When Mrs. Manca Yuvan made her first trip to United States in 1912, it was a lot different from the second one she embarked on by sea a few days ago.
Mrs. Yuvan is one of the approximately 700 out of 2,200 who survived the Titanic disaster in April, 1912, which cost the life of her uncle and, had it not been for her girlish sobs, her father's too.
Now the mother of two grown children, Mrs. Yuvan is in Detroit visiting her sister, Mrs. Mary Koshir, a reunion 34 years in the making.
Mrs. Yuvan, a Slovenian, lives in Milje, Slovenia.
Since coming to Detroit, she has had a chance to visit her brother, Frank Karun in Cleveland and to visit the grave of another brother, Urban, in Mt. Olivet Cemetery.
When the Titanic struck the iceberg in the Atlantic, Mrs. Yuvan was not quite 5.
Recalling the disaster and speaking through Mrs. Koshir, who is fluent in Slovenian, Mrs. Yuvan said her parents had come to the U.S., leaving her in Slovenia, then ruled by the Austrians.
But her father returned to their hometown to bring her here.
After chatting with a member of the Titanic crew in Ljubljana, Slovenia's capital, he decided to go back to the U.S. with his brother-in-law John Markun, on that ship.
When the Titanic began sinking, Mrs. Yuvan said, she was taken quickly to a lifeboat and her father and uncle stayed behind.
After drinking a final toast, she said, her father jumped into the icy water. Her uncle stayed on the sinking ship.
"My father swam around for two hours," Mrs. Koshir translated, "and when he reached our lifeboat, he tried to climb aboard. The people hit his knuckles because they thought there was enough aboard, already, but I cried and pleaded with them so much they let him on."
The following year, she related, her father took the family back to Slovenia and in 1914 World War I broke out, preventing the family from returning to the U.S.
Mrs. Koshir came here in 1926 as a young girl.
Their meeting over the Christmas and New Year's holidays was the first they have had in the 34 years since Mrs. Koshir left their hometown.
Wars have come. New rulers, like Tito, have replaced the Austrians and the Karageorgevich monarchs of pre-World War II Yugoslavia and finally the Nazis who annexed Slovenia for a while.
Nevertheless, Milje remains pretty much the same.
One wartime incident stands out in Mrs. Yuvan's memory, however.
She told of the 40 townspeople who were shot as hostages by the Nazis as a reprisal for the shooting of a policeman by three partisans who hid in a field near her house.
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