Vinko Tavcar and his wife, Ana, twice had to leave their small children as they fled the Communists after World War II.
The children stayed with relatives and weren’t reunited with their parents until 1952 at Stapleton Airport, according to a Denver Post story.
Tavcar, a machinist who owned a local machine shop, died on Nov. 13 in a care facility in Lakewood. He was 88.
The Tavcars were married just as Hitler was taking over Europe, said their daughter Nancy Crenshaw of Glenwood Springs.
Vinko Tavcar served in the Croatian military and took leave from military duties to go to a small village where his wife and son Anton were staying.
He took his ill wife on an overnight trip to Zagreb to see a doctor. While they were gone, the train tracks were bombed and they couldn’t get back to the village where their son was staying with a relative.
They had a second child, Renata, but were separated from her when Tavcar was called back to Zagreb.
Learning that his country was going to surrender, he defected, and after some time, he found his wife.
Determined to flee the country, they had to leave the baby girl with a cousin “because they had no food or any way of taking care of her,” said Crenshaw.
“They were running for their lives and hoped their children would survive,” said Tavcar’s daughter Ann Pelner of Lakewood. “They did the best they could with what they knew at the time.”
Eventually, the Tavcars fled to South America and, after a three-year wait for a visa, they traveled to Raton, N.M., close to the Colorado border, where his aunt, Milka Horacek, lived. Tavcar worked as a baker.
The couple moved to Denver in 1951, and he found a job as a machinist.
Horacek was planning to visit Croatia, and Tavcar gave her $1,000 he had borrowed so she could bribe officials to get his children released and pay their way to the U.S.
She was successful and brought the children to Denver in 1952. Renata Tavcar was 8 years old, and Anton Tavcar was 9.
Pelner and Crenshaw were born in the U.S.
Vinko Tavcar was born on Dec. 1, 1921, in Ogulin, Croatia. He married Ana Karlovic in 1942.
He worked in a Denver-area machine shop until he opened Tavcar Tool & Die, which he ran until retiring in the 1980s.
In addition to his wife and daughters in Colorado, Tavcar is survived by his son, Anton (Anthony) Tavcar of Hendersonville, N.C.; his other daughter, Renata Fleenor of Los Angeles; five grandchildren; five great-grandchildren; and his brother, Vilim Tavcar of Zagreb.
Virginia Culver: 303-954-1223 or vculver@denverpost.com
