I’d taken a semester of Bosnian, but I found the language difficult. On the train from Vienna, I proudly used the one complete sentence I knew in the language: “Ja sam u vlaku za Zagreb.” (I am on the train to Zagreb.) How that was supposed to carry me through weeks of work in refugee camps, I had no idea, but if I were ever again on a train to Zagreb, I could let people know.
On the train a middle-aged Bosnian woman wearing jeans, a rumpled jacket, and thick-framed brown glasses heard my accent and stopped me in the passageway between cars.
“Are you an American?”
“Yes.”
She asked me where I was going and where I came from in America. I told her, and she said, “Why isn’t America doing anything?”
“Doing what?”
“Why isn’t America doing anything to stop the ethnic cleansing, to stop the rapes, to stop the murders? Do you know what is happening to the people of Bosnia? You know what’s happening. Now, why don’t you do anything about it?”
I had no answer. I tried to explain that I was here to help.
“If you’re going to help, why don’t you do anything?” Her hands trembled, and her mouth pressed into a frown. She added, “You’d help us if we had oil.”
I walked past her and stood at the window of the train. I felt uncertain again, as I had in that nursing home with my grandfather. We had crossed into Croatia, and I got my first look at the vivid green hills and squat white homes that dotted the Croatian countryside. A red compact car drove along the road parallel to the train tracks. I raised my hand to the open window and waved. The man riding in the passenger side of the car stuck his hand out the window and flipped me off.
When I got to the Puntizela refugee camp, kids came running toward us. They looked like any group of American schoolchildren. Most wore clothes that had been donated by Americans or Europeans, and as they clustered around us, I felt surprised at how clean they were, how seemingly well-fed and happy. The refugees I’d seen on the news always looked dirty and distraught—lost in misery.
The kids jostled us, asking, “Have bonbons?” or “Have chocolate?” Those who couldn’t speak English simply opened their hands or scrunched the tips of their fingers together and touched their lips to signal for treats. I felt dumb for not bringing any.
Two boys grabbed my hand. I thought they wanted to hold it, but they turned my wrist over. They wanted to look at my watch.
Another boy ran circles around us as we walked toward the camp. One of the boys looked at him and then back at me. He frowned, shook his head, and rolled his eyes in the international sign for “That one’s nuts.”
Behind the kids followed Dario and Jasna. A married couple and refugees themselves, they ran the volunteer projects in the camp. Dario was a barrel-chested guy with black hair and a face covered in stubble. Beneath the stubble, his smile was full of joy but twisted just enough at the corner of his mouth to make you think he was about to fire off a sarcastic bullet.
I reached to shake his hand.
“Hey, how are you doing? Welcome to paradise,” he said with a chuckle. He spoke to the kids in Bosnian and then told us, “The kids love you already, and they’ll keep loving you as long as they think you’ve got candy.”
Jasna had dirty-blond hair and a meek but warm smile. She walked behind Dario and barely said a word. Later I’d learn that her English wasn’t great, but she managed to convey a wicked sense of humor. She was the more practical of the pair, making sure the volunteers had a place to stay and that they knew the work schedule. She told us when lunch would be served. They made a good team: Dario kept everyone’s spirits up, and Jasna kept the camp running.
The Puntizela camp stood outside Pula, Croatia, a beautiful city that was home to Roman ruins, including the Arena, one of the largest amphitheaters in the world. The stone walls of the ancient structure still towered 106 feet in the air, providing shade for the ice cream vendors who set up shop on the stone streets. The refugee camp was set in a park on the edge of the Adriatic Sea. Bright blue water glistened off a rocky beach, and tall cypress trees surrounded the area.
The refugee families lived in trailers. They were cramped, but given my expectations about the misery of refugee life, I was surprised to find families living in trailers at a seaside resort.
I threw myself into life at the camp. I started a soccer team with one of the refugee boys, helped in the kindergarten, played chess with the teenagers, and talked with the adults. I sat in trailers with families and drank endless cups of coffee. I thought about the distance between this camp and the classrooms at Duke—the distance between talking and doing. My days rushed by.
