Featured Kids 2
Sarajevo Diary
Photos & Stories by Children Who Survived the War in Bosnia: 1992-1995
Four Years of War
We welcomed the year of 1992 with great happiness, not knowing all of what would happen to us that year.
Some people were predicting war and were buying supplies, just in case. Most people like me thought of war as a short conflict with a few casualties, lasting one, maybe two months, or in the worst case three months.
However, as the situation developed, that optimism started to slowly vanish. I remember barricades in March, the interruption of classes and the first shots I ever heard in my life from guns, rifles, and machine guns.
School started and lasted until April. The April 6 demonstrations broke out and the shooting began again. Then the first shells landed around my house. Everything quieted down again until May.
On the first or second of May, I don't remember the exact date, my family and I went to visit our good friends. We went to their house in the morning, planning to spend the whole day with them. Around noon, a few explosions could be heard around the city. As time passed the explosions became more frequent. For that reason, we started back toward home. On our way home we did not run into a single person on the street. The city
seemed deserted.
After we got home,, we turned on the television. They were showing the center of the city. We could see the explosions and the direct hits on certain buildings. There was lots of broken glass. After we had been in the house about fifteen minutes, airplanes flew overhead. We rushed to the basement, together with the neighbors. The airplanes did not drop bombs.
On the fifteenth of May there was the worst shelling of my neighborhood of the whole war. Shells were landing around my building and one hit the sixth floor. For the first time I felt indescribable fear. The shelling was so bad that we couldn't get down to the basement because we could be hit by shrapnel bouncing off the entrance wall.
The summer of ninety-two passed with frequent shelling and nonstop shooting. The massacre happened in Vase Miskina Street. That street overflowed with the blood of citizens of Sarajevo.
Toward the end of summer and the beginning of fall, around September, we no longer had electricity, and there were problems with water. The winter was approaching but we had no supply of firewood. We made a stove shaped like a box out of tin. The end of November and the beginning of December I remember from the cold and the shortage of food.
People were cutting the trees everywhere; in the parks, around homes and anyplace where it was possible. I would spend all day outside collecting wood. Evenings were spent in darkness, and there was by then no electricity for several months.
Nineteen ninety-three was the worst year of the war for me. In January we got gas for our apartment and then it wasn't cold there anymore. In March the worst that can happen to a person happened to me. I think I can best say it all by saying that I lost someone in my family. Life continued to go on.
We started summer without water or electricity. We had already adjusted to the shortage of electricity. We had to drag the water from wells that were very far from my home, about three kilometers. We did it with the help of a cart and bicycle. The whole year of nineteen ninety-three passed with constant shelling. At times ten thousand shells were fired on the city in a single day. In that year school started again. Classes were held
in basement rooms and other such places.
Nineteen ninety-four was welcomed in with hopes for a better life. In February of ninety-four the horrible massacre happened at the Markale Market. Around sixty-seven people lost their lives and a huge number of people were wounded. Some became invalids after that.
NATO intervened and from then on and until the end of the year there was much, much less shooting than in the previous three years. During the summer we had electricity and water. In the fall and winter of ninety-four there was less and less electricity until it was completely shut off. Luckily, there was water.
We welcomed in nineteen ninety-five. Toward the end of January the electricity situation improved. There was water and gas with which there had been a lot of problems and misfortunes. That lasted until April when the electricity and gas were turned off again. There was no gas at all and we had electricity every third day. Soon the water disappeared and again we had to drag it from the distant wells.
In May shooting and shelling started again. In August there was another massacre in front of the city market, not far from Markale. A few days later NATO intervened above the attack positions of the Serbs. I could see the airplanes bombing. After that there were no more big conflicts or shootings. Early in the fall the peace talks began in Dayton with good results.
The peace agreement is finally signed in Paris and I hope that it is the end of this war in which hundreds of thousands of people were killed and many objects, cultural monuments and other things were destroyed.
I live with some hope for a better tomorrow. I think and I hope that there will be no more war. I want to live a normal life again like every other person in the world.
Dejan Ljavric
8B
Catholic School Center
I am sitting, squatting near the window and warm stove, looking at my town, lit up by the moonlight. The candle near me is slowly burning down, leaving me in the dark, staring out at the snow flakes that cover the wounds of my Sarajevo.
In my thoughts, I return to the days when we all lived in peace and felt joy with the coming of each new day. We did not even dream of war and the horrors that it brings.
We were growing up playing. We were cheerful about starting school, traveling to the sea, getting new shoes, and we cried about getting our first bad grade.
And then the awful day dawned. The sound of bullets, the explosions of shells, and the wail of sirens filled everything around us. The eyes of my people were filled with fear and worry.
"What happened?" The fear never left for even a moment during these last thirty tragic months.
