We lived under the communist regime in Slovenia, then a part of the Federal Socialist Republic of Yugoslavia. My father was a renowned TV reporter and director who worked for the national TV Slovenia (the only TV station in our country at the time, where the media had been closely monitored and controlled by the government) and he decided to produce a TV series on the history of Slovenians.

For some reason, he felt the need to publicly criticize the communist regime and predict it’s downfall in the last episode. For those who are not familiar with how the communist countries inspired by the Soviets were run, such an act was akin to heroism bordering on insanity. One automatically became an enemy of the state and enemies of the state had to be eliminated. They thus either ran for their life and emigrated or stayed and risked to get killed. The latter was done in several ways.

Among the favourite methods of the regime were “accidents” and “suicides.”

All hell broke loose

My father promptly lost his job and had to open a private video studio where he began to produce ads and promotional films instead of TV documentaries to make a living. Soon after that a white golf (a car of choice for the unmarked police cars at the time) tried to force him off the road and make it look like an accident. My father was a good driver and managed to escape unharmed.

I had no idea that this was even going on. My parents tried to protect my sister and me by leaving us out of this as much as possible and I spent my days in total oblivion. I was 21 and my main concern was how to be as original and unconventional as possible.

My parents gave me my mother’s old car, an orange Citroën Dyane. It was pretty beaten up and rusty, so I had to have it repainted to prevent further decay. This was a perfect opportunity to be unique and stand out from the crowd, for I could pick a custom color for my car.

I opted for an unusual warm yellow tone. I wanted my car to be like a little sun that would bring a smile on the face of everyone who’d seen it. It was not possible to buy a yellow Dyane in Slovenia and I never saw any on the road so I was sure that I was the only one who had it. I loved that.

It turned out, however, that this was not the case and that this curious fact saved my life.

I came home one morning after spending the night in town and found my parents and sister in the kitchen all white in the face and staring at me as if they’d seen a ghost. They looked mortified and I was taken by surprise. “Why are you staring at me like this?” I asked, “What’s going on?”

It turned out that my sister saw a demolished yellow Dyane on her way home. The car looked exactly like mine. It was hit by a police car and the girl who had been driving it died from the injuries.

The latter was not surprising considering that Dyane was one of the least safe cars that were ever made. It was like a cardboard box and the metal was so thin that it would bend if you leaned on the hood. Surviving even a moderate crash was unlikely, to say the least.