The War of Present

I was 4 years old when the war started. Together with my parents, I was unaware of the situation around us. I had a happy childhood before that, born and raised in the old part of Sarajevo – Bistrik, where I had learned to walk, run, laugh, talk and sing, where I have participated in toddlers’ recitals and plays in a kindergarten. Three months before the war started, we had moved to a new urban neighborhood – Otes. Buildings were brand new and colorful, with a beautiful hill of just a perfect slope for children’s winter joys. However, those joys did not last long. Spring did not come as a sunny season with green grass and beautiful flowers, but rather with rifles and danger all around. Our neighbors were leaving the buildings and departing to Serbia and Croatia, and we did not understand why and what is happening. We did not have an alternative homeland to go to. We were born and raised in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the only country to call a homeland.

Soon after their departure, we were forced to leave our apartment with no luggage nor suitcases to bring our memories, photographs, or toys. It was not a dislodgment people do in countries with no war whatsoever, it was not a migration for the better financial opportunity; it was fight for our own lives!

I don’t remember my birthday, 25th March in 1992, I don’t remember were we running before or after that, but I do remember my mom dressed me with as many clothes as she could have put on me, because that was the only luggage we could afford – our bodies.

The starry night was quite different from the one in good night song for kids. It was starry like in that Chernobyl show on HBO – full of grenades, bullets, fire! We were running through the fields, hiding in abandoned houses, praying to survive the next minute, hour, and day.  

The next four years were the saddest stories I could have imagined to read and live through. The Little Match Girl had a completely new dimension of meaning. I was that girl who was trying to find little thin branches together with my mom, in the coldest winter days in a park that was gone… People cut the trees to use it as heating fuel, and we did not have any knife or saw to get some for ourselves. Therefore, we waited for people to get their wood and leave, and only then we would come and pick some branches that nobody wanted, just to try to lit a fire and make cold nights less cold and scary.

In those four years, I have seen and experienced the horror that nobody can portrait for you. I have lost my dear friend in front of me when a grenade fell in the park where we played. I was lucky enough to survive. She didn’t.

I had numerous panic attacks where good people took me to the basement and tried their best to comfort me. They even gave me a sugar cube to try to bring me back to life. And that is enormous. Why? Because sugar cubes were like diamonds. Extremely rare and expensive.

In order to escape those horrors, I started writing poetry when I was 5 years old. I have written my first poems about the seaside and sunsets, swimming and playing in the sand. It was my new reality in order to survive the physical and mental torture in the occupied city of Sarajevo.

You know what? I still write. Every day. And I am 34 years old. I still write. I still see and hear the horror. In this peace 30 years later that had never come to the reality of peace.

I thought it was I being cautious, it was the inner child with traumas, but no. This is the reality that I am afraid of. I am afraid for all those good people in Bosnia and Herzegovina in a real danger of being slaughtered once again. Once again, in front of the International Community. In front of Europe declaring peace and colife.

I cannot take grenade nor rifle and become the aggressor who took my childhood, who took my friends and family from me, who took away the opportunity to become all that I was supposed to be in a normal, ordered society.

All I can do is speak. Therefore, I speak about the horrors that happened 30 years ago, and I speak and scream for the past to stay past and not to become our future where children of the children of the war would have to relive the history of terror, occupation, and genocide.