Sarajevo Under Siege. Ivana Macek
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no matter how many they are, won’t harm you because you’d be in a shelter by that time.” The young woman who described naively hiding bullets and shells from view continued: “But when the first shells exploded in front of our building, and when the shrapnel from the neighboring apartment went through our apartment, well, then we started to take shelter…. Either in our hall, or by going out to the staircase, so that we wouldn’t be near the doors or windows. And there were days when the shelling was going on all the time, and when all of us were in the cellar for the whole day.”
People behaved irrationally at the beginning because they could not recognize real danger. They could make stupid choices because they were still reasoning within their peacetime standards. As their experience of the war grew, some Sarajevans were seized by fear that could become paralyzing. They called those who were too scared and who sat in their cellars all the time podrumaši, cellar people. Being so frightened was judged as a weakness and staying in the cellar was regarded as absurd, because in war there was no way to protect oneself. I was told several versions of a common story that was meant to prove this point. Some person, a young man hiding from the armed service, or a panicky older woman, spent all of the first two years until the ceasefire in the spring and summer of 1994 in the cellar, firmly refusing to go out. The relatives provided him or her with the necessities. When it was finally quiet, the person dared to go out for the first time and got killed by a random sniper bullet or one of the few shells. The moral of the story: if you were meant to get killed you would, no matter what you did. Trying to protect yourself entirely was futile, it made your life even more restricted, and any semblance of normal life vanished.
During the war it became acceptable to be afraid, even for men who traditionally were not supposed to show their fear. In such extremely dangerous circumstances it was impossible not to be afraid, so social norms adapted to the situation. Sharing fear and having it acknowledged enabled people to cope with it when necessary. As a young soldier told me, everyone was afraid, and what was important was not to be overcome by panic. At the front lines, if you felt afraid it was okay, because you knew that the guy on the other side of the front line was afraid, too. If you happened to meet face to face with an enemy soldier, you could count on both of you being afraid, and you could either shoot him or hide. But if you panicked, if you lost control of yourself, then he would certainly shoot you.
Casualties and fatalities were a fact of life. People got shot at, got hit, and got killed. In the Sarajevo Survival Map I read: “The State Museum … was on the front line…. The building was hit by more than 420 shells…. In front of the museum stood a UN transporter that was supposed to protect the citizens riding in the trams. A lot of people were killed and injured on that spot” (Kapić 1996). The first time I went there to meet an acquaintance for an interview, she told me that a woman had been killed there earlier the same day. The first time I experienced direct shooting was also there. The shots came from Grbavica, in front of UN soldiers in their tanks who did nothing to protect me. At first I bent over, ran, and swore. But soon I started to feel numb, heavy and empty, instantly depressed. Seized by the paralyzing realization that I had no control over my life, I lost all will to do anything. When I thought about it afterward I understood that what was happening inside me was a half-conscious realization that my life—all I ever did, my qualities and qualifications, the righteous purpose of my being in Sarajevo—was no longer worth anything. I remember a soldier on the Croatian front line showing me a bullet. “You see this bullet?” he asked. “That’s how much your life is worth in war: 1 deutsche mark!” In Sarajevo, being confronted with my mortality in this direct way rendered all cultural phenomena, including money, meaningless. My life was not worth even a deutsche mark! After a day, when I managed to convince myself that my stay was worthwhile and worked out a way of exposing myself as little as possible, the depression disappeared. My world was reestablished through reaffirmation of my own values.
Most Sarajevans experienced this seemingly never-ending pendulum swing between strength and depression. Periods when they could dismiss the dangers of their situation were followed by periods when their sense of normality was fractured, and then they had to struggle to reaffirm their sense of purpose, even of self.
The circle of fright starts with the fear for one’s life and ends with the fear of death. And so it goes on in a continuous circle—with a rational beginning and a rational end, or with an irrational end and an irrational beginning—and so on to infinity. Altogether it develops into a fright of the fear itself, which threatens to become an all-encompassing feeling. And so a new fear emerges, which is not cowardice, but a fear that one might lose one’s fear and become a hero. And then the fear appears anew. (F. Trtak 1996:29, my translation)
People developed various techniques for dealing with snipers and shells, but there was really not much to do about it in practice. Strength lay in the belief that you could survive.
For instance, people did not look at the sniper positions all of the time. Indeed, some people never looked, on the theory that if you looked at them they would shoot you. Others cast a confident glance toward snipers when passing the dangerous places to show that they were not afraid. Some thought that it was wise to go firmly but not too fast, in order not to provoke the snipers by showing fear. Others thought that it was better to speed up a bit, or even run if necessary, in order to show the snipers that they were aware of them, which would satisfy the snipers and keep them from shooting. All these strategies were equally futile in terms of avoiding getting shot; they helped people deal with being in a situation that was beyond their control.
A young woman described her reactions to the constant threat of snipers while moving about in the town:
Every day I used to pass one part where a sniper was shooting all the time. I don’t know if it was because of pride or some sort of obstinacy and stubbornness, but I didn’t want to run…. It often happened that I looked toward the hills like I could see whether he was going to shoot or not. [laughter] As if, to see first, and then I could hurry a bit, then stop, and so on…. Only when I heard shots all the time would I stop, and then again that instinct would start working, so—run as fast as your legs can carry you!
To run or not to run became a question of pride and humiliation. Like many Sarajevans, at some point in the war my host felt humiliated because he was being forced by some “primitive maniac” (that is, a sniper) to run in his own town. So he stopped running. He went firmly, with his head held high, straight over the most dangerous crossroads, feeling good because in this way he restored his dignity and showed the “primitives” that they could not break him. And so he continued for some time, until one day, in the middle of a dangerous crossroad, he came to think of his daughter in exile. Suddenly he was struck by the thought of what pain it would cause her if he got killed—and he ran as fast as he could!
To realize that one’s life or death was out of one’s hands could cause depression, and people had to ignore this fact in order to get on with their lives as best as they could. To lose control over one’s life to some unknown person’s whim was an utterly humiliating experience. To reassert some sense of control, at least to choose whether they would live in fear or not, enabled people to regain some pride.
I remember how all of us in a Zagreb NGO in 1993 were amazed to meet a refugee who had come directly from Sarajevo to the headquarters. The man was wearing a perfectly white and ironed shirt with a perfectly new and proper tie: he was not exactly the picture of refugee we expected, since we were aware of the shortages and knew that he had come through the tunnel. A young woman in Sarajevo explained:
The war did not affect my way of dressing…. It could be 15 to 20 degrees below freezing outside and 8 below in the room, but I had to wash my hair each time before I went on duty, so that my hair was clean when I worked, so that I was fresh, so that my lab coat was always washed and ironed, so that I wouldn’t go around untidy. It was probably a way of fighting back. During the time of the worst shelling and lack of water and gas and electricity, when the conditions were really miserable, I noticed that people were clean and ironed, and tidy. It was so during the whole of the war.
People struggled, not so much to maintain some prewar standard of decency, as for emotional and moral survival in the face of overwhelming degradation. Sarajevans were unable to prevent the decline of living standards, but they could still choose to look