One Day the Soldiers Came (27 page)

Ten years since the siege ended and Jaca began to grow tearful as she told me her story, a story about walking to school.

“I was walking with my friends when a bullet hit the pavement in front of me. I turned to run backwards but a bullet hit there too, so I lay down on the road next to my friend, like we had been taught. My friend, though, had been shot in the head. I saw him bleeding, dead. It was very sad because I had a crush on this boy; he was my best friend. I thought I would have profound thoughts when I was about to die, but all I could think was that it was good this day was my birthday. My parents would save money on engraving the headstone. They would only need to put one date on it and they would save money on throwing a small party for me that night.

“I lay there for hours that day. The sniper would shoot near me sometimes to tell me he was still watching. The UN tank came and escorted me and the other children to safety, and we left my little friend’s body on the street there. Others would come get him to bury him—we could not do it. We were just schoolchildren, you know.”

By the time she finished, she was crying, thinking about her ruined birthday and her lost friend. “Everyone has stories,” she said. “When we hear thunder, everyone in the city ducks for cover. I hid in my bathtub during the celebration for the first day of the Sarajevo film festival one year, before I realized it was only fireworks.”

“There were a lot of terrible times,” said Dada Pappo, a stylish woman in her forties who has worked with La Benevolencija since the war. She sat in her beautiful apartment near the center of town and pointed out to me all the places where bullets and mortars hit. As she spoke, we drank her homemade liquor,
travaritza.
She gestured with elegant fingers that held a powerful Bosnian cigarette. Turkish delight was laid on the table in front of me. “Even in the war, we tried to live well, though this was not always possible,” she said. “A mortar destroyed the apartment above mine. If the neighbors had not been staying with me at the time, they would have been killed.”

She talked with one of her neighbor’s children, who had been a young boy at the time of the war, about how they used to gather together to sing and play the guitar. They laughed as they shared memories of their time under siege.

“You remember the night when they were shelling upstairs we had a fashion show down here?” he asked her. Dada laughed and talked about the outfits they put on and how they strutted and wore crazy hats as if they were on the runway in Milan or Paris, all by the light of flickering candles and the rumble of crashing artillery.

“You know,” said Dada, “it was during the war, those were some of the best times too. We laughed and played music and we all came together. Life was very full in those years, with the good and the bad.”

I sipped her liquor and tried to broach the subject of ethnicity. I was not sure how to ask. She had worked with the Jewish community for years, all through the siege of Sarajevo, risking sniper fire and mortar blasts to cross the river to get to work.

“Are you Jewish?” I blurted, somewhat tactlessly. Her homemade liquor was strong.

“Me?” she smiled. “No. I am not very religious, though I was raised a Muslim.”

Dada, along with a Jewish community member named Giselle, was at the forefront of creating the children’s group.

During the siege, the Jewish Community started a Sunday School for the children of community members to teach them about their religion. They watched videos and heard lectures about Judaism. I imagine, with so many of the community members fleeing the city, the motivation for these lessons was one of preservation. While religious observation was never a high priority for the rather secular Jews of Sarajevo, they feared, perhaps, a loss of the last cultural ties to Judaism in the Balkans. They were cut off from their cemetery in the hills on the front lines. To this day, there are bullet holes in even the oldest of the graves, dating back to when Ladino-speaking Jews arrived in Sarajevo fleeing the Inquisition. Land mines littered the rows between the graves. For years, one could not come up here safely. Cut off from their dead, the Jews used the Sunday School to keep their history and their culture alive as best they could.

Early on, the school began attracting non-Jewish children. Children would come to the program and ask if they could bring their non-Jewish friends. Activities were limited during the war, and this program helped everyone take their minds off
the terrible events around them. The community had clowns perform and threw parties in addition to the religious classes. During the Jewish High Holidays, non-Jewish children from the club were invited to visit temple services. The club members also visited major Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim services. By understanding and experiencing each other’s faith, the hope was that future ethnic conflict could be prevented. The multi-religious program for children continues today.

After the war, with UN troops patrolling the city, the leaders of the Jewish community decided to continue reaching out to the children. Their children’s program, called Club Friends, has met every Sunday since the end of the war. The members come from all ethnicities.

Primarily, the club was a venue in which to address the traumatic experiences that every child had during the war. Every summer, the Jewish community took the club on a trip into the mountains outside the city for a week. Giselle and Dada, along with other leaders of the community, hoped to create a safe space for children in which fun would flourish and the troubles of city life—where poverty and crime are still constant worries—would be left behind. It was a place to find childhood again. To this day, the scars of the war are visible on buildings in Sarajevo—many burnt out shells of structures stand in the city center. On Mount Igman, the community tries to put all that behind them and look to the future.

“At first,” explained one mother, “the children didn’t know how to play. They had not been able to play outside for so long. They were very nervous.” Even now, years later, mementos of the war still interrupt play. The shell casing Christof dropped into my palm spoke of past horrors, horrors no one could fully forget. It was these memories, the memories of a time when everyone was forced to identify with one group or another in
a way they never had before, that the club hoped to erase, but, looking at Christof, I could see much damage had been done. His loathing for our adopted mascot, the mutt we called Prijatelj, was a loathing of ethnicity, his own awareness of himself clashing with the identity imposed on him.

