Melton Fox
Dancing Queen
Just been emailed this, it's a good read. It's an article from a Serbian newspaper:
Deep inside a mountain cave, in the dense forests of rural Yugoslavia, the small boy who would one day become the owner of Leicester City Football Club lay in his mother's arms, her cupped hand pressed firmly over his loose lips.
It was 1942, and three-and-a-half-year-old Milan Mandaric - an excitable, boisterous, typically rumbustious toddler - was blissfully unaware of the imminent danger.
Milan, his mother Milica and baby sister Smiljana were hiding from Hitler's invading troops in the rocky outcrops of what is now Croatia.
The Nazis - in alliance with the Hungarians, Italians and the Bulgarians - invaded Yugoslavia in April, 1941 The country was regarded by Hitler as an important geographical buffer to protect his armies from the advancing Soviet Union.
After heavy Luftwaffe bombing of Belgrade, the Yugoslavs surrendered on April 18 and the German troops began their march south across this beautiful corner of the Balkans.
Dusan Mandaric, Milan's father, was a shop/factory owner in their home village of Vrebac. He was captured by the Nazis and sent to a concentration camp in Austria.
For the Mandaric family and countless others from the small towns of the former Yugoslavia, the choice was simple - you left your homes and ran to the hills or you were confronted by the invading Nazis, captured and possibly killed.
Fleeing from Hitler is Milan's earliest memory. "I remember leaving all my toys, everything we owned and the house we called home - and hiding in the hills. I knew it was dangerous, but it seemed like one great big adventure." At night, the hideaways would sit in virtual silence, as below them they could see their homes being ransacked and the troops advancing. The next day, they found a new hideout.
Silence, unfortunately, was something that young Milan found hard to achieve and virtually impossible to sustain.
"If he doesn't stop that noise," one of the older men told his mother, "he'll have to go." What he meant was never clarified. Milan is still not sure. It's a story his mother would regale the family with many times after the war. The inference, she said, was obvious: if Milan didn't pipe down, they'd have to kill him to preserve the hideout and the lives of the group.
"You do anything to him," warned his mother, "you have to go through me first." She gathered her son in her arms and placed a hand over his mouth. She had to do this every time the troops came near.
This is how they would sit, night after night, as they ran from the Nazis for long years.
"It was a struggle," says Milan. "There was little food and a lot of disease. If people became sick, they died. My mother would tell me how dangerous it was, but at the time I thought it was all a game." Milan Mandaric was born in the town of Vrebac on September 5, 1938. His father ran a mechanical repair shop which had been passed down to him by his own father. At the end of the war, Dusan was liberated from the concentration camp and the family were re-united in Vrebac.
It was home and yet it was nothing like home. Everything they had known had changed.
A year later, Dusan divorced Milan's mother, dividing the family. Mother and daughter stayed in Vrebac, while Milan and his father moved to the bigger city of Novi Sad.
"I was eight," says Milan. "I remember sitting on the train, not really sure of what was happening. Then I saw the trees going past my window. I thought the trees were moving, but I was leaving, to a new city and new home with just my father. And that's when it sunk in." Novi Sad (which means "new planting" in Serbo-Croat) sits on the banks of the Danube. The second biggest city in Serbia, it is known, because of its culture, as the Serbian Athens.
It was a handsome backdrop to a lonely and largely unhappy childhood. "My father worked long hours so he could look after me and make a go of things there," says Milan. "I hardly saw him. I spent a lot of time on the street." He didn't see his mother for two years. "I had to say to my father: 'Look, I need to see my mother. This is not right'." He developed an intense loyalty to her which he still carries today. "I was a young boy," he says, "so I missed her terribly.
"I look back now and I know that those things shaped me. I have been married for 40 years. I have two daughters. We have had ups and downs, but my wife and I, we stayed together. I know what it is like for children when their parents divorce.
"I don't blame my father - he was a great man and he did what he thought was right at the time - but it was a difficult situation." Young Mandaric started to get into trouble at school. He concentrated more on football than his studies. He was, he admits, "no angel".
He took solace in sport, kicking a ball around the streets at night, waiting for his father to come home from the factory.
"He was unhappy about me playing football," he says. "Boys playing football had a reputation. They were not good at school." Dusan, who died in 1984, wanted his son to learn about engineering and carry on the family business.
Milan, at first, wasn't interested. "I just wanted to play football and go to the cinema," he says. "I would clean the factory every Saturday morning so my father would give me money to go to the cinema.
"He would walk along the factory, looking for dust. If it wasn't clean enough, he would say 'No cinema for you today, Milan'.
"He was worried about my love of football. He would sit me down and say: 'You need to learn something. You can't play football all the time. I want you to take over my business'.' So Milan knuckled down. He left college, with qualifications in mechanical engineering, and went to work at his father's factory, which was now producing components for cars and kitchen appliances and exporting them all over Europe.
He enrolled at night class and took more engineering qualifications. He was working hard - but, still, his heart wasn't in it. "I wasn't interested in engineering," he says, "but I knew I was a good leader. When we played football, I was always the first on the pitch. I wanted to be the captain; picking the players, sorting out the tactics.
"This is what my childhood gave me: a sense of determination. It gave me staying power. I always felt as though I had something to prove all the time." By the late 1950s, Dusan Mandaric's business - now run by his son - was the biggest business in communist Yugoslavia.
At the age of 27, Milan was regarded as the shrewdest businessman in Yugoslavia.
That began to attract the attention of Tito, the country's powerful communist leader.
Northcliffe Newspapers
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