Bernard Kohn on a business trip

This is a photo of my father, Bernard Kohn, on a boat. This photo was taken during one of his business trips in 1913.

I assume he was travelling to Rijeka, but I don’t know where from. On the photo you can read the name Fiume, which is the Italian name for Rijeka.

I also don’t know who the other people on this photo are, they are probably just travellers; I’m not sure if my father knew them before the trip or not.

In general, my father enjoyed travelling and learning about the world and about other people. He was very curious and wanted to learn.

My father was born in 1887 in Koska, near Nasice. He was a salesman and met my mother in Vinkovci. For a short time, my parents lived in Vienna, Austria, where my brother Aleksandar was born in 1912.

I think they lived in Vienna because of the nature of my father's work. He was a salesman and a manager in a firm that dealt with the production of textiles.

From Vienna they moved to Rijeka, again because of his work, where I was born in 1914, just when World War I started. In the war, my father was an Austro-Hungarian soldier and was imprisoned by the Serbs in Nis in 1915.

In the place where he was captured, there were many typhus patients and my father was also infected with typhus. He died in 1915 in Nis and was buried there. I was only one year old when my father died and I practically never met him.