One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [98]
The siege turned Sarajevo into a nightmare. Mortars and grenades crashed into all parts of town indiscriminately. Machine gun fire tore the streets apart. The city lost power. It lost water. People burned furniture to stay warm. Snipers shot women and children running with buckets full of water on their way home. The Olympic stadium, once a symbol of Sarajevo’s unity and prosperity, became a different kind of symbol. It was transformed into a graveyard. Bodies filled the field.
Jaca, who was thirteen during the war, walked with me toward Bulevar Mese Selimovica, the street that was known as Sniper Alley, which she told me I must see to understand how the people of Sarajevo lived. When we arrived, she warned me, she might break into a run, “just out of habit,” she laughed. “Try to catch up with me if I do. You’ll look silly if people see a girl running away from you. Many people still duck and sprint when they reach this road. The war, you know,” she smiled. “It made us all insane.”
Up above us on the hills, I could see the Jewish Cemetery. Snipers had a straight shot to where we stood, to this entire stretch of road. They hid behind the gravestones, which provided excellent cover. The hid behind the graves and they rained bullets on the city. Rumor had it that visitors who were so inclined could pay for the privilege of taking a few shots into Sarajevo for themselves. During the siege, anyone who walked or drove along this road risked taking a bullet from one of these snipers who did not distinguish between civilian and combatant. Life was cheap. Cars would race at dangerous speeds, swerving up and down Sniper Alley from the airport trying to make themselves harder targets. The city erected metal barricades to protect the sidewalk from sniper fire, but the Serb guns quickly turned those to Swiss cheese. Jaca too looked up at the cemetery and sighed.
Now twenty-six, a writer and translator, she is a vivacious woman, a stunningly beautiful brunette with a dry sense of humor and a lot of plans for the future. She’s written a children’s book and plans to write others. She has a great love for children’s literature, perhaps because the war that cost her her father and her best friend, many of her friends, also cost her her childhood.
“I never thought about ethnicity before the war,” she told me. “My grandmother was Jewish, my father was Muslim, my mother was Catholic. We were a little of everything. When the war started, my friends began to ask me ‘What are you?’ I said I didn’t know. They told me I was a Muslim, so I came home and told my father I was a Muslim. The next day, my Catholic friends said, ‘No, you’re no Muslim. You’re a Catholic like us.’ So I went home and told my father I was a Catholic. But it didn’t matter. We were all in the same situation in Sarajevo. Catholic, Jew, Serb, or Muslim. We were all in the same kind of hell.
“For example, on my eleventh birthday, I was walking to school. I lived near the Holiday Inn and had to cross this street here, just up ahead.” She pointed toward the infamous yellow building, a branch of the global hotel chain, which, during the war, housed most of the international press corps, though the rooms facing the street were uninhabitable due to sniper and mortar fire. I noticed with some degree of horror that the building was surrounded by tall apartment buildings that housed thousands of Sarajevans during the siege, many of whom could not simply take rooms away from the street as the journalists could. Their homes were easy targets, and many had to be abandoned for safer ground. Though nowhere in the city was safe. Death was always above it in the hills that ringed Sarajevo, sealing it.
Ten years since the siege ended and Jaca began to grow tearful as she told me her story, a story about walking to school.
“I was