I knew just enough Bosnian phrases, and could utter them with enough conviction, to give the false impression that I actually knew what I was saying. Often I’d sit for long periods understanding little as my hosts took long drags on their cigarettes and exhaled a flurry of words and smoke while animatedly chopping the air with their hands. I tried to nod at appropriate moments.
Sometimes one of the refugees who spoke good English—often a teenager who would roll his eyes because the old men were repeating themselves—would translate the conversation for me in dollops.
“Then the Serbs came to his house. He told them to go away, but . . .”
“And now he is talking more about his cousin . . .”
“Still more about his cousin. He was, like, twenty-eight years old.”
The beautiful setting of Puntizela couldn’t hide the reality of what had happened to these people. I heard stories of horrific violence. Although I knew that Dario and Jasna were refugees, I didn’t actually connect the word to violence until they told me they came from Banja Luka.
In 1992, when the war broke out, the Serbian army took control of the city, hanging white rags on door frames to mark Bosnian homes. Soldiers stormed these homes to take dishes, televisions, furniture, jewelry—whatever they wanted. Serbian soldiers beat old men with the butts of their rifles, smashed fingers with crowbars, and dismembered bodies with their knives. They raped women and girls. They shot or slit the throats of anyone who resisted.2
The Serb soldiers rounded up Bosnian men, women, and children and took them to concentration camps like Manjača. They identified the community leaders and took them elsewhere to be beaten and tortured. Some of these people “disappeared,” never to be seen again.3 Many of the families I met, victims of the ethnic cleansing, had been forced to grab what they could and walk away from their homes. Often the buses packed with refugees were diverted to killing fields.
I thought about my grandfather, about how he had fought in World War II, about how the world had vowed to “never again” allow genocide. Yet these atrocities kept unfolding.
In cities and towns across Bosnia, the Serbian army forced men, women, and children into mosques and held them there for days. Sometimes they threw them a few bits of bread or gave them a couple ounces of water. Prisoners were forced to go to the bathroom on the floor of the sacred mosque where many of them had prayed and worshiped nearly every day of their lives. After starving them for days, the soldiers “offered” pork to the Bosnian Muslims and asked them to denounce the teachings of the Qur’an.4
I found these details so sickening, I couldn’t believe that the people sitting in the trailers telling me these stories were the same people who had lived them. The stories seemed to come from another world entirely.
A man in one of the camp shelters told me that his wife had been dragged from their house and raped. Both of his brothers had been killed. His sister and parents had been living in a different city, and he had no idea if they were alive or dead.
He lifted his shirt to show me the scar on his stomach and chest left by a grenade that had been thrown into his house. He considered himself lucky that his children and wife were alive. He started to cry. I looked at his children—a boy and a girl who sat together in the corner. I felt grateful they had survived, but more than that, I felt a strong desire to help them and others like them.
One night the refugees gathered for a party in a common area that sometimes served as a classroom. Music played, and everyone drank beer. After a while some of the teenagers started to throw the empty beer bottles on the concrete floor, and shards of glass soon littered the room.
One drunken kid hung on my shoulder and said, “Don’t be scared. This is Bosnian tradition. We drink this s—t beer and party in this s—t place.”
Many of the older refugees left. One boy cranked up the music and yelled something I didn’t understand, and then two boys smashed into each other like they were in a mosh pit and started to wrestle standing on the glass-covered floor. More bottles smashed on the concrete.
I felt their anger and frustration, their need to release some of the pent-up energy that came from being confined in a strange place, their whole lives turned upside down through no fault of their own.
I could also see that these teens struggled more than anyone in the camp. The adults who were parents and grandparents could keep busy taking care of the children, and they found purpose in that love and that work. The younger children were generally resilient, as kids are. But the war had hit these teens just as their real lives should have begun. While some found purpose in helping care for others, most led aimless lives. They were trapped in the refugee camp with no prospects for a job, no prospects for further education. They had limited opportunities for fun, few chances at marriage. In their situation, I might have been smashing bottles myself.