I met Alem on a 10-day, UNICEF-sponsored trip through the former Yugoslavia. I lived at his house for two days and at another Mostar family’s home for two more. Alem’s mother asked me about my mother, how many children she had. I told her I was an only child. She asked me if my mother smoked cigarettes, which I thought was strange. I told her my mother didn’t smoke. She nodded and told me she never smoked until her son was killed. Then she took out pictures of her two young sons before the war. Alem’s father made a dismissive motion with his hands and told her to stop. Alem looked really solemn, as if he wanted to leave the room. But his mother insisted on showing me the pictures. She wanted me to see the son she lost in the war.
A few days later a French UNICEF worker told me that when a mother loses her child, part of her dies and she can never recover. Only then did it hit me that a part of Alem’s mother had died along with her son. She had the look that I was to see many times in Mostar, a look so far off and distant, you wondered if the person was still alive. It made me wonder if people can survive without a soul. It also made me angry that nothing was accomplished by the war and that nothing has ever been accomplished by war.
As an American, aside from Sally Struthers and her tearful appeals to help kids, suffering was a remote concept to me. I chose to ignore the various conflicts around the globe, figuring they had no importance to my life as a New York City high-school sophomore.
When I heard I was going to Bosnia with Children’s Express News Service, the after-school journalism program I work for, the thought of what a war-torn country would be like didn’t really occur to me. It was my beginning assignment as a foreign correspondent and I was excited about going to Europe for the first time. Even the people I told downplayed the seriousness of it all. Some teachers and adults patted me on the back and told me how this trip would help my college essay. My friends cracked jokes about Croatia Airlines and told me I would finally meet people thinner than myself.
I prepared for my trip like a journalist: studying maps, reading articles and writing many questions. But when we got there most of my questions were useless. They were too broad and had to do more with what we would see, rather than what we did see in the former Yugoslavia.
As we were driving toward Mostar, I fell asleep with the Adriatic coast outside my window. I woke up an hour later to see buildings covered with bullet holes and soldiers walking through the streets. I couldn’t tell the difference between the holes from shells and grenades until a UNICEF worker explained that a shell mark is like a spiral and a grenade mark is just a hole.
To me, everything just looked like Swiss cheese. And I always smelled something burning. It was really the smell of burning garbage, but it had symbolic meaning. It was like being in the aftermath of something really big, and you just wanted to keep asking everybody what happened.
Electricity and water have been restored in Mostar, which is now divided into Croat and Muslim sections like Berlin after World War II. Kids on both sides go to school, watch TV, eat dinner and try to lead regular lives. But many of these kids have lost brothers, sisters and their entire families. How can their lives ever be normal?
In Mostar West, the Croatian side, I interviewed a kid named Goran Bevanda, who told me that things would be better only when the next generation came along. “We are the destroyed generation now,” he said. A lot of the adults we interviewed kept telling us that the children were not bitter and that they were the key to peace in the Mostar of the future. I saw another side-that the children were not ready to forgive and forget.
I sat in on a Bosnian chemistry class. The teacher talked on the subject while the kids appeared bored and sat drawing pictures. Everybody smoked in the school halls. You figure that students really had the need to smoke and the teachers understand why.
I also had a group of little followers, kids who would hover over me and stare at me because I was black. It made me feel like I was walking through one of those weird dreams where you go to school naked and everybody’s pointing at you and laughing. It was strange being stared at so much.
A lot of younger kids were born during the war. They have no thought of what their lives would be like without war, so they’re conditioned by it. If you were to slam a door they would jump a mile. They hear firecrackers at night and wonder who it is this time. A lot of the boys are into firecrackers. A few kids tried to sell me firecrackers because they wanted to see my reaction. I was always surprised. Some of them had lost their homes. Some had lost family and they still wanted to play war. But I guess in that way they were like normal boys.
Before going to Bosnia I thought the kids would be different from American kids. But the scary thing is, they weren’t. It shows that war can happen anywhere and touch anybody. Everyone always says the point of remembering the Holocaust is to make sure it won’t happen again, but after talking to kids in the former Yugoslavia, I learned how easily it can happen again.
