Anonymous, 39
Zadar, Croatia
I remember that we were beside the sea and it was a really beautiful day and I remember that—how everything somehow reflects— and I won’t forget the sea, and I wondered how it could be such a beautiful day but also so bad of a situation.
Interview originally conducted in BHS.
What’s your name?
[Anonymous].
Where are you from?
I’m from Zadar, Croatia—
—Sorry, I just want to see if this recorder is working.
Yes, yes, yes, I’m from Zadar from Croatia, and I came to America in 2001. Okay.
Tell me about yourself, who are you, where did you grow up, how was that, how did you spend a typical day, before when you were in Zadar?
Okay, so, I was born in Zadar. We lived a normal life, my parents were normal. We lived on the Adriatic Sea and it was, it was so beautiful, that’s what I remember, until I was 9 years old, until September 1991. It was normal, we lived quite a normal live that and then the war started and we needed to move to another part of Croatia which was occupied by Serbs and was our territory and we lived there from 1991 to 1995. We were in the Storm and we needed to leave for Croatia and then we moved to Serbia. We lived there from 1995 to 2001. And there we, after we lived in a refugee camp, we had the chance to come to America, we applied and we came to America in 2001, and at that point I was 19 years old, we came, my parents, my brother, and I, and, we started here again from the beginning.
When did the war start for you? Was there a specific moment when you realized what was happening?
I was thinking about that today. The situation started when I was in third grade, in elementary school, and the situation started to become... how would you say it...threatening. For example, in our school, where we went, there were plenty of mixed kids and it was mainly Serbs, Croats, and mixed. And I remember once, we were playing basketball and I said “Okay, lets swap and I’ll play for this team, you spin to mine, and we’ll be pretty much equal.” And we switched and this girl, maybe we were around 8, and she said “Ey, now we’re playing Serbs versus Croats.”
And, for example, in the classroom, I couldn’t enter until the teacher entered, otherwise they would harass and humiliate us Serbs. When we were in third grade of elementary school, we had to be in third grade I think, I would wait in the hallway until a teacher entered the classroom first and then I would enter so that I wouldn’t be harassed. At school, we were told that there was no entry for Serbs or for dogs. And it was, it was stressful, it was very stressful that third grade, especially the second semester, it was very stressful. That summer the air even felt that way, that was the summer of 1991, it was very tense, there were even more of those kinds of problems. There were those who told us that Croats would come and they would throw bombs and they would throw bombs on Serbian houses and, you know... I’m a Serb. And [the fact] that I needed to say that I was also born in Croatia, and that’s why there was this whole conflict, and… it really like the situation was getting worse and worse.
And then it was September 16, 1991. And that’s the day that the shooting started.
There were Yugoslav army barracks in nearby houses, they were maybe 500 meters from my house, and both Croats and Yugoslav army started to... started to shoot at each other and at the same time, they both flew airplanes above our house… I really remember these details. When I was maybe 9 years old, 9 and a half years old, that was September and I remember every detail of that day, these two days, I remember. We knew that someone was coming. We were in the basement with our neighbor and we were just in terror from the plane. (Our people [Serbs] were in the Yugoslav Army, which was under Serbs and held by the Serbs.) It was just terror for us, from the planes and from Croats and we feared that someone would come in the basement to kill us and it was for us all kinds of terror.
And then my family decided that... that when it was a little calmer, that would we try to leave Zadar and go somewhere some 14 kilometers from there where my grandmother lived and which was under the Serbs and that was Zemunik Gorniji. That was with my dad’s mom. And my mom’s mom was in the same area, and we planned to go with them. It was… it was September 17, my parents couldn’t go to work (that was over), there was shooting all night, and my dad said that was the end. And that we needed to get ready. And that we could take these two suitcases. It was my parents, my brother, and I, and then my dad brought one of the neighbors. And we had a few things in that one suitcase, some small wardrobe stuff. And I remember that I had a parrot, and that I wanted to bring my parrot and my mom said like, “You can’t bring the parrot, who cares about the parrot now?—” And she said this to me butI grabbed it and I took it.
And that we were at the border between Croatian and Serbian territory and they held us and harassed us: “Where are you going?” “What are you doing?” “How are you going there?” They held us for at least an hour, if not more, I can’t remember now exactly how long, but
I remember that we were beside the sea and it was a really beautiful day and I remember that—how everything somehow reflects— and I won’t forget the sea, and I wondered how it could be such a beautiful day but also so bad of a situation.
When during that day did you leave? In the morning?
It was morning. There wasn’t shooting that day which meant that it was September... September 17, 1991. It was morning, early I’d say, maybe around 10 or 11, something like that. And then we came to Benkovac, my mom is from there, and that was maybe... I don’t know how long it was to Benkovac. Maybe 40 kilometers.
And so we came to Benkovac (that’s where most people who had left Zadar gathered), and we were all happy there. Happy that we survived. And then we lived with my mom’s grandmother, me and my brother, and my mom and my dad. And my dad had to go immediately to the war. He was automatically in the war, he didn’t question that, if you were a man especially you had to go to the war, and my mom, brother, and I stayed with my grandmother and grandfather and then it was us.
Did your father come with you to Benkovac?
