“I learnt of my father’s death on the radio. A friend came over – I was doing my military service in Germany at the time – and said, ‘Alexander, please come, you need to hear some terrible news.’ And that is when I heard a BBC broadcast announcing that Peter II, King of Yugoslavia, had passed away and that ‘they waited for three days to inform the general public in order to be able to first inform the King’s family.’ And I, his only son, heard it on the radio. I immediately got in touch with my mother, Queen Alexandra, and my paternal uncle, Prince Tomislav, who also didn’t know anything. Soon after, my uncle received the news of his brother’s death from Yugoslavia too, which was highly unusual, bearing in mind the then dictatorship in our country. But it wasn’t surprising that the Yugoslavian Intelligence Services had learnt of it much before the family, given all the games they attempted to play and did play with us,” Crown Prince Alexander Karađorđević says in his interview with Kurir, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of the birth of the last Yugoslavian king, Peter II.
When did you last see your father?
“It was sad – in May 1970, at a hospital in Los Angeles, where I came together with my uncle Tomislav to visit my father. Sadly, he was already in a coma, and the doctors prepared me for the worst-case scenario. That’s why I went to London, where I met with my godmother, the late Queen Elizabeth II. I asked for her permission, when the time came, to bury my father next to Queen Maria, at the Royal Cemetery close to Windsor. She said yes without a moment’s hesitation, but she also said to me, ‘I am not sure it will be easy for you.’ Unfortunately, Her Majesty was right.”
What about your last conversation with your father?
“During one of the last times that I saw him, he was already feeling unwell. He told me again then, ‘Even if I am dead, bring me back to our Serbia.’ At least I managed to fulfil his request ten years ago.”
He passed away on 3 November 1970, and you were not at the funeral. Do you have any regrets?
“My mother and myself, as well as my uncle and aunt – in a word, the whole family – were very sorry not to be able to attend the funeral. But it was very important to us that no one uses the tragic death of my father as an excuse for new divisions, attacks, and problems for our people and church. This is why we had made that difficult decision.”
‘HE DID NOT LEAVE ME MUCH. AND I AM NOT ANGRY. THE GOLD BAR STORIES ARE RIDICULOUS’
He left only 5,000 US dollars to you in his will. Were you upset?
“It would be inappropriate to talk about the exact amount (I never did before, and I hold on to my principles), but the truth is that it really wasn’t much. And no, I wasn’t angry. I knew that he didn’t have many possessions to his name, except for those confiscated in Yugoslavia (and they still are). He left me much more in terms of what and who I am today – my father’s son, with all the duties that a Karađorđević has. And he also left me the guidelines regarding how to fulfil those duties to our people and country. But, speaking of material values, doesn’t it make you wonder whether this calls into question the fairy tale that was made up and publicized in relation to my father – that ‘gold bars were falling out of his pockets as he was leaving Yugoslavia’, that he ‘took millions of tonnes of gold in sacks out of the country, carrying all of that by himself.’ (This sounds more like he was wearing Clark Kent’s mask, because only Superman could have carried such weight.). He was accused of taking more gold than Yugoslavia had ever produced and that he ‘lived comfortably off using the money he had stolen from the people…’ When you see how little of material value was left after his death, what modest lives my parents lived, when you see that he didn’t change suits like handkerchiefs, doesn’t then this story, deliberately publicized by the Communist services, ring hollow and, quite frankly, ridiculous. To those who want to think with their own heads and not believe every piece of fabrication, it is patently obvious what the truth is.”
Do you mean the schismatics?
“My father was surrounded by schismatics in the US, while my uncle Tomislav and myself were very firm and resolute in our attitude that there was only one Holy Mother Church and its patriarch in Belgrade. Since we saw that due to a very hostile attitude of the schismatics in the US, it was going to impossible to transfer my father’s body to the United Kingdom, we said yes to the funeral in Libertyville. However, we wanted the funeral to be arranged such that Bishop Firmilijan Ocokoljić, as a representative of the Mother Church, would hold the memorial service. As it is the duty of the Crown to unite, it was our wish to unite the people around the bier of my father. Sadly, that was impossible too. There was even mention of a ban, so we gave up because we didn’t want to allow an incident to occur. My father had had a very difficult life, and he didn’t deserve for his funeral to be a place of improper behaviour and tensions. Sometimes, in order to pay our respects to our loved ones, we must make difficult decisions.”
Mitzi Lowe, a close friend of the King who subsequently married your uncle Andrej, was an important factor in the Karađorđević family and in your relationship with your father. Have you met with her?
