What catastrophes seem to do—sometimes in the span of a few minutes—is turn back the clock on ten thousand years of social evolution. Self-interest gets subsumed into group interest because there is no survival outside group survival, and that creates a social bond that many people sorely miss.
Twenty years after the end of the siege of Sarajevo, I returned to find people talking a little sheepishly about how much they longed for those days. More precisely, they longed for who they’d been back then. Even my taxi driver on the ride from the airport told me that during the war, he’d been in a special unit that slipped through the enemy lines to help other besieged enclaves. “And now look at me,” he said, dismissing the dashboard with a wave of his hand.
For a former soldier to miss the clarity and importance of his wartime duty is one thing, but for civilians to is quite another. “Whatever I say about war, I still hate it,” one survivor, Nid?ara Ahmeta?evi?, made sure to tell me after I’d interviewed her about the nostalgia of her generation. “I do miss something from the war. But I also believe that the world we are living in—and the peace that we have—is very fucked up if somebody is missing war. And many people do.”
Ahmeta?evi? is now a prominent Bosnian journalist who has dedicated her life to understanding the war crimes that blossomed all around her when she was young. She was seventeen when the war broke out, and within weeks had been hit by shrapnel from an artillery round that crashed into her parents’ apartment. She was rushed to the hospital and underwent reconstructive surgery to her severely damaged leg without anesthesia. (“They hold you down and you scream,” she said when I asked about the pain. “That helps.”) The hospital was overflowing with wounded—they were laid out in the toilets, in the hallways, in the entranceways—and the staff didn’t even have the time to change blood-soaked sheets after people died. They just loaded the next person onto the bed and continued working. The first night, an old woman died next to Ahmeta?evi? and somehow rolled onto her in her final agonies. Ahmeta?evi? woke in the morning to find the woman on top of her, the first of many bodies she would see during the war.
After two weeks Ahmeta?evi? was finally sent back to her parents’ apartment on crutches and resumed what passed as normal life during wartime. Her neighborhood had organized five apartment buildings—perhaps sixty families—into a huge cooperative that shared food and ovens and shelter. Vegetable gardens were planted around the buildings and everyone ate from the food they produced. Water was gathered individually from roof gutters or from hand pumps in town, but virtually everything else was shared. On her eighteenth birthday, Ahmeta?evi? remembers being given a single egg by one of her neighbors. She couldn’t figure out how to share it with her friends, so she decided to use the egg to make pancakes so that everyone could have some.
The basement of one of the buildings was deep enough to serve as a bomb shelter, and teenagers from the neighborhood led a kind of communal life down there that was almost entirely separate from the adults above ground. The boys would go off to fight on the front line for ten days at a stretch and then return to join the girls, who lived down there full-time. Everyone slept on mattresses on the floor together and ate their meals together and fell in and out of love together and played music and talked about literature and joked about the war. “The boys were like our brothers,” Ahmeta?evi? said. “It’s not like we girls were waiting for them and crying… no, we had a party. To be honest, it was a kind of liberation. The love that we shared was enormous. They’d come from the front lines and most of them were musicians and they would have small concerts for us. We didn’t believe in heroes. We were punk rockers. Our biggest hero was David Bowie.”
Six months into the siege, Ahmeta?evi?’s parents managed to get her evacuated to Italy because they weren’t sure she was going to survive. She had lost a lot of weight after her surgery and never managed to put it back on. Although she was safe in Italy, and finally healing from her wounds, the loneliness she felt was unbearable. She was worried that if the war never stopped, everyone would be killed and she would be left alone in the world. She finally started trying to figure out how to get back into Sarajevo—something that almost no one did. From a bureaucratic standpoint it was even harder than getting out of the besieged city, but with her mother’s help, she finally did it. She flew into the blown-up, sandbagged airport and hitched a ride into town and back to her family.