He did, it was us four, meaning my dad, mom, brother, and I, and [also] my neighbor. We left Zadar together and we went to Benkovac. My mom’s family lived around Benkovac and that’s where we stayed, and my dad was in the war, meaning we were my mom, brother, and I, and my grandmother and grandfather. They were in their 70s then and we were in their house. And the house was isolated, there weren’t many houses around it, and every night we would be afraid that someone would come through the forest and to us and that they would kill us. And that was from September to … March. Every night it was that “Will someone come and say that my dad perished in the war?” or “Will someone come and knock at the door and beat us?” And that’s how it was every night. There was a lot of terror and we, for example—You sit like this, how I’m sitting [upright, legs crossed]— and always think
“Where’s the window? Can I jump out through the window if someone comes?”
And there were 6 months where that’s the only thing you can think about.
Was there ever a period when you could have relaxed? Or was it always panic?
There was always [something] in the background. You could always hear shooting and you could always hear grenades for that time...Aah, I’d say that the majority of the time, you could hear grenades, you always heard “boom, boom, boom” and that’s how it was. So I don’t know, it was very stressful for me because I went to school, to this village school—
—You still went to school?
I still went to school. That was fourth grade, first semester, and there was a lot of stress. There were other details but...the school was a little village school with, I don’t know, 10 students, and I came from a very popular, modern school, but it wasn’t that. I erupted… I lost all my friends in school, I lost all my neighbors, I was... I was crying a lot and I dreamed a lot and we lost everything and I missed my… I don’t know, my bicycle and my skates and my Lego cubes, you know, we didn’t have any of that anymore, and it wasn’t just that we didn’t have it, but that it wasn’t at all possible to buy it somewhere, and we didn’t have any more money, we were simply left without anything.
And then, then my family found this family on the Serbian side that was Croatian… they were Croats on the Serbian side, they had a daughter. They were Croats who stayed on the Serbian side and then we found them and my parents and my brother and I lived with them. My dad was on the battlefield and when he’d come back from the battlefield, he would stay with them too. My mom and brother stayed up with them to protect the family. And [eventually] we came up with a contract through a lawyer that said this family would go to our house in Zadar and take care of our house so that it wasn’t destroyed or set on fire, and we would stay [in Benkovac] and take care of their house. And that was some time in March and I… and I think it was in March or some time in January 1992 that we moved into their house. And they, through the Red Cross, left for our house in Zadar, and we agreed that when the situation calmed down, that they would return to their house and we would go to ours. So that’s where we lived, from maybe, ’92 to ’93, and then there was a truce where there wasn’t shooting. And then the Croats won some part of ours [territory], which belonged to Serbs in that time, and when they won that part, the war started again, and the shooting started, and my dad wasn’t there again, and again there was stress and fear.
The second semester of fifth grade I didn’t go to school at all, not only me but no one of ours [Serbs] went that semester, they only gave us the grades we had in the first semester. People simply didn’t go to school. I was eleven years old and the shooting started again and we went a little into 6th grade, and we had every other day something, something like that. And then in 7th grade, at the end of seventh grade...
that was 1995—Thank god we were all living.
We lived without electricity, a lot of times without water, without phone lines. We didn’t have enough food, I remember that there was a day where we didn’t have anything to eat and the border with Serbia was closed, and I remembered that bird, that parrot. And how it needed this special food and I remember that we didn’t have any more of that food for that bird. And [before that] someone stole that bird from us, and [I thought] it really was a good thing that it was stolen because it was hard to watch how the bird died because it didn’t have this special food… yes, yeah. So however bad it was that the bird was stolen, it was good to not have to watch how that happened.
So in 1995 my mom, she has a sister and they had three daughters, and two of them studied in Belgrade and one lived in Benkovac with us. I was 13 years old at the time and she was 12. “Why don’t you go to Belgrade and spend one summer there, in peace, so that you don’t hear the shooting and so you can relax like kids, you guys didn’t have a childhood, no?” And [so] we went to Belgrade, us two, we were with these two sisters and they were there in, um, university. One was 20 years old, I think, maybe 22 years old. One was 18 and enrolled in university. And us two. I was 13 and my sister was 12 and we spent the summer together.
And one morning when we woke up, it was the beginning of August 1995, they announced on the television how the Croats had won all of Croatia, meaning that the territory that belonged to Serbs now belongs to Croats. Now it’s Croatian overall.
But no one on the television told us at that time what happened with families, with all those people, where our entire family was.
My mom had five sisters, all of their kids and their families, my dad had two brothers and one sister, you know, grandmother, grandfather, we don’t know this very large family, and we didn’t know anything about anyone.
You just knew that that area was now Croatia?
That it was Croatia. No one said anything about the people, no one said anything at the beginning, we had a big family and now it was just us four and the oldest was 22. And that was a big shock for us and a few days passed and then their dad called and said “Hey, we’re all alive and we’re moving from the Croatian territory in Bosnia, we [already] left, and we’re coming to Serbia.” And that made us throw up. We calmed down, but it was also a big shock for us that we didn’t know all of those days. And then they were all coming to Serbia, and my parents ended up in Kursumlija, in a refugee center, in some worker barrack, or some building that workers used before the war (but then the war started and construction finished). And I left to go live with them and we lived in that refugee center for two years and it was hard. It was there that I started going to school.
