Vera Amar

This is my portrait from my second marriage, to Isak Bata Amar. When the war was over, he was the drama secretary at the National Theatre, and I met him when I enrolled in the Drama Studio. After a two-hour conversation, he asked me if I would like to marry him. As soon as I turned 18 I had married a Serb, and I had a son, Slobodan. My marriage to the Serb was unhappy and terrible for me. My husband abused me and he insisted that I was a smelly Jew. My son never met him. 

Isak was from an Orthodox Jewish family and he would not be able to marry me if his parents were still alive because I was a half-Jew, with a Serbian mother and a Jewish father. We married on February 15, 1947. My husband never found anyone from his family. It was a nice life with Isak. My son from my first marriage received the same treatment, if not better, than our other son. My son Slobodan received that name because he waited for freedom and Zoran because he was born at dawn. Isak, like my father, brought tranquility to our house. There was lots of love and understanding.