The Conversation

Archbishop Stepinac, welcome.

Is that how you prefer to be addressed?

It's just Archbishop.

Aloysius.

That's much better.

Josip.

Aloysius.

We finally meet.

Please have a seat.

How rude of me?

This is comrade Vladimir Bakaric,

the President of our Executive Council of Croatia.

I've been traveling all across this great land of ours,

as we've liberate it.

How great to be on her.

You smoke?

No.

- Catholics are allowed to smoke, yes?

Yes.

Oh, that's right.

It's Muslim who can't.

- They're not allowed to drink alcohol either.

- They don't know what they're missing, do they?

You drink?

No? - On occasion,

- A son of a winemaker surely has a glass of wine

now and then.

Tell me during mass,

do you really take a sip of wine

or is it just water to fool the masses?

It is real wine.

He won, the bastard.

I was certain that you'd be one to stick with water.

And what did he win?

Another week among the living.

And a bottle of whiskey given to me by the Yugs.

You see no one believed in us.

And now that we've prevailed in the war,

the west and the east just adore us.

So we have vodka from Moscow, whiskey from America,

cigars from Cuba, chocolates for Belgium.

Please have as many as you like, I won't tell.

Thank you, but no.

A man of principal.

Did the church teach you discipline

or was it being a soldier?

Life did.

Aloysius, you can relax.

Only the worst things they say about me are true.

I wanted to meet you in person.

I'm glad you came.

It's always better to discuss important matters

face-to-face don't you think?

Yes.

- So my suggestion is that the two of us talk first

one-on-one and then my colleagues can join us, everyone.

Please have a seat.

I like to hear information firsthand.

That's the kind of person I am.

Everybody talks, and the truth is filtered.

Eye to eye, we can wash away any doubts

we may have about one another.

Can't I offer you anything?

Now that we're alone, can I tempt you with a whiskey?

- Thank you for your tempting offer.

But the answer is still no.

How about a snack?

We have a wonderful kitchen,

the best chef in town at our disposal.

He can make us whatever we want.

Thank you.

Another no.

Very well, I hope that's the last no

that you gave me tonight.

And that depends.

On?

What it is you're offering.

- Believe it or not, I wanted to be a waiter

when I was a boy.

Life show me become a locksmith.

Ordinary people work very hard to get by.

- Then decadence comes easy and now that you have it,

as you say, at your disposal?

- We can't pretend not to enjoy the good side of life

when it's offered, can we?

- And what is good to you may not be to me

or to someone else.

- And you Aloysius, you're lying to yourself.

There's not a working man out there

who refuse what I've just offered you.

- A man can easily be tented, if his belief is weak.

- That's the one thing they said about you.

Stepinac is many things,

the courage of his convictions is unshaken.

I wanted to serve you.

Tito waiting on the Archbishop,

imagine when people would say.

- That there is hope even for those who may seem hopeless.

- Yes, that may very well be the case.

- God never turns his back on us.

Even when we turn our back on him.

Where do you think God goes

when war rages and innocent lives are lost?

Is that a time when God goes on vacation.

- To love it, to hate those are the options.

God grants us those options, and we choose is up to us.

So war is a choice.

Sometimes it's unavoidable.

People easily swayed.

They shouldn't be, but the temptation to have

more of everything prevailed and we lose ourselves.

Swayed.

The church is fairly successful in swaying the masses.

Where do you think politics got their ideas

from people in your line of work?

- What I do is a calling not work.

I'd still call it work.

And I'd still subscribed to the idea

that God must be on vacation,

allowing man to become more of what he is, a rat

with a boundless desire to horde and destroy.

Does smoke bother you.

No, it doesn't.

- I can't go very long without cigarettes and a drink.

It's a weakness, I know a bad one.

They taught me how to roll them in Russia,

every single cigarette I smoke, I roll them myself.

If I ever stopped smoking,

I'd miss rolling these things more than smoking them.

Do you have a weakness?

- I'm sure you know that better than me.

A life of abstinence.

That's a breeding ground for any number of weaknesses.

We do have to give up our most basic needs in the Partisans.

Four years of hunger, thirst, exhaustion,

tramping through the forest, the plains,

sleeping just a few hours if any days on end.

It got so cold that I closed my eyes, think this is it,

I never see the light of day again.

But I endured.

That's why nowadays I can perhaps forgive myself

my weaknesses, because I think I earned them.

There's a beauty in enduring, don't you think.

- There's beauty in the survival.

- Yeah, but it seems to me that to endure

has become synonymous with people born in this region.

Something to be proud of.

- You too are recruit like myself.

But I don't let it define me.

Besides we creating a new Yugoslavia

one that'll be more just a place

where we can forget petty differences,

where together we can work for the common goal,

equality of opportunity for all.

Yugoslavia failed.

- Failed because it was ruled by a monarchy.

- It failed because the differences prevailed,

you want to replace one decadence with a new one.

What comrade Stalin is doing,

what I'm doing is revolutionary.

It's a new world, a rebirth.

- If you had to put a dog, a rabbit, a donkey

and a snake into a cage,

could you imagine they could co-exist

without someone getting bitten?

That depends.

On what?

- On how deadly the snake's venom is.

That's not what I asked.

I understood you very well.

Yes, there is a risk of failure, but we must try it.

- Try, yes, but we must learn from our mistakes.

Certainly.

Why don't you go first, Aloysius.

- The wish of Christ to have their land

came at a high expense.

Very highest, I'd say.

There isn't a tree wide enough in the forest

to hide you from your sins.

And doesn't the Bible say we must pay for our sins.

- This war was just one of many calvaries

in the thousand year history of the creation of people,

we will pay for our sins.

We will repent.

The rest is up to God.

One night, not too long ago

when my battalion hit inside of Bosnian cave,

an elite unit of German parachuters surrounded us.

They had us.

I may seem Godless to you,

but that night something not of this earth saved me.

- Yet you refuse to give God credit.

God or fate.

- Maybe God and faith make fate easily acceptable.

- And maybe it was just chance, destiny.

You and I could have been very different.

It well very well may be.

- You were trusted to getting married than I was.

I find that hard to believe.

Marija Horovat.