Whenever a child is brutalised, or violently killed, a part of our humanity dies.
The deep-blue July Sarajevo sky smiles radiantly on Veliki Park. The lush green park is vibrant with children playing, some elders joining in. A 5-year-old excitedly races her two-wheeler scooter around the green glass sculpture. Her mother dreamily looks on, absorbed in her memories.
The symbolism of the fountain with the tall green glass sculpture in the centre is of no interest to the little cheerful girl or the other children racing around merrily. For the girl’s mother, this fountain arouses agonising memories of personal loss during her childhood.
The glass sculpture on Marala Tita (Marshal Tito) Street, I am informed, signifies an incomplete sandcastle. It is encircled by a black brass ring of melted mortar shell casings with the footprints of the siblings of the estimated 1 500 children killed in Sarajevo during the 44-month siege from 1992-1995.
Located next to this memorial is a set of seven rotating metal scrolls engraved with lists of 521 children's names with their dates of birth and death - victims of vicious fascist ethnic nationalists; mercilessly shot by their snipers or bombed by tanks and mortar shells.
On the green lawn a few metres from the memorial, I freeze in front of the “Nermin Come” statue, horrified at what the statue depicts: a father calling his son Nermin to surrender to Serb soldiers re-assuring him they won't hurt him. They were both found in 2008 buried in mass graves in Srebrenica, a UN-declared “safe area”, east of Sarajevo.
The contrast is surreal: children frolicking freely without fear in the park against the backdrop of memorials for children killed during the war. I find it impossible to comprehend that, just two decades or so ago, Sarajevans were running for cover from snipers’ indiscriminate shooting or deathly shells or tank fire - 10 000 civilians lost their lives in this city.
I stroll through the park, and then walk up steep flights of stairs through a central residential area. Cratered war scars on dreary apartment block façades eye me menacingly. I wonder about the perilous lives of families that once lived here, evading gunfire and shells, holed up in claustrophobic building basements.
I lose my way on the hill navigating through irregularly laid-out streets. I finally find Logavina Street. Before the war, Muslims, Orthodox Christian Serbs and Catholic Croats lived in communal harmony as neighbours here.
In her book titled after this street, award-winning journalist Barbara Demick reminds us that several Serbs from Logavina Street fought in the Bosnian army alongside Muslims defending and liberating Sarajevo.
Their identity was intimately linked to this historical city’s “melting of cultures” rather than ethnicity or religion. That one third of Sarajevo marriages were mixed before the war bears testimony to the intermingling of cultures over generations.
Fittingly located on this historic street is my destination, the War Childhood Museum. Opened in January, it’s the creation of Jasminko Halilovi who was four years old at the start of the war.
In 2010 he placed a public call on the internet directed at anyone who had spent part of their childhood during the war in Sarajevo, requesting a response, in no more than 160 characters, to the question, “What was a war childhood for you?”
He received over 1 500 text message responses, of which 1 030 appear in his book, War Childhood, published in 2013. Some respondents also sent him childhood war mementoes.
Realising that these mementoes were treasured for over two decades and that people were now prepared to share these, the seed was sown for a museum displaying a “collection of memories”.
The power of the human spirit in times of adversity shines through the book's recollections and the museum exhibits of childhood experiences during war - love, courage, solidarity, generosity, sacrifices.
There’s sadness at the loss of childhood: for Ernad, 3 years old at the start of the war, it was “a time without sweets, food, toys or fruit. I had my first banana and chocolate [and] playing with a toy car after ’95”. For 13-year-old Edin, “A sniper killed my brother. It killed my childhood, too”.
Then there’s joy and hope: for 6-year-old Nerma: “On 12/5/1992, I received the best present: my little brother.” Or 7-year-old Admir’s poetically expressed polarities: “A little bit of heaven in hell! A drop of water in a desert! An ocean of love against the sown seed of evil and hatred!!!”
As I solemnly absorb the museum's collection, evoking a mosaic of feelings, Aida’s tragedy, 13 years old at the start of the war, is heartbreaking. Her memorabilia is “My mother’s letter”, written in Bosnian, filling three-quarters of the page.
This is Aida’s recollection: “Before the war we lived in a village in Foa. We managed to flee to Sarajevo at the start of the war. My dad immediately enlisted in the army of Bosnia and Herzegovina. By June 1992 he had already lost his life on the front line. My mother, brother and I were placed in temporary housing in Ali-paino Polje.
"My mother started writing this letter to our neighbour in the countryside. A shell landed on our apartment on March 25, 1993. My mother was killed as she cooked us dinner. She never finished writing that letter.”
An hour later, I walk down Logavina Street towards the busy Mula Mustafe Baeskije Street with mixed feelings of pain and joy, anger and sorrow, retribution and forgiveness. In any such conflict all sides suffer: victims and perpetrators, victors and vanquished - there is no real honour or glory in war, only the loss of our humanity.
Just metres away, the beauty of the white minarets of Ottoman-era mosques and domes of synagogues, inter-mingling with Catholic and Orthodox cathedrals and churches, is an inspirational reminder that Sarajevo is the celebrated home for more than 500 years of diverse cultures.
That warm summer evening I walk past Veliki Park. I hear laughter and banter from groups of teenagers and young lovers hanging out in the park.
The green illuminated sculpture takes on a new imagery in my head. When viewed from the side I see a mother, the taller column, tenderly embracing her child, the shorter column. Later, I am told that it symbolises a mother trying to protect her child.
The children’s memorial is a place of hope and love in a city tortured by memories of loss. Mandela’s words float through the park: “There can be no keener revelation of a society's soul than the way in which it treats its children.”