But I’d never been in school as a refugee. Not the first time I was a refugee in Benkovac, nor the second time in Kursumlija. Because you always have an accent, you say one word and kids make fun of you because of your accent, even though their padaži [element of BCS grammar] weren’t good in that era—we had better cases and we were still never accepted. And it was that. Nor did we have a lot of food, and the worst part to me was that after school we waited an hour and a half for the bus every time. And in the mountains, where we were, there was snow, a lot of snow in winter, and we would wait in ice and in the snow and sometimes an hour and a half in the snow for the bus… I can’t stand the cold. Not only that, but we also received jackets and school bags from the Red Cross. So [we weren’t made fun of] just because of the accent, but also looking like [refugees]. You knew who were refugees by the jackets and the backpacks. That was also difficult. It was those details.
And we lived there for two years. And my aunt and uncle who lived in Belgrade had daughters who were at university and they opened this store, a grocery story, and then they called us to go to Belgrade, and we set off again to go to Belgrade. And we started again at a school, a new school. I needed to go from Belgrade to Pancevo, to travel, because there wasn’t a school in Belgrade for me, [laughs]. I needed to travel by bus, by trolley, and by train, every day to and from school. And then we were again [refugees]in Pancevo, and they were more accepting of me, better than before, as a refugee and I’m really thankful for that.
And to this day, I stay in touch with them.
And while in school… my parents sold their house in Croatia, the one that we swapped. Because the Croats, that family in the end, got two houses, ours and theirs, because we left and they went back to their house and [kept] ours but they blackmailed my family. There was one time that my dad was in the army, and some soldiers came to our house (I’m talking about the war again) and we were in Benkovac, and they said, “You know those people you were taking care of? That Croatian family that you’d switch houses with and whose lives you care of? We, our people [Croatian army], wanted to kill you and them because you were protecting them, and then someone said, ‘Don’t do it man, they’re just trying to save the house.’” And now, even though my parents took care of, not only their house but also their lives, they still blackmailed us in the end and got that money.
My parents tried to get pictures. They said that the house was really beautiful, and that it was all modern. But they [the Croatian family] took all of the furniture (it was bought before the war) and they took everything from the house and my family asked of them only a picture, and they never gave us a picture. That’s the one thing that we wanted from the house. They still got 10% of what we sold it for. My dad got that money and then my dad built a new house in Belgrade, around Belgrade, and then we moved to that house [laughs], and we lived there in the house for two or three days. And then, it was me and my mom in the house, Zeljko, my brother, was working,
and the NATO bombings started. That was 1999 and it all started very, very close to that house, and that we were again were wondering: “Are we going to survive?”
And we survived. And my dad came, because my dad worked in a different city, my dad came to the house and said if… “Okay, now we’re going to apply through that IUM program to try and leave this country… even though we built a house, we can’t stay here and I can’t watch you in war anymore like it’s been for the past 10 years.” And so we applied and then we had three interviews and we passed those three interviews, which, it wasn’t easy to pass those three interviews because you need to be honest with them and say where you were, what you were doing, and then we pass the three interviews and we came to America and that’s that.
[Laughs a lot].
At the beginning, you said that you noticed a few changes in school. Were there, I don’t know, were there these events happening in school before? Did you totally understand what was happening?
[Nods], I was young but I was really aware. Because there were only politics on television, and I was a kid, so we, at only 9 years old, understood that something needed to happen there. We were fully acquainted with that, as kids who were only 9 years old, we had been acquainted with that [idea].
I remember Summer 1991, there was some fire in the area around Zadar, where I’m from, and all of our neighbors, all of us took to the streets. And I remember that I was sitting on that sidewalk, um on the sidewalk, and we all gathered and felt a big panic between people. And I wondered, “Pa, how is there no one smart enough to end this war so that we don’t have to have any, of this, with Serbs going to one side, Croats wanting a Croatia without Serbs, without us.”
They wanted a clean Croatia without us. Even though we were all really similar, really, really, similar, we look the same. For example, my aunt, we were mixed, my aunt was married to a Croat, my first cousins were Croatian. [And] not just my family, but a lot of family was mixed and it was never really clear to me how we didn’t have one smart person that could end this. And I wondered about that, and I wasn’t interested in that [hatred]. I never—however much they might have really, really hated us— we were kids and we feared everything, but
I never, never, never, hated them, I couldn’t hate them, even though others were creating that hate.
And with them, and with us, but I, for example I could never hate, and every time that we moved from Zadar to Benkovac, at least one family stayed, a Croatian family stayed in Benkovac, to live with Serbs. And they were my best friends when we moved from the refugee center to Belgrade, again my best friends were Croats. My best friend today is also Croatian, and Croats were really always my best friends, even though everything happened, [laughs], between us, I never looked at people for who they were [their ethnicity], but whether I liked their energy or not.
Did you ever notice any tension your own personal relationships with Croats? Were there friends with whom everything was normal before the war, but then during the war, you noticed something different?
My friends were Croatian, the majority Croatian. We went to school together but they weren’t [laughs], they weren’t friends anymore in that sense because we were cut off— there weren’t phone lines where we could hear from each other, that was cut off— until they appeared on Facebook. I went on Facebook in 2008, and we connected there, and it was like everyone forgot, and we forgave each other. That’s where we reconnected in the end, you 1991 to 2008, when we reconnected. But between me and my [close] friends, no, [no tension]. We still hear from each other to this day.
When did you leave Zadar? How did you go? What did you take with you?
