Leaving Sarajevo
I came home from a basketball game in a park, only to discover my mother in a state of frantic agitation. She told me that a few moments earlier a car with mounted loudspeakers had passed, announcing that Ilidža, the suburb of Sarajevo in which we lived, had been declared "an independent Serbian communality," or words to that effect. The Serbs now required that all males above the age of 16 register with their new self-proclaimed authorities. The war had come to our town. The childhood was officially over.
The war in Sarajevo had started a little over a week earlier, on April 6th 1992. A few days prior to that, we had all been dismissed from school, as certain people "in the know" already knew what was coming our way and wanted to prepare themselves and their families for the inevitable. Ever since the start of the war in neighboring Croatia in 1991, Bosnia and Herzegovina has been immersed in an uneasy and surreal game of denial. In general there was not much sympathy for the Croatian people and their suffering. There was even a sense, particularly among Bosnian Serbs, that Croatia had brought the war on itself by embracing the hard-line nationalism of the Croatian Democratic Union (HDZ). Those of us who knew that the war in Croatia could not be that easily contained, and that the Serbian war machine was only warming up to unleash the full force of its brutality on everyone it perceived as its enemy, could only anxiously wait and see what would come our way. On that pivotal day in April of 1992, our wait ended.
Ever since the passing of that car with the loudspeakers by our house, my mom had been anxiously working on trying to figure out what to do. We knew that we had to leave, but the questions were how and to where. By the spring of 1992 the war in Croatia had reached a stage of an uneasy truce of sorts, with all of the major fighting more or less over. Croatia seemed the most logical place to escape to, but with our car not functioning, we had to rely on public transportation to get us there. The most direct route to Zagreb, where we had some relatives, would have taken us north, but that route was becoming increasingly unsafe. The only other option was to try to get to Mostar in Herzegovina first, where my grandparents lived, and then get to Croatia somehow from there. The problem with that option was that we would need to take a train, and the main train station was cut off from us at that point. All the public transportation in Sarajevo had by then ceased to operate, so we had no easy way of making it to the train station. My mom started making some phone calls, to see if someone would be able to give us a ride. Most people were understandably reluctant: by then we were hearing of the Serbian paramilitary units setting up bogus "checkpoints" where they would stop any car that they deemed "suspicious," and oftentimes seize the car and rough-handle the driver and the passengers. The risks were real and vivid.
On April 16th 1992, sometime in the early afternoon, we got a phone call from one of my mom's work colleagues. Her husband was a cab driver, and he was willing to come pick us up and drive us to the train station. In one hour. In that time, we had to make a life-changing decision, gather whatever we could, and leave our home, probably forever. My mom was understandably apprehensive. She looked at me and asked: "What do you think?"
For me the decision to leave Sarajevo was one of the easiest ones in my life. That place had been directly or indirectly hostile to my family and me ever since I could remember, and the hostility had on quite a few occasions turned violent. As I was growing older I had increasingly started to perceive the vast differences between the culture and values of my surroundings and those that I espoused and gravitated towards. It was not a place where either individual opinion or individual responsibility were promoted or even accepted. For most of my adolescence I had felt like an alien there. In a few instances when I would get particularly despondent and discouraged my mother would try to encourage me with words: "I am not raising you for this place." She knew, and increasingly so did I, that the only way to overcome that place was to leave it. So when she looked at me that Holy Thursday in 1992 while engaged in the most important phone conversation of our lives, I just said "Mom, let's go."
We started packing immediately, if trying to assemble the most fundamental necessities of our lives can be called packing, and tried to get all that we could possibly need to help us as refugees. Thanks to her legal background, my mother was particularly attentive to ensuring we take as many of our official documents and paperwork that we could. For me the most important decision concerned which of my precious books to take with me. I have always been a bibliophile, and had treasured my small home library. Under the mounting pressure, I had to decide which few books I absolutely had to take with me. This decision, too, was surprisingly simple: I took my Bible, the collected works of Edgar Allan Poe (in English), and the two volumes of the Croatian translation of the Berkeley course in theoretical Physics. Anyone who knows me well will probably not be surprised by these choices. We also decided to take our cat with us. The poor thing had to be carried in a sack, and on the subsequent train ride she almost got dehydrated out of fear and anxiety.
My mom's friend came on time, loaded our luggage, and left with the three of us on board: my mom, my brother, and myself. As we were leaving, I threw one last glance at my old house, and made a promise to myself: I was never coming back. Sarajevo had brought a lot of pain and misery to my family and me, we had no family ties to that place, and we were forced to leave in the most painful and humiliating way. For me, there was absolutely no reason to ever want to go back. Over the past two decades I've kept that promise.
In the ensuing years I have reconnected with some school and family friends from Sarajevo, and every once in a while we get in touch. Many of them ask me if I have been to Sarajevo lately, or if I have any plans of visiting. I tell them that I haven't been there since I left in '92 nor do I ever intend to go back. Most of them think that this as an unduly harsh attitude. I understand where they are coming from: many of them love the city in which they had grown up or where they had gone to school, and perceive the war and its aftermath as a tragic aberration from an otherwise almost idyllic life they remember. My memories, for the better or worse, are different from theirs. In fact, for the most part I have left those memories behind in Sarajevo, together with most of my other possessions. Leaving Sarajevo gave me an opportunity to start from scratch and build up my life with the values and attitudes that I can freely choose for myself. It has forced me to create an identity that is based more on the things that I believe in and treasure, and less on the circumstances that are beyond my control. I feel blessed that over the last twenty years I have been able to pursue that path, and look forward to all the new places that it may take me to.