No River Too Wide For Two Friends Ex-Refugees Reunited After 37 Years

The river was black and wide and just days earlier, had been frozen.

“Jump,” said Boris Vrbeta.

Zeljko Lisjak hesitated: “Let’s try the water first.”

“If you try it, you’ll never do it,” Vrbeta said. And so they leapt into the waters of the Mura River, two young men from Communist Yugoslavia leaping toward freedom.

The cold hit like a body-long fist. Swimming as a spotlight skimmed the inky surface, they made it to the other side. They still had to cross Austria by train undetected - or risk being returned to Yugoslavia. They still had to cross the roiling Salzach River to safety in West Germany.

After that, they walked all night. At 6 a.m., with no money, no belongings and Lisjak’s shoes full of blood, they turned themselves in to the West German police.

It was March 21, 1959. But it would be decades before the two men could reminisce.

One stayed in Germany. The other went to Cleveland, then California, Alaska and finally Spokane. They reunited for the first time Sunday at the Spokane airport and they have been talking ever since.

“I never dreamed we would meet again,” said Vrbeta, owner of Eat Rite restaurant, 2303 N. Washington.

They had looked for each other for years. An insurance agent living in Frankfurt, Lisjak advertised for Vrbeta’s whereabouts in their native Croatian newspapers, even offering cash rewards. He came to Florida last year and called the FBI for help in Germany, everyone registers with the police. He kept looking.

“I thought I must see my friend one more time,” he said.

Finally, someone who’d seen one of the ads sent him the address of Vrbeta’s brother in California and the reunion was arranged. They almost didn’t recognize each other.

They had been neighbors and drinking buddies in Zagreb when they fled. Vrbeta was a 24-year-old machinist, Lisjak a 19-year-old electrician. All the girls loved Lisjak, but there was little hope for either getting married, much less an apartment. But leaving was a very serious thing. Vrbeta had already served nine months in prison for trying to escape over the mountains.

They told no one of their plan: to flee across the water at the coldest, darkest time.

“It was very, very crazy,” Lisjak said.

Once in West Germany, they were jailed nearly a month for entering the country illegally. They ended up in a refugee camp where Vrbeta found a job as a garbage man. It was in the trash cans at an American military complex that his future was decided.

“There were blocks of cheese and food in their garbage. If they were throwing away food that valuable I thought, this must be a very blessed country. I wanted to go there.”

He applied for and eventually received political asylum, arriving in New York by that December.

Lisjak married a German woman and went into the insurance business near Frankfurt. Both couples had a son and daughter. Both had grandchildren.

But they also changed. In Cleveland, after saving an unsuspecting Serb about to become a target in a Croatian bar, Vrbeta met the Serb’s father: a Seventh Day Adventist. Vrbeta converted, gave up smoking and drinking, and became a vegetarian.

He went to work selling Bibles and children’s Bible stories, moving with his wife, Rahela, to California, Alaska and then Spokane, where they opened their restaurant.

In preparation for the reunion, the Lisjaks, who are Catholic, visited Seventh Day Adventists in Germany to understand what they would encounter in Spokane.

In Vrbeta’s strictly vegetarian restaurant, the meat-eaters were adapting nicely.

“This vegetarian thing is good,” Lisjak said.

“Not forever,” his wife, Christa, said.

They laughed. The two couples thank God for their meeting and will leave this weekend to visit Vrbeta’s brother in California.

They’ve been talking past midnight, slipping between their old language and English, between the past and the present: the ruddy German citizen and the slender American in a Snapple sweat suit.

For them, the Cold War is finally over.

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo