of being shot at. Sitting on Kovači was a necessary exposure, since we were there to see the town and document local life. But the meter in my new friend at one point indicated to her that we had been there for too long.
How did she know when it started to be too dangerous? The answer is: she did not. And this was one of the basic arts you had to learn in Sarajevo during the war. You had to be aware of the dangers and at the same time ignore them because there was not much that could be done about them. During my second stay in Sarajevo I heard a joke that captured the incomprehensibility and irrationality of Sarajevans’ situation, in which Sarajevans found some sort of shared logic that guided their lives: An American team of psychologists came to study Sarajevans. They went around the town asking people, “What is 3 times 3?” The first person answered “Tuesday.” The second person answered “365.” The third person said “9.” “Well, how did you come to that answer?” the psychologists asked the third person. “Well, it is simple,” the research subject responded: “Tuesday minus 365 is 9!”
As an example of stupid behavior, I was told about an ignorant foreign humanitarian worker who tied her shoes in the middle of the Holiday Inn crossroads. While the privileged foreigner was condemned for being unaware of the dangers, the ignorance of Sarajevans at the beginning of the war was described rather as childlike. A young woman explained:
For instance, when there was shooting, I could peep through the window. My dad told me: “Hide yourself, you see that there is shooting!” And I hid behind the blinds, and I was supposedly safe there because I didn’t see the street any more. Or in the bus, or in the tram…. If at Marindvor you could hear a sniper, people might raise up their hand, so as not to see the side from where it was shooting…. Someone could put up newspapers, women their bags, they covered the children…. Or, if there was shelling you could hear it whizzing. You knew that it would fall somewhere near or that it had already fallen, and then everyone ran and pulled their heads between their shoulders. As if you pull your head in a bit, and you’ve escaped the shell.
Figure 6. Gathering in front of the Catholic cathedral in central Sarajevo. Sarajevans used to linger there after mass even though they were directly exposed to shooting from the surrounding mountains. Sarajevo, October 1995. Photo by author.
I remember my own reaction to my first air-raid alarm in Zagreb in September 1991. I was alone in my great-aunt’s apartment on the fifth floor of a building near the center of the town. As I heard the sirens, I decided to go downstairs and see what the others would do. I took the staircase, having learned during earthquakes in my childhood not to take the elevator in such situations. I had also been told not to panic and rush, because many people had been trampled in the subways during the Blitz in London. I found people gathered on the ground floor. Some tried to convince children to go to the basement, but most of us went out to see what was going on. It was very quiet, unusual for a city with nearly a million inhabitants. We could only hear an occasional car speeding along the empty streets. We were looking at the skies in order to spot airplanes. The only problem was that the entrance of the building where we were standing faced north, and the military air base from which the planes were coming was to the south. But none of us seemed aware of that fact. We just stood there, watching in the wrong direction and exposing ourselves completely unnecessarily, with the feeling that we somehow were in control of the situation!
Afterward, when I thought about it, I remembered what a soldier told me in Nova Gradiška, a town on the front line toward Serb-controlled territories in Slavonia. “It is the first bomb that kills. Because that is the one people watch out for. If you don’t get hit by the first one, the others, 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
