Andrej Bajuk - Life in Exile

Life in Exile

Bajuk was born in a Slovene intellectual family in Nazi-occupied Ljubljana. His father Bozidar Bajuk was a classical philologist, and his grandfather Marko Bajuk was the principal of the Bežigrad Grammar School, one of the most prestigious secondary schools in Ljubljana. The Bajuks were acquainted with the famous poet Edvard Kocbek who lived in the same building.

The family left Slovenia in early May 1945, when the Communists took power in Yugoslavia. They spent nearly three years in refugee camps in Lower and Upper Austria before leaving to Argentina with the help of the Slovene refugee relief network set by Ivan Ahčin and Miha Krek. They settled in Mendoza, where Bajuk grew up, studied and started a family.

He received his first degree in economics at Universidad Nacional de Cuyo. He received his first Master's degree in a two-year international study program organised by the University of Chicago, receiving the second jointly with his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. He returned to Mendoza, where he taught as a professor at the university. After the military coup in 1976 he was fired and soon left for Washington, D.C., working for the World Bank for a year. He then switched to the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB), where he stayed for a number of years. He held a range of positions at the IDB, from economist in charge of analysing social projects to adviser to the executive vice-president. For his last six years in Washington he was in charge of the office of the Presidency of the bank and a member of the board of executive directors of the bank. From September 1994 he was IDB representative for Europe in Paris.