Nothing much really… really, very few things. Maybe a couple outfits, some clothes, and that was everything, that was that, that was everything we kept. And I remember at the border, when they were inspecting [us] at the transition between Croatia and that Serbian parts, which they called Krajina. I had this backpack, my school backpack, and it was a little bigger. We wore slippers in school— we needed to take our shoes off and we wore slippers. Like THESE slippers [shows me a pair of beige, fleece-lined slippers].
And [the inspection officers] looked like these slippers and they thought that they were someone’s weapon or something. And they jumped at it to see what they were, if they were something important or something, but they were my school slippers [laughs]. And when they saw that, they said “ah.” They stopped us and inspected us and questioned us, and then we left with our dad’s mom. And we left, first to my dad’s mom’s place, which was in that area, around 14km [away]. After that we left for Benkovac, where we [stayed], and that was really different for me.
When we first arrived, for me it was bad… you know,
for 17 years [after the war] I had nightmares. Really bad dreams. I dreamed non-stop that we were in our house [in Benkovac], with someone trying to kill us, and I had to hide for all 17 years.
Until I went back there in 2008 and I saw that house where we lived, and that neighborhood. And that’s when that stopped for me, really it was just maybe one per month, but before I had so many, those where I really couldn’t sleep and where I couldn’t, for example, I couldn’t got to school, I would fall asleep because I couldn’t sleep the entire night, [laughs], because of those dreams. It was really hard, I couldn’t, go anywhere, I couldn’t do anything, because it would remind me of our house [in Benkovac] and there was no way I could live normally...Somehow, someone took that part of me then, and I don’t know, it disappeared. That part of me disappeared.
[They started to go away] when I went to Zadar. Now that… aah, you know, my dreams were so real that I thought they were reality and [I would] bite to see if this is reality or again, only because I didn’t know if it was again a dream or if I woke up and it was happening again. I wasn’t conscious that I was home. I was with my cousins and friends and it was the ten of us and it was such a beautiful summer and we had the most beautiful summer ever, and that... I couldn’t believe that it was real. That I was there. And that it was my life. And from then on it was better, after I went back and saw it [Zadar].
And your dad was in the war? Was he on the battlefield the entire war or would he return and leave again, on and off?
He’d leave and come back. He was an engineer. So when they made roads, for example, if they [Serbs] won some territory, they would make roads. But he was also on the front line. And it was horrible. Like if it was Bozic, [laughs], my dad would come back home [laughs]. My friend, who was a Croat, told me once—my dad would return from the battlefield, from the war, and I ran toward him, like “my dad lives! My dad lives!” and— she said, “I remember that when your dad came home, how you ran toward him, every time like that when you saw your dad and that he was living.” Once, there was a time when we didn’t see him, that was some time in January 1993, that, um, maybe February, we didn’t see him for a month and a half, two months, even though he was nearby, maybe 30 miles, something like that. But he was on the front line and we were in Benkovac, and we didn’t know anything about him, so when he did return that time, it was a really big deal, [laughs].
And, you know, you pray to God non-stop, the one thing you have was God. That gave us strength. Nothing else could give it to you.
You mentioned that there wasn’t enough food in Zadar or in Benkovac. How did you find food, what did you eat?
Honestly, there were a lot of days in my life, I’d say from ’97 to ’98 where I was hungry. There’d be a border, and when Croats or Muslims won that part the border would close with Serbia and we wouldn’t have food, you know. The stores would be completely empty, there wouldn’t be anything anywhere. The Red Cross, mainly. When we would get food, it was through the Red Cross. It was flour, oil, sugar, not in any large amount, but just enough for a little bit. I remember once, my mom didn’t have enough flour to make bread, I was maybe 10 years old, Željko [my brother] was 11, and, she asked my grandmother and grandfather. And my grandfather came with maybe 10 kilograms of flour and gave it to us. For example, for clothes, there wasn’t any powder or detergent for our clothes. So instead, my mom used, a lot of people used, ash. And with the ashes—there wasn’t any electricity—, they would put that in a pot, with white laundry, and the ashes boiled. Like, take a dish or clothes, [and wash them] like you were going to cook. You know, that’s really... [laughs], it couldn’t have been worse.
This may be a strange question, but against that background, did you have ways of entertaining yourselves at all?
Pa, for example… when we had the UN convoy from Kenya, for example, their troops were really great toward us. I remember Željko left to go somewhere and they gave him a fully box of shoes, a full box of candy and chocolate and sweets, and they have that to us in school, and we all rushed to get those boxes. That was to us, [laughs], the biggest deal. We were really happy that we got that, they were really great, those UN people from Kenya.
But then, there were the people from the Canadian UN. While we went to school—and our school was three or four kilometers [away], something like that, and there was this big sidewalk next to the main road—and these UN people from Canada, sometimes they would point their weapons at us. We really felt…hmm…we didn’t feel protected by them like we felt with the soldiers from Kenya.
There wasn’t, I [don’t] think… there would be grenades exploding or something, but sometimes, there would be a truce (they would find a truce between Croats and Serbs). When there was a truce, we could go to the sea and that was when we relaxed the most. It wasn’t always possible to go, you know. [pauses]. But we knew that we were going to the sea, because we had a very small exit on the sea to Karina, that’s next to Benkovica and when we would go there we knew we were going to the sea. But in general, our childhood was taken from us, we weren’t.. we didn’t have that childhood that other kids had, we instead thought about, “Are we going to have electricity?” “Are we going to have water?” “How are we doing to learn next to a candle because you have to put it out before the sun sets?”
