I came home to the hotel I switched on the lamp over the mirror, thinking: If I do not look different there is something wrong, sir. Perhaps I should have gone west first.
Yes, in the beginning the mirrors were the worst, but afterward it takes no talent to understand that one can cope with seeing everything without going blind. It is not even gruesome to be here any more. It only makes one tired and one sleeps well at nights. (Dagerman 1996:115, my translation)
Everyone staying for some time in a war zone has similar experiences. The overwhelming destruction numbs one’s sensitivity, the sight of death becomes an everyday fact, and exhaustion takes over after the initial rush of adrenaline in one’s body. Most of the people I met in Sarajevo had experienced this shift. One woman said: “Before the war I thought how war is so awful, and if I was in the war I could not sleep for days, or something. But you are so tired from the grenades that you … [laughingly] you just fall down and sleep. That’s … that was surprising, really.” I was amazed at how quickly I got used to the devastation, first of the Croatian frontiers and later of Sarajevo. While I was there, I never took a step back and looked at the town through the lens of peacetime standards. I suppose that, like many a Sarajevan, my senses of mortality were sufficiently engaged with avoiding sniper fire and occasional shelling. My creative forces were concentrated on the task of documenting life during the war. I lost this state of mind and emotion only a few times, when I experienced what other people in Sarajevo experienced throughout the war: the awareness of having no power whatsoever over your own life, the feeling of meaninglessness that resulted, and the omnipresent emptiness. Although we are aware of our mortality, we seem to have a limit as to how much of this knowledge we can take in at a time. This human quality was expressed many times by Sarajevans as a somewhat shameful amazement over their “getting used to it.” They often wondered whether they would look and act normal to people outside Sarajevo, because they were aware that in the outside world the material destruction and deaths caused strong emotional, social, and political reactions. They themselves no longer felt this way, as a young woman described:
Figure 5. Although all of Sarajevo was subject to shelling and sniper fire, some parts of town were directly exposed to shooting from the mountains. Signs were posted in these places saying, “watch out, sniper” (pazi snajper) or “dangerous zone” (opasna zona). Sarajevo, spring 1996. Photo by author.
In the very beginning, every person killed was reported in all of the mass media. As time passed—it may sound a bit cruel, but it really is so—we started getting used to all those victims, and people began to turn into mere numbers. It was reported only: so and so many killed, so and so many hurt…. And then we came to a stage when they would for example report: ten hurt, and you would say: well, it isn’t so many. Two or three killed—oh, then it is not so many today. You know. But that is terrible.
This numbness registered the war’s excessive violence.
A play with this theme was put on in Sarajevo; it was based on the life and work of Mula Mustafa Bašeskija, a Sarajevan chronicler who lived in the eighteenth century (Lukić 1991). His “Chronicle” included a time of plague in Sarajevo. At the beginning of the plague people who died were named and their lives were briefly described: who they were, what they did, and their characters. Toward the end of the play, the narrator only reported that by that time thousands of people had died. The play ended with a long list of names of the recently deceased. The connection through two hundred years of the experience of the plague with the experience of the siege was simultaneously terrifying and tranquilizing. From the perspective of shared human experience, personal mortality lost its significance. Art was the form through which this awareness could be expressed. When the authorities renamed a part of Titova Road for Mula Mustafa Bašeskije, the notion of sharing the war experience beyond the limits of their own time and their own mortality effectively became incorporated into the body of the town.
It was only when the immediate danger to their own lives had diminished that Sarajevans were able to see the destruction and let it affect their feelings. In 1996, after the Dayton Peace Accords, a new graffito appeared saying “kad se saberem—oduzmem se” (when I pull myself together—I fall apart). A young woman’s account of the effects of the first relatively long ceasefire in 1994 is characteristic: “For me it was much more difficult when the situation got better…. I felt terrible! The shooting ceased, but the town was very ugly looking. I mean, until then I didn’t pay very much attention. All is so destroyed … Only the skeletons of the stores, so much garbage in the town. A lot of concrete, cement, glass, everything.” In 1996, the situation was even more appalling, since along with the material destruction the destruction of the social, cultural, and moral fabric of the city became visible. The Dayton Peace Accords, cheered in 1995 because they stopped the shooting, were now understood for what they really were: an official and international formalization of the division of the country and people into three political and territorial entities, based on the different ethnoreligious backgrounds of people in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Until that moment, many Sarajevans had hoped that those divisions would end with the war. This story of Sarajevo shows that this division was destructive in a way that residents found impossible to comprehend; it felt like more than Sarajevans could take—so they “fell apart.”
To Know, Yet Not to Know
Entering Sarajevo for the first time, I was aware of the dangers awaiting me as I moved about in the town. I was fairly cautious and took every opportunity to learn the places where sniper fire and shelling were most likely. The most dangerous places in the center, I learned, were the crossroads around the Holiday Inn, as well as Hrasno and “Sniper Alley,” parts of town bordering Grbavica, which was under Serbian control. This undertaking was of limited usefulness, since the danger was omnipresent and hovering over us. Looking toward the surrounding mountains, everyone could clearly see where the military positions were. It was almost a rule that wherever there were no trees, the territory was under the government’s control; the trees had been cut by Sarajevans during the previous winters. In the forests you could see a blue UN flag here and there, which meant that on one side was the ABiH and on the other the Serbian Bosnian forces. The town was practically surrounded by Serbian positions. You could assume that almost every spot in the town from which you could see the mountains was a place where a sniper could see you.
As far as the shelling was concerned, the most dangerous places were around the Presidency Building in the center of the town, the public water pipes where long queues formed during the water shortages, and any other place where people gathered, such as marketplaces and bread lines. During the periods I spent in the town, there was not much shelling. Only once, in September 1994, as the ceasefire was coming to an end, did I experience random shooting and shelling of the town during the daytime. In March 1995, too, the city center was shelled at night. As people were used to much worse periods, I never spent long hours in a cellar. During lighter or intermittent shelling people hurried home, listened to the explosions in order to judge whether it was incoming or outgoing fire, estimated how far away the explosions were, and decided whether it would be necessary to leave the apartment for the cellar.
I became aware of the constant calculus of danger one evening during my first stay in Sarajevo, sitting on Kovači and chatting with a young Sarajevan woman I had met some days earlier, with whom I developed a friendship during the war years. We were waiting for Staffan, my Swedish colleague, to finish taking photographs of the newly extended cemetery. It was a pleasant September evening, sunny and quiet, and so was our mood. Suddenly she said agitatedly: “Now what is he doing? Does he think that he’s on holiday on Hawaii?!” I was surprised, and suddenly became aware of the mountains and forests surrounding us. We could have hardly been more exposed. I felt nervous, but there was really nothing to do. I asked her whether I should fetch my colleague, but we saw him coming so we just got up and continued our walk.
This episode taught me that even when people did not show it, they were always subliminally aware of their exposure, and
