Daily Tasks

MARKETPLACE

"Market rules were: you exchange what you've got for what you haven't got. For example, you barter 3 kg of tobacco for 1 kg of powdered milk, or cigarettes for flour and sugar. "

BARTER

"I made a flower shaped hair ornament, something unusual, and exchanged it for a pack of diapers, which was something I couldn't afford at the time. "

COFFEE

"I used to make grain coffee; usually of barley, but once I made it of lentils. I also tried rice and acorns. "

COMMUNICATIONS

"During the war radio amateurs passed more than 20 million messages. "

HOSPITAL

"Can you imagine that we assisted births by candlelight? There was one candle only in the entire maternity ward. One candle for two deliveries at the same time, one candle for three babies born at the same time. "

LIGHTING

"I made a lamp. I inserted an IV tube into the gas hose, and put an empty cartridge from a ballpoint pen at its other end; it created enough light to illuminate the room. "

HEATING

"As there was no electricity or gas, we had to cut branches or gather the paper to survive. "

GARDENS

"I improvised a windowsill sized garden, literally – on my windowsill. I had 27 kinds of vegetables. Zucchini flowers hanging from my window never failed to thrill passers-by. I had various types of peppers, including hot cow-horn ones."

SNIPER

"Suddenly you find yourself riveted to the spot: you're in the middle of the street, you're aware what this street is, and suddenly a sniper starts shooting but you cannot move. It's just for a moment – then you step up and go ahead."

FOOD

"I attended a dozen lunches or dinners organized under the motto 'Pick your lunch, catch your dinner'."

MOVING

"Trying to determine where the sniper spots were for four years under the siege created certain reflexes; and one had to get used to believing that barricades, to believing that containers (there were 380 containers) could somehow protect him. Or at least one thought they could."

HOSPITAL

"Imagine a man on the operating table in a room where temperature is -5°C. We practically worked in what medicine considers a kind of hibernation. Maybe that's why our patients were able to stand long and difficult surgical procedures. Hot meals were prepared in cauldrons supported over a fire. Laundry was done in the same way, an average of two tons of laundry was washed by hand every day."

WATER

"I was always waiting in line for water, as I could not take more than 70 liters at once."

TRANSPORT

"A lot of times I've been faced with a situation where it would be crazy enough to pass certain city parts by plane, let alone by bike, as they were regularly under sniper fire."

INVENTIONS

"I didn't invent anything, but I used to make hair shampoos from different plants."

RECIPES

"I used to make rice popcorn. You put oil in the pan and wait for it to heat up. Then you put rice and wait for it to swell and become golden. This is good both as a meal and as a snack, for entertainment."

MOVING

"I covered 14 kilometers every day."

FOOD

"There was only one oven in the whole neighborhood, so we all baked our bread there, we had to wait in line for 4-5 hours."

ESCAPE

"I did a lot of things, anything that promised distraction from the harsh everyday life."

TRAM

"We tried to protect trams any way we could. We set containers and our buses as sniper protection, and later on even pieces of cloth to prevent snipers from seeing when a tram was passing. Citizens thought that, although risky, it was easier to go by tram than to walk because walking was practically impossible. People had no shoes, they had no clothes, I know this as I often spoke with passengers. They used to say "You drive the tram, whoever's destined to survive will survive, who is not – there's nothing you can do.""

FEAR

"If someone was afraid, they said they were afraid. If someone loved someone, they immediately said it, they showed it clearly. If we wanted to give each other a hand, that's what we did."

RECIPES

"I often made natural herbs preparations. For example, a mixture of methylated alcohol and garlic as a remedy for dizziness and for general strengthening. Every day you take one drop more until you reach 25 drops. We maintained our strength with help of these mixtures. I shared it with my neighbors."

FEAT

"Walking around the city in order to survive – with shells falling around – is certainly a feat in itself."

COMMUNICATIONS

"We communicated with the outside world via satellite phones, humanitarian organizations, radio amateurs, foreign journalists, the UN, Jehovah's Witnesses, Caritas."

TRANSPORT

"A Golf was running on oil, and if we could spare some cooking oil we'd add it to diesel, the Golf would run on anything! It never broke down. It jumped up, drove downhill, uphill. I think that Golf saved Sarajevo."

INVENTIONS

"We went to bed as early as possible and got up as late as possible – this way we skipped at least one meal."

MOVING

"I used to cross streets running 300 kilometers per hour."

PETS

"People were amazed when I advised them to feed their dogs brewer's yeast as supplement. They thought the yeast would make dogs swell. A dog is not bread, the yeast cannot make it swell."

