasons are not the ones usually assumed.
This family is not part of the Istrian exodus. The Treaty of Paris of February 1947 handed Italian Istria to Yugoslavia and gave its inhabitants the right to opt for Italy; hundreds of thousands took it. But Crikvenica and Senj were never Italian — they had been in Croatia since 1918 — so nobody here was an optant, and no treaty gave them a door.
What 1948 did give them was fear of a different kind. On 28 June 1948 Yugoslavia was expelled from the Cominform and Tito broke with Stalin, and the purge that followed fell on anyone suspected of siding with Moscow. The camp built for them opened the next year on Goli otok — a bare island in the Kvarner, in the water between Senj and Rab. It is visible from that coast.
And leaving was not a matter of buying a ticket. Emigration required permission that was rarely given; the practical route out was an illegal crossing into Allied-held Trieste or into Austria, and then a refugee camp and the International Refugee Organization, which ran resettlement from 1947 until 1952 and is how both brothers reached Australia.
- inf — «better and safer» is two different things and they may have two different dates. Better points at the shortages and the collectivisation of the late forties. Safer points at 1948 itself, and at the island.
What would settle it Arolsen Archives and the IRO case files for the surname; the Australian and South African arrival records for the brothers, which would date the family's whole westward movement precisely.
III«his mother was with another man not that long before, by the last name Carr — and there was always suspicion she perhaps ran away from that as well.»
lore
«Carr» is almost certainly not an English name.
On this coast Car is a real and ordinary surname — the word means emperor, and it is said tsar. An English-speaking family in Johannesburg, hearing it and writing it down, produces Carr every time. A British Carr in Kvarner in the 1940s would be extraordinary; a Croatian Car would be unremarkable, and the search moves from the wrong country to the right one.
The woman is Uršula Kovačina, born about 1890, married to Anton Rudolf Defranceski. And her situation makes the story entirely possible: this archive records Anton Rudolf as having died in 1943, which would leave her a widow of about fifty-three with the war still on.
But here the archive has to admit a contradiction of its own, and it is a serious one. Anton Rudolf stands on the Pfullingen list of foreigners in 1947, and was certified by that town's mayor in 1950. He cannot be both dead in 1943 and certified in 1950. One of those two facts is about a different man, or the 1943 death — which is held only «per the family», itself lore — is wrong.
Until that is resolved, this archive does not know whether Uršula was a widow or a wife. Which is precisely the question the story turns on.
- inf — if the 1943 death is right, a second partnership by 1947–48 needs no explanation at all beyond ordinary life.
- inf — if Anton Rudolf was alive in 1950, then «with another man» means something else entirely, and the word ran in the family's telling starts to carry weight.
What would settle it The Crikvenica or Senj death register for 1943; the Pfullingen certificate of 1950, which this archive holds as a plate and has not fully read; and then the registers for the surname Car in Crikvenica, Senj and Novi Vinodolski.
IV«Hedviga was a singer in Crikvenica.» — and, the same day: «at the Hotel Therapija, which I believe closed down.»
lore · venue named
This one the archive can only believe, and it explains something it could not explain before — and the hotel is still standing.
Hedviga Blažević was a Senj woman — born there, daughter of Ljubomir Blažević and Milka Papić the tobacco-factory cigar-roller, out of a line of Senj carriers reaching back past 1768. Ivan was a Crikvenica man. Twenty-five miles of coast road lie between the two towns, and nothing in this archive has ever explained how they met.
Singing at the Therapia explains it. The hotel opened in 1895 as the Nadvojvoda Josip — the Archduke Joseph — and the archduke himself bought it a few years later and renamed it Therapia, when a hydropathic institute was fitted inside it. That is the building that made Crikvenica a health resort rather than a fishing village: baths, physiotherapy, a season, an orchestra, and guests from Vienna and Budapest. Senj had none of it.
So a Senj woman with a voice went to Crikvenica to use it, and met a Crikvenica man who had come home from a Reutlingen factory floor at seventeen. It is the first explanation this archive has ever had for that marriage.
And it did not close. It was renovated in 2006 and run as the Falkensteiner Hotel Therapia; then it was sold to an Austrian buyer and renamed Kvarner Palace. The building is there. The name she sang under is not — which is very likely why the family remembers it as gone.
- inf — this is probably how they met, and it is the only account of it the archive has.
