Bosnia: A Scarred City

Sarajevo, a deadly war zone for many children

Nina was a happy child. A pretty twelve-year-old girl with brown hair and a bright gaze. She loved dancing, and she hated the war. Her name is inscribed on a plaque on a corner house in the Gorica district of Sarajevo: “Dear Nina, you walked down this street to school, and

from this street you left for eternal rest. You will live on in our thoughts.”

It has been 30 years now since the war raged in Sarajevo. From April 1992 to November 1995, Serbian troops from the surrounding mountains made life in the city hell. The siege lasted 1,395 days. There was hardly any food and little water. The only plentiful things were bullets and grenades. Nearly 12,000 people were killed in Sarajevo in this war. 1,600 of

them were children, and the last of them was Nina Zeljković. She died in the fall of 1995. On her way to school, she fell victim to a grenade. The Dayton Peace Treaty, signed shortly thereafter, came too late for Nina.

Thirty years is a long time. The world keeps turning, and anyone walking through Sarajevo today sees cafes packed with patrons and fashionable stores selling expensive brands. Busy everyday life in a vibrant city. For the tourists who are coming to Sarajevo in increasing numbers, the war is presented as a creepy souvenir in the form of ballpoint pens made from

cartridge cases.

But anyone who lifts their head while walking through Sarajevo will still see bullet holes on many facades, a pattern of horror, the scars of war. And anyone who could peer into the minds of Sarajevo’s residents would quickly realize that the war only ended militarily. It continues in people’s minds, and it is fueled politically by the nationalist leaders of all three ethnic groups that fought each other back then: Serbs, Croats, and Muslim Bosniaks. The war has left its mark on the city and especially on the souls of all those who cannot forget what they experienced or whom they lost.

At the Zeljković family home, Nina’s picture hangs in the hallway, and more photos are on the sideboard. Her parents, Zemka and Hike, live here on the ground floor; above them lives Nina’s older sister, Belma, with her husband and two children. The family - what’s left of it - remains close.

Immediately after Nina’s death, they couldn’t stand it in Sarajevo any longer and fled to the US. But after nine years, they couldn’t stand it in a foreign land any longer and returned to Sarajevo. “My daughter’s cemetery is here,” says Zemka Zeljković. “I could never stay anywhere else.”

It’s as if the Zeljkovic family lives with two clocks, in two timezones. They work, cook, and laugh in the here and now. Time passes, and Zemka’s and Hike’s grandchildren are already older than their dead daughter. But Nina remains forever twelve in the old photos and in her diary, which Zemka guards like a treasure.

Nina began writing in June 1995. For three months before her death, she confided her experiences, thoughts, and feelings in her diary. There was joy, for example, about the Latin dance competition she had been anticipating for weeks. Hope shone through when she wrote, “Soon Sarajevo will be liberated.” But she also spoke of hunger when there was once

again nothing to eat in the house. And of fear when a grenade hit the neighborhood. On one of those dark days of war, she wrote in her diary: “Why? They are killing our souls, which exist only to love. They shall be damned. But even so, I will not curse them, because they are also fathers of children seeking peace and happiness.”

Nina’s mother later took this diary to the mayor of Sarajevo. Her idea, her wish: That schoolchildren should hear Nina’s story. That they should learn what the war was like and what war means. The mayor expressed interest, but after the election that followed someone else was in charge. In the end, nothing came of it. “They don’t want to lift the lid

anymore,” Nina’s family believes today.

Life goes on, and perhaps everyone in Sarajevo simply has enough to do with their own plans for the future and wounds from the past. Official remembrance is almost routinely cast into monuments such as the glass cone, splintered in two, in Veliki Park just outside the city center, intended to commemorate the children killed in the war.

For the parents of the dead children of Sarajevo, this was apparently too little, too impersonal. Almost 30 years after the end of the war, in the fall of 2024, an association they founded opened a memorial room not far from this official monument. A mirrored cube stands at its center - the Memory Box. It’s a shrine with many drawers containing individual

mementos of the children.

Zemka Zeljković brought something of Nina’s to this Memory Box. The TV news even reported on it. Zemka shows a video of it on her cell phone. A video of her crying and placing Nina’s dance dress in one of the drawers. It’s a pink and black dress, covered in sequins. The day before her death, Nina had worn it to the Latin dance competition. A photo of her in this dance dress is also in the drawer. She looks like a little princess in it. Nina was a happy child.

Sarajevo,June 7, 2025

Translation: Lisa Kremer