And, I don’t know, the sea was...when we would go to the sea in the summer, that was the best. It was, I think, Summer 1994, that we went to the sea, that year was, “Okay, we can go.” The other summers weren’t so good, hahaha.
Was there a time during that war that you felt hopeful? That the end was near?
No, no, no, I don’t [so]...no, there wasn’t. The future wasn’t known. The future simply wasn’t known. What was going to be [of us]? I thought that at the end, some reconciliation among us would come and that we would go to each other’s territory and to each other, however, we were all…. We all needed to leave everything, I think, of us [Serbs in Croatia], there were around a quarter million or 250,000 Serbs who had to leave everything in 1995, and they needed to go to Serbia. In all this, when we were in Serbia and when I was with my cousins, my parents stayed in that Krajina part which belong to Serbs, Croats could have killed the majority of Serbs. There was probably a deal made somewhere to not do that. But they wanted to and they could have, they were better armed and they were ready, they were really ready. And, um... we’re happy today that they didn’t take advantage of that because they could have done that and who knows how I would… where we’d…
So, in the end, we were all happy only because we were alive. And that was the biggest happiness—that we were alive and healthy and that we were all gathered together again and that’s the best happiness in the end.
Did you have an “all is lost” moment?
Pa… um… no. We lost everything, we lost everything that September 17th in 1991. We became homeless in one second, my parents locked my house —the house was paid off and they [my parents] were in their thirties, Zeljko and I went to school, they didn’t have any burdens. They had good jobs and everything there was how it should be. They had a great life— and we, all of us, in that moment lost everything. It was really difficult for me, not because we lost our house, but our home—that wasn’t a house that was a home. There was this feeling of security there, there’s where you’re born, you think that’s going to be your house for years, that it would be for your family. You know for us, you don’t buy a house, you stay in that house and your brother stays there with his kids and that’s how it is, that’s how it is from generation to generation we’d say. And that’s a big thing for us in America, you buy a house and you buy a new one , it’s not important, but for Serbs, it is a big deal because that’s your home more than your house.
That’s where we lost everything. But after that, for us in the war, there wasn’t anything after when we... we didn’t have anything else to lose. On the first day of the war, we lost everything—as far as material is concerned. We lost our friends. I think that was a really difficult part for me. It was difficult to lose everything that first day.
After that we didn’t have anything else. We could only lose our lives. And we didn’t do that. And that’s what we held onto and that’s why we were positive because we prayed to God just to stay alive. So we didn’t have anything to lose [laughs]. You don’t have anything, that means you have nothing to lose.
We didn’t have a childhood, they took it, and you think, you have electricity, you have water, you want to see your mom and dad and for them all to stay alive. And that’s it. That’s the main thing.
But we know how to “be.” And how to laugh. How to joke around
about everything somehow, we always had something that we knew we could joke about. Even though it was a serious situation we still could joke about something. And we weren’t depressed. You know with us, it was that, [we’d] be hungry, [we’d] be really hungry, but we were never, we were never sad or depressed, no. We never were.
What do you think you never feel that way?
Um, pa, you know what it was? It was a lot of days, a lot of days when we thought that we wouldn’t see tomorrow, th at was going to kill you or you’d be killed by a grenade or that someone would come. There were a lot of days in my life, a lot of situations where I thought “This is the end.”
I remember, that first day of the war, when we were in the basement with our neighbor,
I looked at the ceiling and I said, “God, I’m only 9 years old, I really want to live. I really want that so much, my one wish is that I live and to stay alive.” And that’s what, I think, pushed us—because of that one wish to live my life.
How? That wasn’t important. It was important that you just live. I remember that, there would be a lot of days, for example, during the bombing in Serbia in 1999 when again, it was that feeling like we had in Croatia that we just wanted to survive. We got to that house finally—we had a house again—And again, [laughs], we had to leave everything. But, I think that’s what kept us going, there were a lot of days where, again,
“Okay, I lived through the night, I’m here.”
[You know] how I say I always feared that someone would come to the door and knock? One evening, someone came to the door. And this guy came, and he knocked on the door and said “My mom and my brother and I lived here.” And now, now in my head, you know, “Windows? Where are the windows?”—
Where did that happen?
—In Benkovac, this was maybe 1992, something like that. 1992, 1993. And now it’s us three, in the house, someone comes to the door. This is that moment that I feared would happen. And first you think, “Windows. Where are windows?” “Can I jump out the window?” And my mom says, “Okay, I’ll see who it is.”
My mom goes to the door and i hear, “Okay.” But before this, my mom’s friend called her and said “Hey, someone was here at my house,” —she just lived with her grandma, she was maybe 20-some years old, and now she’s calling my mom and said that someone was at her house — “He tried to enter my house and I called the police.” But at that time, there weren’t police working. He could have killed whoever he wanted in however long it took for him to go from her house to ours. And now, [I look at] my mom, you know, “Do we jump through the window or do we stay?”
