{"id":745824,"date":"2026-08-22T05:10:11","date_gmt":"2026-08-22T05:10:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/745824\/"},"modified":"2026-08-22T05:10:11","modified_gmt":"2026-08-22T05:10:11","slug":"croatian-refugee-tracks-down-mold-siblings-who-sent-him-a-gift-33-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/745824\/","title":{"rendered":"Croatian refugee tracks down Mold siblings who sent him a gift 33 years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"

A man forced to flee war in Croatia as a child has used social media to find and thank the siblings who sent him a Christmas present from Wales more than 30 years ago.<\/p>\n

Dalibor Sentic was 10 when in the early 1990s his family fled the newly independent country – which had recently become involved in the Balkan wars<\/a> – for Stockholm, Sweden.<\/p>\n

Dalibor had received a gift from two young siblings, eight-year-old Claire and Peter, six, from Mold, Flintshire, and had hoped to track them down but only had limited information on them.<\/p>\n

Decades later, Dalibor, now 44, was able to find the pair to thank them, saying the gesture had “meant a lot” at a time of great difficulty.<\/p>\n

Describing fleeing his homeland as a child, Dalibor said “we had basically nothing”.<\/p>\n

“It was like starting all over again.<\/p>\n

“I was so innocent but remember hearing the bombs,” he said.<\/p>\n

Dalibor said that, despite the conflict surrounding them, his parents made sure he felt “loved and secure”, although he added that moving countries was “tough on a kid”. <\/p>\n

Some months before they fled, Dalibor said his teacher took him into a room full of packages, telling him to choose one to open.<\/p>\n

It contained a picture of Claire and Peter, which he held onto for more than three decades. <\/p>\n

“The older you get the more you understand the meaning behind small gestures… it meant a lot,” he said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A man forced to flee war in Croatia as a child has used social media to find and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":745825,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[96,59,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-745824","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entertainment","tag-entertainment","tag-gb","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745824","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=745824"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/745824\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/745825"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=745824"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=745824"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=745824"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}