One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [100]
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