The war through their words and eyes

I must have been 14 or 15 years old when I was in a car with my mother and Inge Deutschkron. It was a beautiful afternoon in Berlin, some time in late spring. Inge Deutschkron had just been visiting my class during a history lesson for an hour or so. My mother, who had helped organize Mrs. Deutschkron's visit to my school, had offered to drive her home afterwards, somewhere to the Western part of the city. I remember how during the entire ride I felt so privileged. Not only had I curiously followed Mrs. Deutschkron's narrative in front of my class earlier, when she told us of her hiding as a young Jewish girl in Berlin during the German Nazi regime, which made her escape the Holocaust. In addition to that I was able to follow her discussion with my mother, be included in it and ask further questions, all of which Mrs. Deutschkron answered generously in her typically vivid, intriguing way. I remember how back then I had wished that that ride would never end. Seated in the second row of the car, I was hanging to Mrs. Deutschkron's lips and felt so great for having a mom, who assisted my education and learning so actively.

With the entirely same curiosity, I devoured Anne Frank's diary and listened to the stories of my grandparents and other WW2 witnesses of how they experienced the Second World War being the innocent kids they were. Just last summer in SF, for a few times I visited a charming old Jewish lady who escaped Berlin in the 1930s.

While exploring the past of WW2 through somebody's eyes, I usually feel a strong personal link to such accounts. I guess these stories are so intriguing to me, because the victims had been about my age when they experienced the cruelty and hardship imposed upon them by German Nazi terror. I know that through someone's eyes I further my understanding of my country's dark history in a much more human and emotional way, an approach to the past that no history book could provide.

With a similar motivation - to learn about the recent wars in the Balkans - I embarked on an international seminar on challenges of a post-conflict society to Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH) three weeks ago. The study trip was organized by Humanity in Action (HiA). On Tuesday, day 2 of the program, our seminar group watched Savršeni krug (The Perfect Circle), a film directed by Ademir Kenović. 'The Perfect Circle' narrates the day-to-day life in Sarajevo during the Bosnian war. During this war, for almost four years from 1992 to 1996, forces of the Republika Srpska and the Yugoslav People’s Army besieged the capital of BiH. The armed forces stationed in the surrounding hills of the city and shot everything that moved in the streets below, causing many casualties.

Walking Sarajevo today, the traces of aggression are still countless, even 15 years past. Many facades have been fixed, but Sarajevo Roses - concrete scars - still blossom everywhere eternally. Locals point to the main boulevard in Sarajevo as 'Sniper Alley'. Monuments give memorial to the past crimes.

At the Sarajevo Children Memorial. The columns you can see in the picture carry the names of 521 children killed during the siege. 

'The Perfect Circle' movie tells the story of two young brothers, the older of the two a deaf-mute, and a poet in Sarajevo during the war. The fates of these three individuals get connected because of the siege. After their village has been attacked and the inhabitants killed, the two young boys have come to the capital in search of an aunt - their only relative in the country still alive. Arriving in the city, they encounter the Bosnian poet whose wife and daughter have just fled. Brought together, the three of them face the daily challenges and dangers of besieged Sarajevo: the continuous hunt for food and water, exposure to cold and dampness during harsh winter, managing a life without electricity, regularly hiding in basements and bomb shelters, in ceaseless search of relatives and friends, running the gauntlet between shells and snipers during daytime, crouching behind barricades made of burnt cars and trams, stumbling across the dead and injured in the streets, and facing fear and terror in darkness and at night because they are trapped in a city that is almost perfectly surrounded by merciless aggressors. 

Watching that movie was not easy. It moved me to see people in permanent need for something - be it warmth, love, shelter, food or water. They were not responsible for the state they were in. How should I remain unaffected by watching fellow human beings face danger or deal with their fears on a daily basis? Especially the innocence of the children - how they are desperately trapped in such hostile environment - touched my heart. And as our knowledge of history suggests, the film did not provide for a happy ending. 

So, I was sitting there, in the middle of Sarajevo, watching a movie about the life in this very town some 15 years earlier. After the film, we seminar participants - students from Poland, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Spain, the US, Germany and Bosnia-Herzegovina - were invited to share our impressions of what we had just seen. There was silence at first. Then, some questions were raised from the non-Bosnian students and some clarifications followed. Suddenly, one of the Bosnian students spoke: "I was here in town the entire war. I was 3 to 4 years old when the war started and I can assure you this movie is very realistic in the way it portrays life during the siege". At that moment my heart sank. And I could tell so it did for many of my fellows. One by one, the Bosnian students started talking about their experience during the war. Either because they had witnessed it themselves or from what they had heard. Each one of them explained to us why this movie touched them so personally and what feelings it stirred in them. 

All the time, the non-Bosnian fellows kept silent. A young Bosnian man asked us to share our impressions and thoughts, but still none of us raised their voice. I, for my part, felt that I had nothing to say. I had grown speechless. I did not dare to ask further questions or to request more detail to individual stories. I could sense how much my Bosnian fellows were affected and I felt connected to them in an ineffable way - so much that I felt ashamed. They were my age, often even younger, and silently I was comparing my life to theirs. While I had been safely living and growing up in Berlin --  alive, happily, taken care of -- they had been exposed to incredible, for me unimaginable dangers -- here, in Europe, a few flying hours away from my home and peaceful heaven. It had taken me 15 years to come and learn at length about the history of their country - in peaceful times and being totally provided for - and to listen to the personal stories that were unreturnably theirs. My hitherto ignorance was weighing heavily on my shoulders. My friends had been deprived of their childhood and my childhood is now long past to share some of it with them.

Throughout the discussion various images of the movie kept popping up in front of my inner eye and my throat tightened. The movie had made the experience of the siege so palpable and, yet, I knew that no movie could ever grasp the fear and helplessness one feels in cold, bloody, merciless war - war that lasts longer than 90 minutes or two hours and has no button to be switched off or that can simply be abandoned if desired. Seated in a circle with the Bosnian fellows I was scared to hurt by asking these young people to retell their experience. Even though I am very curious to know what the War in Bosnia was like to the people who lived here - what they knew at the time, how their parents coped, how they managed to go on, how they survived... still at that moment I wished memory could just be eradicated from peoples' minds and hearts, such that the suffering could finally come to an end. My fear was that by voicing my questions I would not allow them to find the solace they deserve, to forget and to move forward, and hence to enjoy the peacefulness and liberation I have been blessed with all along. 

Eventually, an HiA director closed our discussion. With his words he expressed what we all felt: us non-Bosnian students were very privileged to be present to such personal accounts of experience and we are grateful to our Bosnian friends for sharing their stories with us. We retreated to our rooms with a heavy heart.

Being in Bosnia it became so apparent to me how the war has not only left the obvious scars on concrete and facades, but how most important of all we need to heal the deep wounds the war has drawn in people's hearts and minds. This responsibility to heal to me feels European, human, if not universal. We need to know what has happened. Therefore, we have to listen when somebody shares their story with us. We need to study our past across national, ethnic, religious borders. History is human. History is the sum of personal fates and stories. My own story of a growing-up in Berlin in the 1990s is connected to a growing-up in Sarajevo in the 1990s in a much closer way than I may wish for.