Jelena Janković
Jelena Janković was born in 1953 in Vranjak, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. In 1965 her family moved to Vinkovci in Croatia, where Jelena later founded her own family. Her husband was Catholic and his mother refused to accept Jelena because she was of another religion. As a result, in 1972 Jelena converted to Catholicism. Her children were also baptised in a Catholic church. At the beginning of the war in the 1990s she was in Vinkovci, alone with two children, having divorced her husband. Since Vinkovci suffered heavy shelling during the war, she decided to take her children away from the threat of war and she herself had to go to Zagreb for an operation. During the time she was absent, someone else moved into her flat. For a number of years she fought a legal battle in order to get her flat back. During all of that time she was renting a flat in Zagreb, living with her children under harsh economic conditions. She eventually got her flat back and subsequently sold it. After that she bought an apartment in Zagreb in which she still lives today. She has never received compensation for the losses she suffered.