And my mom looks to see what it was, and says, “Who are you?” And the guy introduces himself and says, “I know your husband, we were from the same village, I’m in the army, and there’s another soldier of ours who wants to kill me. Can I stay with you tonight? I would protect you.” Now, my mom can’t believe him because there are enough Croats know my dad and now, if she lets him in, he can come in and he can kill us, all three of us. And we don’t know if he’s really a Serb or a Croat. But my mom lets him into the house and we—my mom, brother, and I—sleep in one bed because we were just in terror, [laughs] At that point, if something happens, it happens. And he’s sleeping in another room. Now, he says, something like, “I know you’re all terrified that the war hasn’t passed.” And that night we survived. Through the night. He actually was a Serb, and he was in that situation and he came with us because he knew that my dad did live there.
This is what happened to him—they lived on the front line and his sister-in-law just gave birth. And she left for some milk or something in another village. And Croats came and took her and raped her and killed her. And then someone left to see where she went, to see what happened to her. They couldn’t find her, she wasn’t there. Then, they [Croats] came and took that guy and they killed him too. And then, that guy that stayed with us, came and spent the night. And that night, they [the family] went back to Croatian territory and they asked “Where are they [the sister-in-law and other family member],” and they called their names, and they said, “where are they,” “where are they.” They knew that they were killed. And then there was only a kid left who was a couple months old. Her child was only a few months old. And that’s that story.
And after that, my dad and I went to visit my grandfather’s grave, but those graves were in Croatian territory. So my dad and I went through the Red Cross to these graves (Serbs gathered and Croats let them go to the graves to visit the cemetery). And we, my dad and I, went on that same road where they [the other family] were killed. It was...that was so awful. We were in such terror that that would happen to us. I remember that too. There were enough… enough of those situations where you just want to survive this,
just to survive the next two hours.
You literally feel like you’re near the end.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, it’s finished, you know, the end is here. Like you said, we saw the end of everything, in every situation, you could see the end.
When did the war end for you? When did you feel that the war was over?
When we lived in that refugee center and when we found ourselves in Belgrade. That’s when I was with my cousins and we found out that they were alive and that was, hmm... 1995. That’s when we found ourselves in that refugee center, that’s when I felt like it was over. By then, Croats got their territory, we were thrown out of Croatia and we moved to Serbia and that’s when I felt like that was over. All until the NATO bombings, [laugh], we were like…”is it Zadar again?”
How were the years between 1994 and 1999, between the Zadar and the bombings?
Ah, you know, we lived from August 1995 to August 1997. We lived in the refugee center and it was more materially difficult because we lived in bad conditions. Again, food was in question, again, we went to school and again, we were like, like, a lower class because we were refugees, because we have an accent. We weren’t really accepted by anyone in that environment—
—Do you know the name of that refugee center?
Yeah, yeah, it was called Selovo, a place next to Kursumlija in the South of Serbia
—And for example, I came to school on the first day. And me and this one girl, who was from another part of Croatia, had a really, really strong accent, really just so strong. We came to the classroom, and they say, “What are your names?” And she says “Branka,” and they ask me and I say “Zeljka.” And they start laughing, the entire class, started laughing. And it wasn’t clear to me at all why. And after a few days, one girl says to me, “You know when we were laughing when you came in the classroom?” And I asked her why she was asking, and she says “Because we call turtles Željka. We call them Zeljka.” And I said “oh wow,” [laughs].
And Branka always had a strong accent. Her and I were always together, and somehow always ridiculed, regardless of what she said, they just repeatedly...they always laughed at her accent. Branka had problems after that, and when I later moved to the US, she threw herself off a bridge, in um, Belgrade. And she killed herself… Yeah… she had psychiatric problems and she needed help in that time and… there wasn’t any help.
And that was at school in the refugee center? You lived there for two and a half years. What was life like? Did you live in the center itself?
No. It was isolated. We were isolated in those little houses. We had two rooms and a bathroom for our family, which was really good for a refugee center, and those were decent accommodations. One problem was that we were isolated from everything and there was nothing close to us. The first town was 14 or 17 kilometers [away], I can’t remember exactly, we were surrounded by mountains, everything you saw in front of you were mountains and around you were mountains and nothing else. The bus went twice a day, at 6:30am it went to school. And then after school, you’d leave and wait for the bus for an hour and a half, and that was the hardest part for me. We would wait for the bus in the ice and cold, and that was one of the worst experiences because I can’t stand cold, I can’t stand it. And now I give everything to Goodwill but I will never give my ski jackets, that, [laughs], I’ll always have.
And as far as the food is concerned, it was sometimes okay. We had lunch after school, and it was okay and we could eat it and it was okay. For example, I adored sauerkraut, I remember lunch was sauerkraut with some bad meat and that was really hard for me to eat, [laughs]. But our mom worked in their kitchen, she was one of the women in that kitchen. I remember once, when we lived in that refugee center, we came home after school and there wasn’t any food at all to eat that day, and what we were going to do? So we leave and we find some apples on some trees that belonged to some other people who lived nearby, and we left. And I had these light jeans, and I slipped on the green grass and get grass and everything else on those jeans. And it was my last pair of jeans, I didn’t have anything else to wear. And I came home, I went home, I eat my apple, and I cry and say “Now I don’t have jeans.” And that day, my aunt from Belgrade sent us a package with two pairs of jeans. That same day we got the package from my aunt. That was, you know, a celebration, [laughs].