I spent a lot of time over the four days on the mountain with Christof, kicking the ball around or walking without saying much. I tried to reinforce in him a sense of the validity of our dog’s existence, that he was no better or worse than other pure-bred dogs (there were two beloved German Shepherds at the guest house), but had everything to do with how loving and smart a dog he was and how amazingly strong he was because he survived. Christof listened, and at times when he thought no one was watching, would pet the dog, once even bringing him water, but there was no Aha! moment; no great breakthrough in his defensive shell. To the last day on the mountain, he still bullied the mutt, still shouted at him and called him names, his face red with anger that this ugly monster, this mixed breed, should live. Over the course of the next year, I learned, Christof and his little brother stopped coming to the club events on Sundays, and neither returned to Mount Igman the next summer. I like to think my experiment in historically conscious psychosocial animal husbandry had some effect on his thinking, but I doubt it. His anger ran deep, deeper than a dog could cure.

Luckily, his anger was not the norm. Most of the children in the group got along quite well. There were few conflicts among the kids in the club. One boy told one of the American women I was with, a psychologist who had been coming to the group since the war ended, that the kids did not want to “mess things up the way their parents did.” She too tried desperately to show the children the worth of the mixed breed dog. In our minds, he became Bosnia. He was a survivor, beaten, but living still, and
determined. We wanted the children to see that being purebred was not the most important thing, not so important at all. It was all about who you were inside. The dog was an uphill battle, a stretched metaphor perhaps, for which the kids had no time. They had real identity battles to fight and at the moment, real fun to have. No time to play with a big ugly dog they didn’t like, even if that “meant something” to the visiting psychologist types. The business of childhood continued.

The adults worked hard to create a safe space for young people, where the ethnic tensions that surrounded them did not have to exist. The children too were committed to this idea, for the most part. They wanted the past to be the past and did not dwell on it, did not show any eagerness to talk about these issues—it was talking about ethnicity that caused all the problems in their minds to begin with. History was best left below—on Mount Igman at least, soccer or arts and crafts were the more pressing concerns. The dog was not popular, perhaps, because he was a reminder.

I played soccer most days and watched Christof passing the ball eagerly to his Serb, Jewish, Croat, and Muslim teammates without hesitation—well, with a bit of hesitation because he could be a showboat in the game and wanted a bit of the glory for himself. As they all played together on the field strewn with shell casings, I took a short hike to the ruins of Hotel Igman and the abandoned Alpine Slide from the Olympic games, now riddled with bullet holes. In spite of the history right in front of me, the physical evidence that games are no match for destruction, I got the sense that as long as the children kept playing soccer, there was hope.

The children certainly had their resentments and their prejudices and their fears. Their futures were uncertain—when we left the mountain, economic hardship awaited every
one of them. War criminals were still at large. Neither Ratko Mladic—the general responsible for the massacre of nearly 7,000 civilians at Srebrenica—nor Radovan Karadzic—the architect of the campaign of ethnic cleansing—had been apprehended and put on trial. Bosnia was essentially divided into two hostile states—the Muslim-dominated Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srbska.

Though under the banner of one nation, the divisions were still strong, and politicians still tried to fan the flames of nationalism that burned just below the surface. Each of the two states had its own parliament, police force, and school curricula, its own laws and regulations. They even had their own separate armies. The central government had limited responsibilities and limited powers. NATO forces still handled much policing in the country, maintaining an uneasy peace between the two sides.

Provisions in the agreement that ended the war and created the two separate states within Bosnia attempted to set up mechanisms that would protect “human rights.” A Human Rights Commission was established, which could make observations and issue reports, but had no power of enforcement. Refugee returns, arguably one of the most important factors in rebuilding society, depended on the ability of the refugees to trust the institutions of the state in their home area, especially the police force. Muslims who had been expelled were reluctant to return to Serb-controlled areas, and Serbs who had fled were reluctant to return to Muslim-controlled areas. Perhaps most troubling for children was the loss of friends from different ethnic groups who had left their homes and would not return.

The Dayton Accords, which ended the war in December 1995, set up a system that stopped the fighting but left the wounds created by the war largely unaddressed. There was no
ecological
approach to rebuilding the society—no effort made to address the underlying causes of the war, the interconnected effects of the war on a community level, or the circumstances that could lead to another one. Police forces still harbored former military and paramilitary soldiers; schools still taught their own version of history in which the victimized group was always the group writing the curriculum, in which there was always an enemy “other.” The separate media rules and education systems ensured that the propaganda on each side would continue to flow. Refugees did not return, by and large, to unfriendly areas. The ethnic division of the country had been institutionalized.

Another war was not out of the question, but war was not, however, the major concern for the children on Mount Igman, neither memories of the war if they were old enough to remember, nor fears of a new war coming. They had more pressing concerns than politics and warfare.

“There is too much crime in the city,” Elvira said. “There are too many drugs and no jobs. It is very hard in Bosnia, you know?”

Elvira was a high school student, a plucky girl who spoke English well, fretted about boys, and enjoyed looking after the younger kids on the mountain. More than once, I saw her scold Christof for his attitude toward the weaker or littler children. She was a bright, motivated youth, who, under different circumstances, would have found life brimming with opportunities.

“The problem is,” she explained, “there are no jobs. I do not know what I’ll do after school. Even with a university degree, there is no work.” Bosnia has a 40 percent unemployment rate and young people are often anxious to leave. Elvira spoke German and hinted at the possibility she might go there, though Sarajevo was her home and she was not eager to leave it. Her family had stayed through the war, hiding in basements with
their neighbors, dodging sniper fire to get water from the well or firewood to heat their home. Why would she leave now? She was conflicted and hoped the situation would change.

After coming down from the mountain and spending some time in the city, I sat on a rooftop with a group of men in their early twenties. We drank beer and looked at the burnt out towers of the twin skyscrapers, nicknamed Momo and Uzeir. Momo, a Serbian name, and Uzier, a Bosnian name, gave the towers significance before the war. They represented Bosnian unity. Because no one knew which building carried which name, both towers were destroyed in the siege. Now the corpses of the twin buildings stand as far more grim reminder of what brother can do to brother.