Shells were launched at the schools, hospitals, nurseries and were taking the lives of innocent adults and children. At the intersections, sniper bullets searched for their victims. No one knew if they would survive the night and be alive on the next day. It was necessary to go out for bread or water and every movement was a game of death.
I shook it off and returned to the present. I felt tears in my eyes and again I ask questions for which no one can give me an answer: "Why? Why are the children's eyes filled with tears every day? Why are my parents so serious and worried? Why are those in the hills shooting at us and at the city that they had lived in? Why?"
Snow is still falling and covering my town in a clean white dress. It will welcome the New Year in that dress. I want the New Year to bring peace and freedom to all of us, and that the ugly things will vanish with the old year.
Dijana Hadzic
In a bitter echo of the night, in the darkness wet by dreams and confusions, trembling, empty from sobbing, I am sitting.
I am swallowing the last bites of the eternity, while somewhere there in the empty darkness, empty form sobbing, the night is shrinking cursedly, night is preparing the attacks on my feelings,
I am hiding behind rosy petals of my illusions, behind mottled nights of existence, I am hiding behind myself, behind life.
I am collecting pieces of the deceptive existence from chips of seductive poisoned arrows. I am finding them and arranging them.
I am emerging from some splendor, from the magnificence of hell, in a search for myself, I am, being captured in a trap for the naive, I am choking in the chasm of my illusions.
I am vanishing and rotting deeper and deeper toward the center of unfeeling, empty nothingness... The waves of the grayness lifeless darkness, is folding wings over me.. I am choking in the nothingness,
fading.. disappearing.
The ocean of empty torrents, fake poisonous passions I am ejecting to the deserted island, of the ocean of death.
Crushed by the hammer of intoxication, I am awakening from the smoldering, drowsy beauty of slow dying ... The thoughts are coming together and connecting ... wounded by the numbing excellence of opium ...
The depth of my life is beautiful, me alone. "And why? What why?" I ask myself still sleepy and drowsy, again I am trying to awaken and sail out of a flood of emotions ...
Why? Why all that? Am I alive, am I existing-!-Like them, like you? Am I a being? Human? What is human? Is he just a thought of pity? Where am I?
I am lost somewhere, do I have a ticket to magnificent warmth and happiness of being?
Am I me or somebody else? Am I just an evaporated phase of nothing? I am nothing ...
Pleasant soothing sun, is going over the tip of my fingers over my body
firmness of stone... sliding over me, smothering me and choking.
I need to relax, so I can be taken by the storm of death ... just to relax and disappear.
But something strange is possessing my body, slowly, it is composing the chips of my conscience and will, it is lifting me somewhere forward, into the reality of life.
Unbelievable power is pouring into every cell of my life like supernatural water from wells of fiction worlds, it is twisting around me, it is joining together the thin threads of my almost snapped, failed existence, it is binding them and piling.
THINKING, I AM STARTING TO THINK ... every part of my body, is resisting, fighting, fighting for the life ... And here is what I want ... I WANT TO LIVE! I HAVE TO! Because I am the drop in the ocean which has the obligation to be salty, wet, to exist ...
I am standing and looking, I see ... the glowing forehead of the sun emerging slowly from unending waves ... somewhere there in the distance ... while still the gray haze dive through the beautiful morning of my beginning.
People in haste slide through streets, they hurry and try to chat with each other. I am still standing and watching ... the happy call of birds draw my attention. OH, ARE YOU SO BEAUTIFUL WORLD? I am returning ... after the shipwreck, I am stranded by the ordinary obligation of living. HERE I AM WORLD!!! I want to merge with united river of ordinary people, who exist through suffering life. Let wind and somberly storms of life whip me. I want to taste the power of existence, the magnificent responsibility of living. I don't want anymore to search hopelessly for myself. Hey, world, offer me the hand of hope!!! I was captured in a trap for naive, in a galosh of unfeeling ...
And now here I am. Lets forget the search for once self! Let's become a human!!! And because all you NAIVE people,
FIGHT
HOPE
AND
HOPE
Mediha Adrovic, K.S.C. Nursing School 10a
What is Peace?My name is Rijad. When the war started I was four years old. I didn't know what war was about, but I was afraid of shells and snipers. We went
down to the basement many times and hid from the shelling. Six shells landed on our root
One night when my mom was on night shift, two 120 mm shells landed on our root I slept, I heard nothing. Smoke came into our house, my grandmother laid on top of me to protect me with her body.
For one whole year I never went out into the street, My saddest day was when my friend Sredo died. He was only five years old. I asked Mom if the Chetniks were people just like us.
In the war I learned my first words. In the war I started school. Five students in my class don't have parents. They all were killed in the war.
When the peace in Dayton was signed, I asked what is peace and what does it look like? I don't remember how it was before the war, but now I would like to be able to go to the zoo, travel, ride in an airplane, go to the sea, I will never be a soldier because I don't want to kill people.
Rijad Softic
7 years-old
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