Reflections on "Return to Kozarac"

Reflections on “Return to Kozarac,” a film by Paula Goldman, 2000

the introductory text at the beginning of the film:

On May 24, 1992, the residents of this mostly Muslim town awoke to find their houses surrounded by Serbian tanks. The night before, Serb residents had fled the town, knowing what would happen. Serbian soldiers used loudspeakers to tell Muslims they would be safe if they came out of their basements and surrendered. It was a trick. When Muslims emerged from their homes, intense shelling ensued, and the streets filled with blood. The town was then burned to the ground. With more than 2,500 dead, survivors were taken to concentration camps in nearby villages. Here, many were beaten and tortured, and more were killed. Finally, after months of detention, survivors were released from the concentration camps. But with no homes left, and their country at war, there was no safe place to go. As refugees, many fled to Croatia, or were forced to take residence in displacement camps. Today, [eight years later], those who survived the ethnic cleansing of Kozarac are moving back home.

Emsuda Mugajić is my hero. She is the strongest, most faithful woman I have ever met, and her story has had a huge impact on my life and my way of thinking. In the summer of 2004, (my second trip to Bosnia), we went to Kozarac for the first time and stayed with Emsuda at her Peace Center. She told us her story, told us about what had happened in her town during the war: how thousands of Muslims were murdered and thousands more displaced, how she herself survived a concentration camp and lost family members, how she became a refugee and finally returned to her hometown to start healing and rebuilding. She showed us a book more than twice the size of my high school yearbook with the name and picture of every missing or murdered man, woman, and child. When Emsuda had finished speaking, I sat with one of our interpreters as she thumbed through the book reading the names and dates that I couldn’t understand, pointing to pictures and saying “look, a five-year-old boy” or “that is an eighty-year old woman . . . how could they do this to such people?”

I felt completely overwhelmed. I stood outside and wept, cried as I have never cried before. I cry easily, in spite of myself and sometimes over very inconsequential things. This was completely different – this was the most raw, most real, most intense emotion I had ever felt. I felt anger, I felt horror, and I felt unspeakable sorrow at the suffering and pain Emsuda, the other people of Kozarac, and the entire population of Bosnia had undergone. It was the single moment I can point to that changed my life. It completely transformed my outlook and approach to the world.

The next afternoon after our friendship camp, Emsuda took us to the actual building (a school before the war and now again used as a school) that had been the concentration camp where she and her family had been held. We went on a “tour” around the outside of the building. She pointed to the window of a room where her entire family had been held, pointed to the windows of a gym where men were taken to be killed. Emsuda told us how refrigerated trucks would line up outside of the camp in the evening, how people would be taken away during the night, and how the trucks and people would be gone the next morning. Pointing across the street, she showed us where the house had stood where women and young girls were taken to be systematically and repeatedly raped and tortured, most likely in a “woman’s room” similar to that in S..

inmates at Trnopolje camp

She shared her personal stories, told us how the women had banded together, stood up to the soldiers, and managed to save the lives of two children, though they realized they wouldn’t be able to save the next ones. She told us how starving people shared their only bread and water, how people banded together and did anything they could to help each other through inhuman circumstances.

I saw in person the cross monument that Republika Srpska officials put up in front of Tronoplje as a tribute to the Serb soldiers who defended the region, the same soldiers who raped and tortured Muslims in the concentration camp. I felt powerful revulsion when I saw the monument and heard the story behind it. For the first and only time in my life, a symbol of the religion I practice completely disgusted me. I was ashamed that people who supposedly share a common Christian faith with me used an aspect of that faith in such a repulsive and offensive way. When speaking about it, a Serb woman in the video says, “fuck their cross.” Startling as her statement is, I agree.

the cross memorial outside of Trnopolje

I marveled at Emsuda’s unfailing strength, unflinching hope, unwavering faith, and incredible ability to forgive and move forward in a positive direction. I was most amazed at her ability to let go of her anger. I had heard this story as an outsider, and I was outraged. She had lived the story, and managed to take a holy, faithful path and move beyond blind hatred and the desire for revenge. Emsuda refused to be a victim; rather, she wanted to empower herself and others and share her story with the world.

After watching Return to Kozarac, I was also inspired by the response of Emsuda’s prison guard, who helped her escape in spite of contradictory orders. He stuck to his convictions, and did not let the madness of war overcome his better judgment. I think it’s very telling how he states that no one could have forced him to commit war crimes. On one hand, it gives me hope that there are people of integrity who refuse to be manipulated and act in uncharacteristically malicious ways. On the other, it distresses me to realize that, at least according to this guard, the people who did commit war crimes did so voluntarily. The guard’s comments tie in with the questions of culpability for war crimes discussed in They Wouldn’t Hurt a Fly by Slavenka Drakulic.

After my experiences with Emsuda, what happened to the Muslim population a decade ago in a small town in a country that I couldn’t have located on a map two years earlier became real and important to me. I had read about the facts and figures of the war, and they affected me to some extent. But reading about something or hearing about something in the third person is nothing compared to hearing a personal testimony. For the first time, I realized that genocide and concentration camps are not things that were left behind in World War II. When as a child I learned about genocide in Nazi Germany, I was baffled as to how such tragedies could have occurred. On some level, I assumed that the Holocaust couldn’t have happened in today’s world, not when conscientious people like me are there to stop such things from happening. It didn’t click that the same thing happened eleven years ago in Bosnia and is happening in Darfur as I write this.

