There's an adage that says that a birthmark is a place you were killed in a past life. The buildings of Sarajevo wear bullet and grenade holes like they're hoping the scars will turn into birthmarks, but it will be a while till the war is long enough gone that it counts as a past life. Just concluded a little over 20 years ago, there is nobody in the city or country who lives free from the war’s effects; whether it's one's trauma or one's parents' trauma, it is impossible to be a Bosnian without also being deeply connected to a history of genocide and ethnic divides. It is impossible to be a foreigner in Bosnia without feeling the weight of its history upon your shoulders as a descendant of those who saw and did nothing.
I was born in New York City to middle-class American parents. I grew up in the sheltered suburbs, never coming closer to war than the attack on the Twin Towers. I have no experience of what it means or what it feels like to live in constant mortal peril, simply because I happened to be born in the United States. I left home in 10th grade to join THINK Global School, a traveling high school with students from all over the world. When I came to TGS I met a boy from Kabul, a girl from Palestine, and a girl from Israel, all of whom shared their experiences of living in war zones. It is unbelievable to me the way simple circumstances can completely change the course of one's life, and this is what we see in Sarajevo.
After 6 weeks in Sarajevo, we left briefly for Mostar. A city divided by ethnicity and religion, Mostar is full of stories. One story we heard was from a musician named Orhan Maslo, but we called him Oha. Oha was the youngest soldier in the war, not more than 16. He told us a story of survivor’s guilt, a story of impossible choices and seemingly endless loss. But most poignantly of all, he told us a story of growth and rediscovery — a story of healing. Oha is a drummer, a percussionist who was accepted to Berklee College of Music on scholarship and turned it down to found his own music school in Bosnia, where children and teens from all ethnic backgrounds learn to express themselves. We combed through Mostar searching for any story we could get our hands on. Nino, the manager of our hotel, regaled us with accounts of his childhood antics with his identical twin brother, Dino, and in the same breath told us that life during war is like living "with a gun pointed straight at your head." A poet read us his piece on language barriers, an artist showed us the street art inspired by the destruction. We left Mostar after painting a mural on the wall of our new friend’s garden inspired by the artist Dallas Clayton that reads, “Stani ovdje i pomisli na nekog koga voliš,” or “Stand here and think about someone you love.”
I was convinced after a day of walking around Sarajevo that I would never get used to the constant reminders of the war. I thought that it must be impossible to become accustomed to living in a ghost of a war zone. But, like everything else over time, the bullet holes became background noise. What didn’t fade into the negative space is the colors: the glass of skyscrapers reflecting blue sky, the unscheduled lemon-yellow trams that were always either too late or too early, and the rich, bitter brown of Bosnian coffee. The architecture was multifaceted; Soviet apartment blocks contrasted with Ottoman buildings directly opposite Austro-Hungarian architecture. Clouds of smoke clung to sharp edges and crumbling walls and wrapped around the bridges and under my door.
There is nothing that can teach someone who's never lived in a war zone what that terror feels like, but the next closest thing is to live in the ghost of a war zone. To look around a tram car and know that everyone surrounding you understands loss and survival at a deeper level than you do. To run your fingers across the scars of bullet holes and your eyes across mass graves and bloodstains. And yet it all becomes normal, which is a testament to the ability of humans to get used to just about anything. As Frida Kahlo says, "At the end of the day, we can endure much more than we think we can."