“What we're looking at is a picture of me with my two younger sisters. This picture was taken in Italy, in a refugee camp in Trieste, Italy. Yugoslavia was communist at the time. And it was very economically depressed. And my father wanted to seek a better life for his four daughters. So you don't see in the picture is my sister Kathy who actually took that picture. 

“When we were refugees in the camp, they had a Christmas party. They had someone dressed as Santa Claus, and they gave out gifts. And my sister Kathy, who, again, is not pictured in this photo, she received the camera as her gift. She was upset at first, she's like, ‘Oh, everyone else got these wonderful toys, and I got this camera.’ She didn't think it was a real camera. And when she realized it was a real camera, it kind of changed things from a recording our history point of view.

“If you look at that picture, you see hope in our faces, and resiliency, the fact that our parents were able to, with very little education, manage and navigate all these different circumstances. First refugee camp, the second refugee camp, living in Cleveland, finding jobs, finding a community, raising children, in a place where they had hope; they didn't really have hope back in Croatia.

“We have such successful people in our family. So we have cousins who have their own businesses, they're millionaires. They employ so many people. My sisters and I and my brothers were all employed, very successful in what we did, paying taxes, supporting everyone, and now volunteering now that I've retired—giving back to the community. That's what we're about, because that's what my parents were about.”