My experiences with Emsuda changed the way I look at the world. I basically spent an entire year processing what she had said and what I had seen in Kozarac before our group returned to Kozarac in 2005. We went to Kozarac again in 2006, so I’ve heard Emsuda tell her story twice since the first time I heard it. Since I’ve gotten over my initial emotional reaction, I’ve started to see the whole picture – to see the positive that came out of the negative, to start to try to analyze the causes and effects of the situation – a process of analysis I hope to continue.

Building Bridges and Crossing Borders

(this is an excerpt of an article I wrote for my church newsletter after returning from my final trip to Bosnia)

According to Alihodja, a character in Ivo Andric’s Bridge on the Drina, there is a Muslim legend that God created the world out of a soft material. Satan, in a jealous rage, raked his fingers over the earth to create valleys in order to make life difficult for the humans trapped on either side. In response, God sent angels to spread their wings over the valleys, thus giving humans the gift of bridges.

I recently returned from my fourth consecutive “servant trip” to run friendship camps in Bosnia with the NJ Synod. The camps were a huge success, and we served over 2,500 children! Our theme this year was “Building Bridges, Journeying Together,” and what I think makes this trip so incredible is the way we try to conquer the valleys of hate and misunderstanding between people by building bridges of friendship, love, and respect.

The goal of our trip is healing and reconciliation from the civil wars that wracked the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. Even though the war officially ended in 1996, the ridges left in the bullet-scarred countryside and in the wounded hearts of the people are very deep. We try to help rebuild bridges and strengthen relationships between the Bosnian Muslims (Bosniaks), Bosnian Serbs, and Bosnian Croats.

You can see it happening, slowly but surely: when Muslim and Serb children who are in a segregated school play together at our camps, or when children who draw nationalistic Serb artwork bond with our Muslim interpreters. A bridge is built when, for example, our fourteen-year-old Serb interpreter Petar goes over to Emsuda, the Muslim woman who is sharing with us her story of surviving a Serb concentration camp, and gives her a hug and commends her for her courage.

We try to build bridges as well between our team of Americans and the Bosnian children and adults we serve and are served by. You can see it when the children make “shrinky-dink” medallions as gifts for ELCA High School Youth Gathering participants that have messages like “I love America” or “Bosnia + America = friends.”

above: me with Vladana, in Brcko
I see it personally in the special connections I build with the kids at the camps, like the 12-year-old girl named Vladana who gave me her “hug pillow” as a special gift this year, or the young boy named Pero who wrote me a thank you note in broken English at the end of camp. The great thing about returning is strengthening standing relationships, like my bond with the now fifteen-year-old girl named Ilma who I have been exchanging letters with every year since 2003, or the girl named Durđica who I bonded with in 2004 (because I was one of the few Americans who could pronounce her name) and have gotten to see two more times since then.

As always, words cannot adequately describe how amazing this trip was. It was eye-opening, life-changing, and uplifting. Like in the Muslim legend, this bridge-building truly is a gift from God. The best part about the trip this year, however, was that it didn’t have to end when I got back to the United States. New Jersey Synod, on a grant from Thrivent Financial, took a group of eighteen Americans and five of our Bosnian Muslim interpreters and friends (one of whom, Jasmin, is staying with my family) to the National Youth Gathering in San Antonio, Texas. For both weeks of the Gathering, we ran educational and interactive workshops and exhibits about Bosnia, the war that happened there, and NJ Synod’s responses to it. We wanted to educate young people, let them know that this sort of thing happened in Bosnia and is currently happening around the globe, and that there is something they can actually do about it.

The Gathering theme was “Cruzando: Journey with Jesus.” Cruzando is a Spanish word that literally means “crossing,” and the Gathering focused on expanding our horizons and crossing the literal and figurative borders we have in our lives, which fit in perfectly with our friendship camp theme of building bridges. In order to cross borders of apathy and ignorance, you have to build bridges of education and enthusiasm, and this is exactly what the American Lutherans and Bosnian Muslims on our team did with each other and tried to do with the Gathering participants.

The Gathering was a fantastic experience for all of us—we really got a lot out of it, and I think we contributed a lot to it as well, as we offered participants a very different experience than many of the other workshops and activities. For example, one of our workshops was the “Terrible Great Game,” a war simulation that gave people a small taste of what it is like to survive an ethnic cleansing. It was especially valuable that our Bosnian friends came with us to share their stories and experiences about the war with the teens at the Gathering—it’s one thing to read about a story, but to hear it first-hand is just so much more powerful.



We probably communicated directly with about 6,000 people at the Gathering through our booth and workshops, and I hope we helped some of them to cross borders and to look at the world in a new way. The first time I went to Bosnia, I crossed from my sheltered suburban world to a realization that there is more out there, and that though much of it is real, dark, scary, and different, it is beautiful. I think our team helped some of the youth we interacted with take a step closer to or come to a similar realization.

above: a sign at our booth in San Antonio