The darkness of long winter nights was one of the most difficult disruptions Sarajevans had to cope with. A young woman’s account from September 1994 describes how people were thrown back on themselves:
The worst thing is that it gets dark early. You see already now—it is dark at half past seven. Eight o’clock, and there is no electricity. Terrible. You don’t know what to do with yourself…. And there is shooting … you can’t go anywhere…. You can’t read, you can’t do anything. Like, you strain yourself to read by candle, you lose time, and then you go to sleep at seven, eight….
As soon as I started thinking of what was happening to me, what I could have done, what I didn’t, what I could and what I couldn’t, I would fall into a crisis. And that leads nowhere. And then it is better not to think about these things, but just go on, as long as it goes.
With nowhere to go and nothing to do, alone with their thoughts and sounds of explosions outside, Sarajevans were imprisoned by darkness. Fighting off this sense of isolation and utter powerlessness demanded great inner strength. Memories of prewar life were a double-edged sword: they helped people escape from the wartime destruction, yet thoughts of the life they once had were painful. An old Jewish curse captured the pain of loss: “May God let you have, and then not have.”
A cultural worker of Sarajevo evoked the words of Dante as well as the music and words of the Hebrew slaves in “Va, pensiero” from Verdi’s Nabucco, where the destruction of the beloved land and the tormenting memories of the better past, including dear ones now far away, end with a plea to the Lord to “inspire a harmony that we may have the strength to endure”:
The long winter night starts at 4 PM. It is cold in the room and there is only one flickering candle light. One cannot read and that which one writes is illegible the following day. The thoughts come to a standstill and continuously go back to the past, and one realizes that Dante was right when he wrote: “Nothing is so painful as to in misfortune remember the happy moments.” You get overwhelmed by despair and escape to bed from the ‘Choir of Hebrew Prisoners’ in Verdi’s Nabucco: “Go, thoughts, on golden wings….” You cannot sing, cannot hum, but you feel a need to sing out loudly, so that everyone hears and joins in the song. When the eyes fill with tears the catharsis has come to its end. You get used to the idea that the following day shall be the same and you prepare yourself for the sources of happiness that are going to be found in small changes. And the melody of the Hebrew prisoners’ choir resonates in you, for you. It does not take much to feel happiness the following day: a look from a neighbor and it is a triumph if the fetching of water goes a quarter of an hour faster than the day before. (F. Trtak 1996:29, my translation)
The most intimate thoughts, coming when imprisonment by darkness left people nothing but the freedom of mind and soul, could find expression in something larger than the vulnerable individual life: a connection across time and space, a sense of belonging to humankind, which is achieved through art.
Magical Thinking
People coped with life conditions beyond their ability to control or even comprehend through magical thinking and small private magic routines, another “childish” solution to an objectively unbearable situation. I was surprised to find myself engaging in magical rituals. The first time I was on my way to Sarajevo, my grandmother, who had never read horoscopes and certainly did not believe in them, said that my horoscope was good for the period I planned to remain there. Although we acknowledged our skepticism with a chuckle, we were both glad that the horoscope was propitious. Knowing there was nothing practical I could do to improve my security, I also looked for a protective amulet to take with me. I did not find one, but when I left Sarajevo I realized that the shoes I had worn were the same ones that I had worn during my visits to Croatian and Herzegovinian front lines in 1993. From then on, I wore my anti-sniper shoes every time I was in Sarajevo.
Many people in Sarajevo told me that in the middle of shooting and shelling they would resort to some prayer. As religious observance was not common in prewar Sarajevo, most did not know how to pray, and people of Muslim background often did not even know how to pronounce the words. But still, praying gave people a feeling of protection. A secularized woman from a Muslim background said:
Shells were falling, I was going out, I had to water the garden, because it was important for me that the cabbage plants grow, so that I could survive, and I went and I prayed to God…. In the Muslim way, I don’t know any other way…. I know only “bilsmilah ilahim rahim,” everyone can learn that, even a two-year-old child. And I prayed to God. Why? Only to chase away the fear, not because I believe, because of my own security…. I felt safer when I went out like that. There, I thought, some higher power will save me.
For a religious young woman from a Catholic family, the belief in a suprahuman power had a stronger and broader protective effect:
My family is religious, practicing believers…. It helped us through the war in a much more painless way than the others. I tell you, even if He was dead, there is something. There is God…. Look, people were losing hands, legs, heads. Whole families. I didn’t lose anything. You know, I have to knock on wood. [laughter] I didn’t lose anyone or anything…. We never went to bed hungry or thirsty, while people were dying of hunger. I never froze…. I was singing in the cathedral choir. Boy, ooooh it was madness, shooting from all directions! … You have probably seen where the organs are in the cathedral. There is a rosette through which they could spit from Trebević [the mountain facing the cathedral entrance], let alone fire a shell. And there were hundreds of young people in the choir. And no one got hurt. You know, I don’t need better proof.
As former unbelievers, as well as religiously observant people, prayed to God in situations of danger, religious practices facilitated the entrance of the nationalist political project—the division of the former Yugoslavia into separate ethnoreligious states—into the most private dimensions of life. Religion was often invoked as a vague reminiscence from childhood, such as a grandmother praying, or ascribed as an identity by being an offspring of one of the three major religious traditions. Sarajevans noticed the irony of dividing into three groups through praying in three different ways to God, because they perceived God as one and the same.
Some Sarajevans of Muslim background took their newly discovered belief in destiny as a proof that their Muslim roots really mattered, since belief in destiny was perceived as one of the characteristics of Islam. But many more understood it as a philosophical recognition that their lives were entirely out of their hands. It was a way of rationalizing away the dangers in order to do the daily errands. A middle-aged woman told me: “I was not afraid at all, you know…. You never know whether you must rush or go slowly, whether you go toward your mortar shell or you run away from it…. You just go and think about that it is some sort of destiny, or something like that.”
Others made logical arguments to themselves in order to dispel their awareness of danger. The probability of getting killed in Sarajevo was no larger than in any big city anywhere in the world: people were more likely to be injured in traffic accidents and violent crimes in New York City than to be injured by shells and snipers in Sarajevo, I was told. As in the story about cellar people (podrumaši), the moral was that dwelling on or even thinking about the dangers was useless. Or, as the young soldier told me, a way of keeping yourself together at the front was to realize that the soldiers on the other side were just as scared as you were.
I found that being with someone and talking about something else was a good way of forgetting that you were constantly within the sight and reach of shells and bullets. If you were walking alone, the best thing was to think about things you had done, people you had met, or what they had said.
It was impossible to keep these illusions continuously intact. Everyone went though cycles of not caring, followed by periods of fear and feeling exposed. When I asked one of my friends how she felt after a shell exploded in her garden only a few seconds after she went into the house, she said she felt miserable. After such an experience she usually called a friend to talk, made something special to eat or drink, or did “something nice—to forget it.” Her technique was to reaffirm life in a way that brought back feelings of comfort and security.
Sarajevan