Scream for Me Sarajevo

My name is Jasenko Pašić.

I was too young during the war to be interested.

In 2008, I got a job as an actor at the Sarajevo War Theatre

which was very exciting for me because I started discovering

completely new dimensions of life under the siege.

This is one such story.

IN BOSNIAN CULTURAL CENTRE AT 1800 - 14 DECEMBER 1994

You can't escape war.

The war is there. You can only hide in some corner.

I think I was at the Obala club when somebody picked me up,

told me there was a concert. So I took my film rolls and went.

The concert passed in a sort of haze.

That's why I probably took so many photos.

I surely wouldn't have used seven rolls of film

had it not been for the energy and the madness.

I might have used my last seven rolls.

The entire atmosphere with the audience and all that

took me back to different times, to a life I lived before

and the things I did before the war.

I come from a normal family,

from an inter-ethnic marriage,

a concept unknown to me at the time.

My mother was an Orthodox Christian

and my father was a Muslim.

It feels weird to think about it now,

some 21 or 22 years later.

To think, as a mature man, about what was in your head at 14.

My mother wanted me to be a nice boy,

but I discovered rock 'n' roll, I started to grow my hair

and wear Statement t-shirts.

Watching American films, I had two versions of my life dream:

to drive motorbikes and trucks or possibly to fix them.

My mum had a different ambition.

She never wanted her child to get his hands dirty.

So my second option was the arts.

There began my wandering between the two.

Hi, Vanja, I just arrived.

Hey!

We were kids. Feda Štukan was the popular one.

He was like... so cool. But we were always friends.

Before the war, Sarajevo lived

like it does today during the Sarajevo Film Festival.

That's how it used to live every day.

Next to Hotel Beograd, Hotel Bosnia now,

that street and the whole square were packed with people.

You couldn't walk in front of the National Theatre

because of all the cafes and people.

I got into computers and drawing early on,

as I noticed I could get a lot from both computers and pencils.

I was quiet and shy, I was staying at home a lot.

I was reading, watching SF movies, drawing,

and that was my world.

Until the war came.

When the war came, we thought it would soon be over.

We wanted to play, buy new records, albums.

But it was no longer possible.

Another life started for us, in the underground.

Hello!

It was Eid.

There was a party so I got out with a case of dark Laško beer.

I got in my Fiat and by the time I got home,

my police station had already fallen.

There had been some roadblocks

and they sorted it out in two to three days.

I thought it was another foolish incident.

Honestly, none of us expected real war to start the next day,

and people to start dying.

At first, we were excited. "School is out."

"Yay, no school. Why?"

"Some kind of a mess."

"What mess?" Our crew from Marijin Dvor went to find out.

There were some protests and petition signing.

They collected signatures for peace, for YuTel TV.

We knew some shit was going on,

but we thought it was nothing serious.

We are not giving our Bosnia away!

I have an older sister. She went out that day.

When she got back home, she said there was a lot of turmoil,

some shooting and unrest in front of the Army Hall.

Suddenly, a beautiful sunny day turned into hell.

Nobody knew there would be a war.

This is where the frontline was, some 50 metres from my house.

It was the frontline in this part of the city

and we were right on it, totally unaware. At least, I was.

Then the shelling of the city and the snipers started,

and the killing of so many children and people.

You walk around the city, see everything torn down.

Many buildings were set on fire.

I saw Sutjeska cinema burned down to the ground.

Everything is filthy and torn down.

The department store was also destroyed.

Trees were cut down.

I saw an old woman, a farmer, walking around with a cow.

In the middle of Titova Street.

It was a cultural shock for me.

In the capital city I grew up in,

I see a cow in Titova Street.

The worst for me was the winter of 1992,

November or December.

My mum was making a fire on the balcony to make us lunch.

The smoke was getting in her eyes, making her cry.

She didn't know what to do. It was a struggle just to live.

I was 14 and didn't really know how to help her.

The normal life you had was gone, nothing was normal any more.

When this evil started in 1992, we couldn't understand it.

We were too young to understand why the shit started.

We took it as the worst horror imaginable.

To me the greatest shock was

the systematic burning of buildings.

Even then, as a 14-year-old kid, I could not understand

why they were burning down Zetra sports hall, for example.

You realise it has nothing to do with...

That something else is at stake.

You realise they're burning down Vijećnica,

the Olympic Museum, all the things we were proud of.

From 1984 to 1992, everybody from Sarajevo,

every Bosnian and honestly, every Yugoslav was proud of

the Olympic Games that took place here.

I only knew that they came, surrounded Sarajevo

and started shooting at us.

As my mother was an Orthodox, they started calling our house.

They threatened her and told her to leave the house

and the Muslim she was living with

as well as her children, and to cross to their side.

Then you realise it is not a dream.

I remember running under sniper fire and shells.

I went all over the city on my bike.

I felt no fear at all,

until one evening I went to visit my friend Alma in Breka.

I was going up Dalmatinska Street when shelling started.

For the first time I felt fear, a panicked sort of fear.

I started running up Dalmatinska, trying to hide.

When I felt that fear of shell fire,

I realised the war and terror had begun.

My brother was shot.

Like all the other kids, he liked collecting shrapnel.

He didn't listen to our mum and ran out after the first shell.

The aggressors would fire the first shell, wait a bit,

then fire a few more when we'd start removing the wounded.

So when my kid brother, nine-and-a-half years younger,

jumped out with a friend to collect shrapnel,

a shell fell between his friend's legs.

It's unclear how the kid survived.

My brother got hit on both of his legs.

Wounded and covered in blood, he ran up the stairs,

as we lived on the 4th floor. Mum met him on the 2nd.

That was the big moment, when I saw my brother wounded.

It's different when other people get hurt,

when it's not happening to you.

But when it is somebody close to you,

like my brother was to me...

He was small, innocent, unprotected, and injured.

That's when the war started in me.

It was either surrendering to it and go nuts

or accepting things as they were, stand up straight

and do the right thing at the right moment.

I had a house, a homeland. It was my duty to defend it.

It was my honour.

We had some phones,

we would occasionally talk with someone from the other side.

Once, we talked with some buddies we knew from school,

our friends, until recently.

They called a few times, warning us

that in the next two days, the situation would worsen,

with heavier shelling,

as some volunteers were coming from Montenegro or Serbia

and they were going to unleash hell,

so we needed to be careful.

There were so many shells.

Once, I went out and saw some dead birds in the street.

There were so many shrapnel fragments and bullets in the air

that all the birds were shot dead and laying on the ground.

Not much to say. 1992 was a shock,

an adjustment to the new situation.

You simply decide,

"OK, there we are, so, let's live our lives

the best way we can."

So we were left to organise new living arrangements.

For us that meant some sort of war schools.

People were sent to the army or had wartime work duty.

When you start war school, you get a timetable.

Thunder from above and from all sides, and you attend classes,

trying to learn stuff and pass a test.

Both young and old, we said,

"It won't ruin our lives, break our spirit.

"You won't stop me from going to school,

doing a concert, even if it kills me."

But in 1993, some sort of "normal" life began.

But it was that. Anyone will say so.

Theatre plays started at the Chamber Theatre.

People threw concerts at Sloga and Obala.

Things were organised in basements,

any area that was safe.

The culture we had during the war will never happen again.

People were without money, but did things from the heart.

We wanted to show those monkeys that we were living our lives.

It was a great risk.

I remember the premiere of "Shelter" was announced.

You didn't know where or what.

It was performed in Kabare at the Youth Theatre