It was hard, in that refugee camp. It was us and two hundred people, around two hundred people. It was all Serbs from different parts of Croatia and it was people with different mentalities, you don’t fit in with everyone. They’re people that you grew up with and who you’re used to being taken away from you, and now you need to gather in this village, and... I don’t know. I had a lot of those dreams, which I told you about, and that was in that period where I was non-stop dreaming, and I remember that I would come to school, and I wouldn’t be able to stay awake. I held my eyes open because I would dream at night and I came to school and held my eyes open to stay awake so that I wouldn’t fall asleep. And I think that it was mainly that there wasn’t enough food. You’re a teenager, you want to eat everything in those years and it’s not there. And I think I was vitamin deficient and everything else. Bread, we had bread. That was about it. And you can’t eat that every day.
How did you leave the camp?
We still stayed in Serbia, but my aunt in Belgrade, they opened that grocery store and they employed my mom and so we could leave, [they employed both] my mom and Zeljko, because Zeljko finished high school, and then my dad found a job in another city around Belgrade. And then we were tenants for two years and then my parents built a new house and we moved.
When did you leave the center?
1997, August 1997, and then the bombings started in March 1999.
How did you feel then?
It was like the return of normal life. Like, “Okay, we’re returning to normal life.” We were tenants and we paid our rent. It was like we returned to normal, um, for the first time there. I went to high school then and we left the refugee center and I went to school in Pancevo and for the first time I was accepted in school, even though I was a refugee, I was accepted. And I was happy, I was, I remember, that I was happy then. And I was always laughing and I would laugh all of class because I finally felt accepted and I always loved that I was always positive. In 1997, I went to second and third year of high school with them, and I was accepted and I was happy for the first time in my life. And that was good until the bombings happened, was it not starting again?
When was the first day of the bombing for you?
It was.. I remember I was with some friends, a Croat too, actually, and we went to some park. We were sitting and talking, maybe the four of us girls, we were talking in the park, and all of a sudden, my mom and her mom come and are running—We didn’t have phones at the time—and they were like “Quick, quick, you need to go home!: And we asked, “ why?” And they said that they started bombing and that they were moving toward Belgrade. We were like, “Mama no, that’s not [happening],” and she said “Zeljka, yes it is, they let us know that planes were heading toward Belgrade and you need to go home.”
We come home, it was me and my mom, Zeljko was working with our aunt, on the other side of Belgrade, in New Belgrade. And we were on the old side. And she said that
they started the bombing, and my mom… her face changed color in a way that I had never seen in my life. Never, never. Whatever we went through in the war, however many bad situations there were, I never saw anything like that—the color in her face changed. And she said “they’re going to kill my kid.”
Zeljko needed to get on the tram then to cross from New Belgrade to Old Belgrade, and they were bombing through all of Old Belgrade by then... can’t remember the exact street… and she said they were going to kill her kid. And the color in her face changed. And I said, “Mom, they won’t, this is Zeljko.” And then Zeljko came through the door, hahaha, again it was like Christmas hahaha. And I’m telling you—that made us happy. Whenever you see life from someone in your family, you don’t need anything else. I remember once we were just in the new house. And Zeljko went to some bar with his friends (his friends were Serbs from Croatia), and they got together. And he went there on a bike, because there wasn’t a bus in that time (there were bombings), so everything was closed, and he would go and he would come back home around 10 the latest because everything was only open until 10.
And now we—my mom, dad, and me—are at home and there was a bombing that night, really close to our house. They bombed the Ibar Highway, where the road was, and it made an enormous hole, it was a huge hole. And while they were bombin the Ibar Highway and my mom was screaming crying. I couldn’t call on the phone, and I said like, “okay, this time God isn’t going to help. This time, that’s it I’m never going to see my brother again. Hahaha.”
Two hours later, Zeljko comes on his bicycle singing. And I’m watching him like, “you’re alive!” And we cried then, we were so happy, we’re like, “Did you see that [the bombings]?” And he laughs! I thought that he didn’t survivei...t was really so close to our house. The house was new but it was shaking from the detonations. Because we had military objects nearby, and those military objects were the target. And you could only see, through the window red, blue, and the house was shaking. Then,
when Zeljko came home, that was the moment when my dad said “That’s it, enough is enough, we’re leaving this house too, again, and we’re leaving and that’s that.”
And where did you go then?
We came to America, that was the moment when my dad decided that it wasn’t possible to live anymore in war. That started in 1991. This was 1999, he said “You survived grenades and bombs and all of that, if we’re going to be homeless in America it’s not a problem, it’s better than living where there’s bombings.”
Did you leaving during the bombings?
No, no, no, no, no. No one could leave the country during the bombings. We left...it was October when we applied. First my dad filled out the application and he then gave the application to me. And I thought “How could we go to America when they were just a part of the bombings?” Like how… that doesn’t make sense [laughs].
And, I really wanted to go to college. And how would I go to college [in America] when I didn’t speak English. So I throw out the application. [Then], my dad called the program [and asked], “Hey, what happened with my case?” And they said “Sir, you’re not in the system.” And he says, “What do you mean I’m not in the system?!” And they say “Pa, you never submitted an application.”
He came home and he was so angry at me—because I never handed over the application—and he goes and submits the application and we were finished. He submitted the application maybe in October 2000, and we were done, it was a really fast process—six months. And then we come to America. We came here 2001. And then two months later 9/11 happened. And then I was like, “God, everywhere I go there’s war.”
