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Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1992
Serbian soldiers, members of the Yugoslavian National Army, had taken me from Anya’s apartment and driven me to the local power company headquarters. They made me fill out paperwork, as if I were applying for a job. I became one of the prisoner workers—skilled labor the Serbs used to work on the power grid in need of constant repair due to the fighting. We prisoner workers lived at the company, slept on mats on the concrete floor, showered in the locker room, and worked all the time. I hadn’t been able to contact Anya to tell her where I was. First Nik disappeared, now me. She would be worried sick.
One afternoon, our captors assigned us to a job at a power station a few miles away, where the equipment had been damaged by shelling. YNA forces occupied the area, in position and on alert. The power station sat at one end of an open field, surrounded by a suburban neighborhood with houses all around. To the east, Serbs occupied the neighborhood. To the west, about five hundred meters away, the neighborhood was occupied mostly by Bosnian Muslims.
As we drove up to the power utility building, guards in blue police uniforms stood outside the facility. The police and the YNA worked in malevolent partnership. We pulled into the gate and checked in with a guard, then parked and went inside where two Serbs from the power company, a technical director, and a technician, waited.
“There’s a damaged circuit breaker,” the technical director said, “and some electrical-isolation parts that need to be replaced.”
We discussed what we needed to make the repairs, then peered outside the open doorway.
“The breaker is over there,” the director pointed to the west, “on the other side of the field.”
I stared out toward the Muslim neighborhood where people were likely ready to fight back. They knew what had been going on in town, and that other Muslim neighborhoods had been the targets of shelling. They probably figured it was only a matter of time before they would be next. From one hundred meters away, they wouldn’t be able to tell a Bosnian from a Croat from a Serb, who were the captors and who were the prisoner workers.
A young Serb policeman had been listening to our conversation and joined us in the doorway. “It’s okay for you guys to go out there,” he told us.
Easy for him to say.
A cracking sound split the air, then another. The technical director crumpled to the floor and a heartbeat later the young Serb policeman collapsed. I jumped out of the doorway and dropped to the floor covering my head with my hands. After a few moments of silence, I peeked out and glanced around. I had landed near the policeman. He lay on his back, perfectly still, a dark stain mushrooming on the front of his blue shirt.
Then one of my fellow prisoner workers, an older man, collapsed. There was no sign of blood or any wounds on him.
After moments of shocked silence, people sprang into action. Somebody called an ambulance. Police guards swarmed in and attended to the wounded. They sat the dazed director up against the wall, blood streaming down the side of his face where a bullet had grazed the side of his head.
The young policeman was not so lucky. His father worked the same shift at the plant, and soon showed up and saw his son lying unconscious and covered in blood. He carried an automatic rifle, and he started waving it around and shouting, “I’ve lost my son. You fucking Muslims! I’m going to shoot you all! Who’s a Muslim here?”
No one budged or made a sound.
When the ambulance showed up, we helped load the young policeman onto a stretcher and into the back, then we climbed into the company truck and headed back to headquarters. There would be no more work that day.
The director survived. The bullet had grazed his temple, just a scratch. My prisoner coworker who collapsed had suffered a heart attack. He too survived.
The young policeman never made it to the hospital. The bullet had gone straight into his heart.
***
My next job assignment was right outside the power company’s headquarters, near the YNA exercise yard—the big open field where the army had set up their big guns to pummel the Muslim neighborhoods. Power lines that fed the YNA base ran from a switchyard next to headquarters, along the street to the base.
For this job, we climbed tall power poles to access high-voltage lines and remove insulators that were needed elsewhere. Six of us were assigned the job and we climbed up the poles. Down below in the field, a large hole gaped in the ground. A bulldozer sat nearby. A white refrigerated truck with the name of a local slaughterhouse on its side drove into the field and backed up to the hole. Men opened the back doors and tossed human corpses into the hole like sacks of flour.
I froze. My mouth went dry. I glanced over to my colleagues high on their poles. The movement had drawn their attention, too, and their expressions turned to stone as they stared at the activity below. Somehow, I continued to work, and finished without electrocuting myself on the high-voltage lines. When we finished the job, we didn’t speak to each other or anybody else about what we had just seen. We all knew exactly what we had witnessed but were afraid to talk about it. We couldn’t trust anybody.
That refrigerated truck made about five trips a day, and now we knew why. We also realized that we knew too much now to ever be released.
