YUGOSLAVIA: Frying Pan to Fire

Last October, after three years of yearning and scheming, Pilot Ivan Kavic of the Yugoslav airlines loaded his wife and young son aboard his plane. Determined to make a new life in the free air of Switzerland, he forced his copilot at pistol point to fly to Zurich (TiME, Oct. 29). Tito’s Communist government demanded Kavic’s extradition; the Swiss would not yield him up. Free to do as he liked, Kavic tried for a job as a pilot on several European airlines. He was turned down. He asked for a copilot’s berth. No luck. After trying unsuccessfully to land even a mechanic’s job, Kavic finally settled down as a car washer in a Zurich garage.

This was not the way pretty, young Mrs. Kavic had thought of freedom. In the single furnished room where she tried to make do on her husband’s meager pay, family spats became more & more frequent. “We had it better back home in Yugoslavia,” Mrs. Kavic complained to the neighbors. If the neighbors were not entirely convinced, Mrs. Kavic was. Last fortnight she bade her husband goodbye, took her son, boarded a plane and flew back to Belgrade.

Last week, abandoned and disillusioned, Ivan Kavic took another plane and flew off—to Communist Czechoslovakia. “I never regarded my stay in Switzerland as definitive,” said the refugee from Tito’s frying pan as he left for Stalin’s fire. “I only left Yugoslavia because it was too fascist.”