Svetlana Broz | |
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Pictured in 2012
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Born |
Belgrade, Yugoslavia |
7 July 1955
Svetlana Broz (born 7 July 1955) is a Bosnian author and physician who specializes in cardiology. She is the granddaughter of the Yugoslav leader Josip Broz Tito.
Svetlana Broz was born 7 July 1955 in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia, the youngest child of Žarko Leon Broz (1924–1995),Josip Broz Tito's eldest son, and Dr. Zlata Jelinek-Broz from Tuzla. As a teenager, Broz worked as a free-lance journalist from 1970 to 1975; many of her articles and interviews were published in newspapers and magazines.
She graduated from the Belgrade Medical School in 1980 and has served as a cardiologist at the Military Medical Academy (VMA) from 1981 to 1999, and volunteered her services at the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992. Her new project is about inter-ethnic marriages entered into during the war. At the outbreak of the war in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992 she volunteered to work as a cardiologist in the atrocity zones. Over and over again her patients told her how their survival had been possible only thanks to individuals with the courage to stand up against the ethnic violence perpetrated by members of their own ethnic group, and in January 1993 she began interviewing for the book that describes these human experiences during the Bosnian War. The book was published in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1999 with a title Dobri ljudi u vremenu zla and in 2003 in the United States under the title Good People in an Evil Time.
In 2000, she moved to Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina permanently. The reason for this was, as she stated in a 2005 interview for Bosnian daily newspaper Nezavisne novine: "After the NATO intervention, I moved to Sarajevo. Twenty years ago, Belgrade was a European metropolis, a city that I loved a lot. Unfortunately, in a way that city has lost its soul. Sarajevo, despite going through a four-year-long siege of hell, kept its soul intact. I love Bosnia-Herzegovina, I feel as this is my homeland. Last year I even became a citizen."