But, what happened with Serbs who stayed? [Well], our neighbors in Zadar—who didn’t leave in 1991—they were raped...people came to their house and cut off their ears while they were alive. People came and said “Hey, we need,” I don’t know, “your TV,” or “I want your couch,” and they had to take it to them. What they say you had to do you had to do.
So if we had stayed...my parents didn’t want to care for a house in that way. It was our most important thing. And so we left at that same moment. We were in our country [Serbia], it wasn’t the best but it was the best decision that my parents could have made—to leave quickly.
You said that it seemed strange to move to America after the bombings. How was it once you arrived here?
We had already decided to come. I was glad because we... I felt as if someone had taken me back to 1990 before the war. I felt like I returned to ten years prior. That’s how I felt. It was summer, the economy was good in America. I felt somehow...peace. There weren’t those sirens—there wasn’t going to be a bomb. I felt somehow happy, peaceful. It was peaceful, that’s how it felt.
As far as the bombing is concerned, that...you simply accept. That’s politics, and the majority of Americans didn’t instruct that to happen, and that the majority of them would have said “no.” Again that was politics, the people are great, there aren’t problems there. And the people in America were so good. I didn’t speak English at all, none of us spoke it very well. If you go somewhere or something and you try to do something, people were always kind.
It was easier in America without English than it was in Benkovac or in Belgrade, in our territory, with our people, who never accepted you because you were a refugee.
Somehow they [Americans] were...something new, something different. I don’t think I had even one bad experience. People were always wanting to help. They really were that way, it was really so nice. It made the situation easier.
How did you learn English?
There was some private school where we learned English as a second language. My problem was that my social circle here was people from our country… that was good and bad. One and the other, because it was hard for me, really hard. It wasn’t easy for me. I just fell into a depression because my language wasn’t coming and I wanted to go to college and I just, two years later, fell into a strong depression. It [English] wasn’t coming for me and I knew that I needed quite a lot [of English skill] if I wanted to get somewhere in life.
When we came to America, we needed to go to medical examinations and I saw some medical assistants working there, and I said, “Wow, when I know this language, I would love to do that.” And when I learned enough of the language, I finished school as a medical assistant. And then I found a job and I’ve worked there for 12 years. I went back to school again and that’s where I stopped for now [laughs].
Do you go back to Zadar or Croatia often?
No, it was only that 2008 trip. And in 2013 I was in Serbia also. And Croatia, just to visit my aunt. And that was that. I wanted to go last year...it wasn’t a problem, I would have gone, I just didn’t have time. I planned to go last year, but I needed to cancel because of COVID, and this year I don’t want to plan [laughs].
Do you have something that you’d like Americans here to know about the war or about Yugoslavia?
Before the war, we were communists, and people watched that as something unacceptable, from that part of that world. But, in fact, we had all of those freedoms and we all had something, we lived quite good lives and there weren’t any credit cards, everything was cash. And we somehow invested everything well. And we had enough time with our family, with our friends, little stress, and it wasn’t complete blackness that [people] think that communism was. Maybe because we were in Croatia and we’ve always been connected to the [both] West and the East. We were there somewhere… we had tourists and we were exposed to everything.
Where we were, it was really beautiful and really was difficult to leave when you’re from such a beautiful country that you need to leave. That was something really difficult.
There isn’t a message here but that communism wasn’t as bad as people though. At least not in our case.
Is there anything you want people to know about the war?
I don’t want people to know about the war [laughs].
I don’t think it made any sense that war. We were all connected. I didn’t make sense at 9 years old nor at 39 years old because there were really a lot people who lost their lives, a lot of people suffered, went through terrible situations. But in the end, we’re okay with each other again. Someone has an interest in all of that [politics], but the people alone are not. I always said, as a child and now, that whatever it was could have been resolved without war. We simply needed someone smart, we didn’t need a war. It didn’t make any sense at all.
Like I said, my best friends were always Croats. My best friend and I were kidding about that actually—that I was her Maid of Honor and then Ustase would come to the wedding [laughs]. We were joking, but there isn’t any kind of animosity.
How do you feel now toward the former Yugoslavia?
I never felt like a Serb or like a Croat. I always felt like a Yugoslav, somehow in the middle. I simply loved it where I was, but I was in the wrong place. I didn’t feel at home in Serbia, either.
I missed it—Croatia—the stones, the climate, I missed it all. I’ll always miss that part of me, [it’s] something that I’ve missed since we left Croatia. Even though we were Serbs in Serbia, I missed that part of me.
Is there something that you specifically want to tell people from the Balkans about the war?
I think that a lot of people go through hard times there. I believe that the problem was that our people weren’t educated enough, and I think that it was easy to manipulate them. It was very easy to create fights between Croats and Serbs and Muslims. They were an easy target. People didn’t have enough education.
[It’s] like what happened with Trump and Hillary, or with Trump and Biden. Overnight, friends would fight on different sides, and that there [in Yugoslavia], was that on steroids. It seems evil to me just how many Serbs and how many Croats and how many Muslims went through what I went through only on the other side. It changed us as people.
It happened and I am who I am because of it, but we didn’t need that and I think that there’s a need to work around education so that it doesn’t happen to us again—to be able to manipulate us like that. We’re in the Balkans where everyone is interested in ruling that part because we’re somehow in the center [of East and West].
I think that we need to forget that and go forward and help each other.
And that’s that [laughs].