“Yes, I have met with Milica Anđelković, aka Mitzi Lowe, on multiple occasions, and I must say that she was always very polite during these encounters. She was quite an interesting character, and an unusual and specific sort of person. You put it well – she was certainly a factor that affected our family. There were so many factors that were aimed at impacting, and ultimately did impact, our family, so it wasn’t always easy to distinguish the hand of fate from the hand of the Yugoslavian Intelligence Services.”
A serious objection raised against King Peter II was his marriage at an inopportune time – in the middle of the war and in exile. Did it have to happen that way?
“We cannot choose when true love happens to us… It’s true that the government in London didn’t agree to my parents getting married in the most difficult of times, but a watershed moment for my father to fulfil his wish to get married came with the letter from General Dragoljub Mihailović, who he respected and held in high esteem. The general wrote to him that the people of Yugoslavia supported the marriage, that he had asked his commanders from all parts of the country, as well as the people and the clergy… and that all of them supported the King’s marriage. He also wrote about a charter that the Yugoslavian Army in the homeland would draw up, to be delivered to the King and Queen when they came to the liberated country.”
What was the key wrong stateman’s move on the part of King Peter II?
“It wouldn’t be fair to discuss wrong moves given that it’s very questionable to what extent these moves were really made of my father’s own accord or were actually forced and imposed on him. He didn’t want to go into exile, but the Government and Queen Maria insisted he leave the country. From an objective standpoint, for him this was the only solution, bearing in mind the circumstances. The key wrong statesman’s move would have been staying in Yugoslavia. Who knows how many more divisions Hitler would have sent to capture or kill him, and how many more people would have died.”
‘HE TOOK ME TO MUSEUMS, GALLERIES, EXHIBITIONS...’
What are your first memories of your father?
“He was a very good father, caring and gentle, which was quite unusual for people in those times, who believed more in the principle of ‘tough love’, i.e. a strict upbringing. He liked cars (he got that from his mother) and would bring me toy cars as gifts, which I liked very much. He took me everywhere – museums, galleries, exhibitions… When I was eight, the two of us went to see an exhibition about space research in London and dressed up like astronauts… Nice memories.”
But you were always in boarding schools, and not with your father or mother.
“Both him and my mother believed in the value of good education and did their best to provide it for me. I was in boarding schools, and he was always surrounded by our diaspora, who saw him as a figure around whom they rallied. He worked hard to unite and gather them together, so we were unable to spend as much time together as we wished. We tried to make up for that whenever it was possible.”
Your relationship with your father in one word?
“I cannot do one, I have to use two – love and respect.”
He had absolutely no say when it came to the fate of Yugoslavia, before the 27 March coup or later, correct?
“The will of the great powers governed my father’s wheel of fortune, but also that of our country. At the time when Peter II went on an official state visit to the US in 1942 and did all he could to motivate the Americans to support the war efforts of the Yugoslavian Army in the homeland, communists had already infiltrated the British Special Operations Executive (SOE) in Cairo, and they started to spread lies and propaganda. He wanted to fly to Yugoslavia by airplane, parachute in, and join his troops, but Churchill arrested the officers who had been helping him organize and do it. He resolutely refused to support Broz and the Yugoslavian Partisans, but was blackmailed by claims that the Red Army would enter Yugoslavia, physically eliminate General Mihailović, and wipe out his troops… Put yourself in his shoes and ask yourself, objectively, if your moves would have been different and whether it would have been easy to make them.”
‘THE TRUTH CAN NO LONGER BE SUPPRESSED’
King Peter II in the Serbs’ eyes 100 years after his birth – are you satisfied?
“I am happy to see that the situation today is much better than 20 or 30 years ago. The Communist dictatorship wanted to relegate my father to oblivion and create a fake image of him. But the truth kept smouldering, like embers under ashes, and it needed to be fanned a bit to glow again. The truth is out in the open, we have freed it, and now no one and nothing can suppress it again.”
Do you think that, as a ruler, King Peter stood no chance of faring any better, just like our country itself?
“Unfortunately, I do. The Tehran Conference, the meeting of the Big Three in Yalta, the communists in the SOE, the interest spheres that divided Europe in half between the USSR on the one hand, and the United Kingdom and the US on the other, are the factors that shaped the fate of our country and my father. Not even far more experienced rulers wouldn’t have been able to and couldn’t act differently than him under such circumstances.”
Kurir.rs/Jelena S. Spasić
NE PROPUSTITE
Bonus video:
