Nebojsa

Serb from Sarajevo. Born in 1980. He and his family lived in Ilidza, a suburb of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina. Nowadays he lives in Berlin and is working on his dissertation in chemical industry.

What is your first memory of the war?

My family really enjoyed to hike. And around Sarajevo there are beautiful hills, and the one nearest to us were Igman and Bjelasnica. The entire city of Sarajevo went up there. Accidentally my father found something that had been chucked away in a scrub near a forest path: it was a book, and it´s author was Alija Izetbegovic (first president of BiH). This man, as many other protagonists within the process of the decay of Yugoslavia and during the war, was found guilty and was also jailed. In this book there was a description of the aims he and the organizations he was working for had. And I do remember well, although I don´t recall what was written in there exactly, I remember my father talking to somebody about this find and then throwing it away, telling this other man: "Watch out, this here means war!" This is the context in which I first heard about war.