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assertions of how much she was loved, there is perhaps the small voice of a young girl who never knew her mother, and whose father was indifferent to her. Ljubica Markovic, who is Mira’s half–sister, did live with Moma. A former journalist for the Yugoslav state news agency Tanjug, she is now director of the independent Beta news agency in Belgrade. As a child she idolised her older sister, but as Milosevic rose to power they fell out and have hardly spoken for twenty years. ‘I asked my mother why Mira did not live with us, as well as my father’s other son Ivan. My mother said she had asked, but Mira’s grandparents said they could not give her away, that she has all the love she needs. My mother did not push, she thought she had fulfilled her obligations, but I don’t think it was enough. I would have pressed and taken the child. Mira only stayed with us at holiday time. I think it must have been very painful for her, as a young girl, that you have a family and then it is taken away. There must be a strong motivation in her life of family deprivation and compensation for what she didn’t have.’ 2
    The two sisters first met when Ljubica was six or seven, and Mira was six years older. ‘I well remember the first time I saw her. She came suddenly from nowhere, and we were told “this is your sister”. It was a shock, we were completely unprepared, and I reproached my father because he did not bring her up properly. She should have been living with us, it is normal that children are together. But I accepted her immediately, as I did my brother Ivan. Within a short time Baca, as I called her, became a big sister for me, and I wanted to copy her, the way she dressed and the way she talked, but I was too young.’
    Mira compensated for her absent father by idolising her mother, Vera Miletic. After the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia Miletic had joined the partisans and begun an affair with Momir Markovic. Mira recalled what she knew about her mother: ‘Before the Second World War she was a student at the faculty of philosophy at Belgrade University. Shewas a Communist Party activist, and she became a partisan when the war started. Two years after the war started, she was transferred to the Belgrade party organisation. She was the chief of the Belgrade party organisation. She was one of the organisers of the student demonstrations, of the 14 December 1939 demonstration.’ On 10 July 1942, Miletic gave birth to her and Markovic’s daughter Mirjana. ‘I was born in the woods, which is a partisan expression. I was born where my parents were with the partisans, near the banks of the Morava river.’
    Soon afterwards the party leadership sent Vera Miletic to work underground in Belgrade. At the most crucial time of any child’s emotional development, when physical contact with parents is of prime importance, the baby girl was handed down a chain of partisan bases and safehouses, or sometimes stayed with her maternal grandparents. Mira Markovic’s first and most formative years were spent on the run. ‘During the war I was moved frequently, from one spot to another, from one family to another so as not to get my mother caught. Even as a baby, I had a Gestapo arrest warrant out for me. They thought if they had me, they could somehow find my mother, because she was one of the organisers of the partisan movement in eastern Serbia. So when Gestapo learnt that she was pregnant, that she had a baby and the baby was with the grandparents, they were looking for the baby to try to get at the mother.’
    In Belgrade Vera Miletic’s cover did not last. Mira said: ‘She was arrested. Of course we think that someone betrayed her, because she was found precisely where she was hiding. The Gestapo took her at that exact spot.’
    There is still controversy over the precise circumstances of Vera Miletic’s death. Many believe that she gave away details of the