- doc — the hotel's history is well attested: 1895 as Nadvojvoda Josip, Therapia from about 1899, hydropathic institute, renovated 2006, latterly Kvarner Palace.
What would settle it The Muzej Grada Crikvenice for hotel programmes, posters and season photographs, and the Novi list archive at Rijeka for press notices — a named singer at the Therapia between about 1944 and 1952. This is the one errand on the page that could return a photograph of her working.
Ask where a Crikvenica couple went in 1948 to get out, and this archive answers without being asked. It was not Trieste.
The family already had a bridgehead. Ivan himself had been in Pfullingen — he entered a Reutlingen factory on 21 October 1941, aged sixteen, as an unskilled hand, living at Brunnenstraße 7. His father Anton Rudolf stands on the Pfullingen list of foreigners in 1947 and was certified by that town's mayor in 1950. His brother Zdravko was there and resettled to Australia in 1949. His brother Anton's card is stamped «Emigré Australie le 8.3.49» — and it is a French card, because Reutlingen and Pfullingen sat in the French occupation zone of Germany.
So in 1948 there was a Defranceski household in occupied Württemberg with an exit already working. The brothers went out through it in 1949. Ivan and Hedviga went for it in 1948 and did not.
The machinery they were reaching for was the International Refugee Organization, which screened and resettled Europe's displaced from 1947 — and which was already winding down, closing its books at the end of February 1952. The brothers caught it. A couple arriving a year behind them was walking towards a door that was closing.
And there is a colder irony in the date. Leaving Yugoslavia after 28 June 1948 was harder to justify to a Western screening board than leaving before it. Tito had just broken with Stalin; within a year the West was propping him up. A Yugoslav who fled Moscow's man was a refugee. A Yugoslav who fled the West's new friend was a problem.
Confidence inf — the route is documented for the brothers and the father; that Ivan and Hedviga aimed at the same door is inference, and is labelled as such.
The memoir David's mother spent fifteen years writing supplies the ending this page did not have.
Of David's father, born at Senj in December 1951, she writes that he left Yugoslavia when he was three — «it's only the first three years of his life that he lived under communism». That puts the family's departure at about 1954 or 1955.
So the shape is now whole. They tried in 1948 and failed. The son was born at Senj in 1951. They got out about 1954. Six years between the attempt and the crossing, and the child was born into the gap.
Two more things follow from the same book. Ivan Defranceski kept a Yugoslav passport long afterwards, which is a fact about how the leaving was done. And his parents divorced when he was eighteen — about 1969 — which is why Ivan Defranceski, 1925–1995, is buried on his own coast at Senj while Hedviga died at Johannesburg in 2001. They did not simply drift apart across a sea. They separated, and he went home.
Confidence lore · from Cheryl's memoir, 2005–2020 · Cheryl Lerena →
Hedviga's date of birth is in this project twice, and the two do not agree.
The Crikvenica and Senj pages both give 8 March 1926. The certified extract from the Senj birth register — the one attached to her son's 1951 birth entry and translated for the Supreme Court of South Africa — gives 3 August 1926.
Read them as numbers and the fault is obvious: 8/3/1926 and 3/8/1926. A day and a month have changed places, almost certainly when a European date met an English-speaking clerk or a translator working the other way.
This archive does not know which is right and will not pick the one it likes. It is one line of the Senj birth register for 1926, and it is now an errand.
None of the four claims is discarded and none is promoted. What has changed is that they are written down, dated, attributed and answerable — and that two of them have already forced the archive to look at itself: a man recorded as dying in 1943 who is certified alive in 1950, and a woman with two birthdays that are the same numbers in the wrong order.
That is what oral history is for. It does not settle anything. It tells you where to look, and it tells you what the paper never will — that somebody, at some point, was frightened enough to leave.
Source Told by David Defranceski, 10 September 2026, and recorded the same day. Held against: the certified extract of the Senj birth register 152/1954; the Crikvenica register entries and family file on the Crikvenica house; the Senj and Karlobag material on the Senj line; the Arolsen Archives Pfullingen list and sickness-fund card; and the gravestone at Senj. Historical background: the Cominform expulsion of 28 June 1948, the Treaty of Paris of 10 February 1947, and the International Refugee Organization, 1947–1952.
The Crikvenica house → · The Senj line → · Errands → · Corrections →