Post-memories of war

by Kalina Yordanova (Bulgaria)

A leap into the unknown Bosnia & Herzegovina

I have grown up with my grandfather’s stories about his participation in the Second World War. Since Bulgaria was a Nazi ally, his unit was deployed into what was then Yugoslavia as part of a military offensive against neighbouring Serbia. Wounded in a heavy shooting, my grandfather watched his comrades withdraw seized with panic, leaving him behind in the muddy trenches. In the scarlet haze of the morning after, he recognized the silhouettes of three enemy soldiers who were checking the dead bodies for weapons and valuables. Not only did they not shoot him, but helped him recover and after a month at their base he was accompanied to the border town of Kystendil to safely return home. In 2012, sixty-nine years later, I was doing anthropological fieldwork in post-war Sarajevo, examining the process of transmission of war memories from one generation to the next. I was seeking to answer a question that concerned me very personally and that had shaped my own experience with loss and mourning. I was looking into passions and anxieties that underlay family relations and intimate choices, and that had brought me to work with war refugees, victims of human trafficking and trauma survivors. What was the inner conflict I was trying to better understand by constantly exposing myself to the grief of others? With these thoughts, rapidly and rabidly changing the scene in my mind by jumping from one historical context to another, I was walking uphill in the Sarajevo neighbourhood of Švrakino Selo where I was going to meet the family of Ljilja - a former detention camp prisoner. Fifteen minutes later, I was sitting in a tiny kitchen with Ljilja and her husband while a kettle was boiling on a wood burning stove. “So, you want to know about the war…”, Ljilja said hesitantly. “Many people come here to ask us how it was but then they go. And we stay...” I had had my training and I was prepared to become the screen of unwelcome projections but suddenly I felt so overwhelmed with sorrow, that I had to find an excuse to leave the room for a moment. My presence in the hallway and the sound of clinking cutlery had awakened a little girl next door who dashed into the kitchen, curled around her mother and asked for a cup of tea. An hour later, Ljilja was still talking about the difficulties to find a proper treatment for her depression, unemployment rates, and state corruption. At her husband’s remark that “all these misfortunes were a direct consequence of the war”, Ljilja seemed compelled to clarify what he meant. She made a circular gesture around her neck, accompanied by the word ‘uncle’. Their little daughter, who was playing beside her mother, looked at her, yet trying to hide her curiosity. The child seemed puzzled but did not ask a question. My immediate association of this rather bizarre pantomimic performance was with gallows but I also did not dare ask. It all felt awkward but somehow thrilling. In our short e-mail correspondence that followed the interview, the woman eventually mentioned that her uncle was hung by paramilitaries before her eyes. By the end of my visit, the girl complained that she was feeling unwell, lied down on the sofa and asked not to go to school on the day after. Did I see how traumatic memories were being triggered by present circumstances and transmitted from one generation to another? I left Bosnia a couple of months later. On the day before departure, I was walking along the Miljacka river in downtown Sarajevo, enjoying a peaceful early evening with bikers passing by and families sitting in the shade of the linden trees. Suddenly, I was gripped by sorrow, so intense and deep, that I involuntarily started crying. Embarrassed by this sudden flow of emotion, I sat on a bench and looked around. Everything felt somewhat dull and insufficient. It took me quite a while to realize that I was owning back the traumatic experience of many generations who had gone through war and I finally knew what it might have been to walk in their boots.