Click images below to enlarge

"Before the war, I lived in Cilipi, near Dubrovnik. It was very nice and the oak trees smelled good."

"When the first bombs fell, I was in my basement and then we went to Dubrovnik. The Chetniks then burned my house by dropping bombs on it. Then they burned everything that was in it."

Matja does not accept this situation and explains that there must be justice: "I would like a new house like a castle and I would like the people who destroyed it to be punished by making them rebuild a castle. I also want them to give me back the boat they stole. I want the little brook next to my house, the waterfalls and the things I had in the house. I want my grandmother to come back alive from Bosnia."

TEODORA - 5 years old

Teodora remembers her house and the garden where she played happily: "There was a swing an apple tree and a cherry tree."

Teodora refused to draw a picture on the second subject. While the other children were drawing pictures of the war, Teodora sat sadly looking at a blank sheet of paper, incapable of drawing a single line or even explaining why. Her mother told her story when she came to pick her up. Teodora's father had been slightly wounded during the siege and had been hospitalized. He was a part of a convoy of wounded evacuated from the hospital when Vukovar fell and who were taken from the control of the Red Cross in blatant disregard of the international conventions. The members of the convoy were long reported as missing until foreign journalists discovered mass graves near Ovcara where they had probably been thrown after having been massacred. Teodora's mother refuses to accept that her husband had been massacred and is waiting for proof before she will believe it. Teodora is not supposed to know why her father is not there.

"This is me, my friend and a balloon which got away from us." Her feet are not on the ground. Teodora's unconscious has understood that she must ignore the truth: the death of her father. 

ADNAN - 10 years old.

An all-powerful Serb contemplates the siege of Sarajevo while watching without emotion as a man bleeds to death and stretches his hand out in a plea for help.

Men wearing black hoods arrived and arbitrarily arrested men to take them to an unknown destination which may have been death. 

ARMINKA - 10 years old

Arminka imagines that he will see a disaster on his return to Zvornik. Nothing is left but ruins. This is not very far from the reality, since certain cities in eastern Bosnia have been virtually devastated.

SABAHUDIN - 12 years old

Sabahudin lived in Kiljuc, a city of approximately 40,000 inhabitants in western Bosnia. Catholics and Muslims lived together happily, since a church and a mosque are drawn in the middle of a peaceful and carefree-looking population.

Sabahudin's remarkably detailed drawing shows the attack on the city by planes, tanks and ground troops who massacred the inhabitants.

Previous | Back Home