MOVING

"We used to run like hunted wild animals."

RECIPES

"I used to bake rice bread. Boil the rice well and mash it. Then add a little bit of grain flour and mix it together. This bread won't get hard even after three or four days.."

WATER

"I made a shower on my balcony. I tied a bucket to a beam so that the rain would fall into it. I soap myself and pull the rope, the bucket leans and I rinse myself with rainwater."

BASEMENT

"During heavy shelling we stayed in the stairway, just outside my apartment. All the neighbors from our floor and the floor above were there. We were lucky: we have never had a direct hit."

MOVING

"I moved around the city because I had nothing better to do."

TIPS

"Pick your lunch, catch your dinner!"

TRANSPORT

"We made a 'city train' pulled by a truck, and named it UNILOK 1000. This was a special vehicle that could move along both tram lines and roads. We constructed small railway axles so that the vehicle wouldn't jump off the rails, and attached to it three small railway carriages which used to be parts of local trains. There was a technical problem of braking control as this little train had to stop on makeshift stops. A truck is not equipped with a braking system that could be operated on tram lines but there were handbrakes in the railway carriages. So our train operators manually stopped this train when needed."

FREE TIME

"I was painting in my free time."

TIPS

"Nerves of steel and the patience of a saint."

FOOD

"I made an alfalfa salad – believe me that I have never had a tastier salad in my life. Two or three days after people realized it could be used as human food, alfalfa was no longer to be found anywhere in Sarajevo."

TIPS

"In my experience, you have to keep moving."

RADIO

"I connected a radio to the bicycle dynamo with a piece of wire. I pedaled producing electricity and listening to the radio."

HEATING

"In '92 we put our winter clothes on and didn't take them off the whole winter. We slept in our clothes because of the night shelling, we often had to get up and go to the basement."

FREE TIME

"When I had free time, I spent it with my friends."

TRANSPORT

"We used to ride a bicycle, we moved faster but nevertheless had to pass the so-called dangerous points, where everybody was exposed to sniper fire of invisible enemy. In those moments you believed you had an advantage for bikes passed those points faster than pedestrians. However, cyclists were often hurt as well."

TIPS

"Laughter, humor, jokes..."

MOVING

"I walked around the city mostly because I would have gone crazy if locked in the house the whole time."

CHILDREN

"Every time I passed a test at school, the paper from which I learned was passed to my mom for lighting a fire, and while the fire was on, I'd sit by it to read and learn something else while there was still light."

COMMUNICATIONS

"Letters traveled for up to four months."

GARDENS

"I have chard in my garden, and potatoes, and pumpkin, tomatoes, onions."

HOME FOR ELDERLY PEOPLE

"You can imagine the problems and the trouble of providing water when you needed two thousand liters a day. No matter the shortages, patients were never left without a meal, and no one got any disease. The staff, as many of us that found themselves in this job, have done the possible for these people to feel safe because we were there for them."

LIGHTING

"I made countless types of lamps to help me to move around the apartment when there was night shelling."

DEFIANCE

"I dress up out of spite."

FOOD

"We were picking leaves beside the Miljacka River, we'd pick some coltsfoot and slice it for lunch."

PETS

"There was no way I could make my dog to leave the building, and that made me angry and annoyed. But there was a good reason for his behavior, and it became obvious when shelling started a few seconds after that. From then on none of my neighbors went out without previously checking if my dog was willing to go."

FEAT

"Pursuit of water while not being sure if you'd come back alive was no mean feat given that it was done under continuous shelling."

PARTIES

"My friends and I were partying for no reason, just to relax. We used truck batteries to listen to the music."

INVENTIONS

"I made a shoe polish."

FOOD

"I planted seeds of Japanese tomato in a flowerpot on my balcony. I was eating sweet Japanese tomatoes the whole summer long."

WEDDING

"I got married during the war. My husband's friends paid for a (two day) honeymoon trip at the Sarajevo Holiday Inn. It was awesome and I will never forget it."

FEAR

"People began to realize that it was normal to feel fear. That it was alright to be afraid and to cry, or to scream, that that was the way, a way, of releasing stress."

RECIPES

"I was inventing recipes. One of them is for bean pie. Boil the beans well, add some onion and pepper, if you've got any, and mash all that spreading it over filo pastry sheets. Then you bake it; it's a real specialty."

FOOD

"I saw a fish in the river, a trout, and didn't dare say it to my fellow fishermen. I went home although snipers were shooting along the river. I took my equipment, but I had no baits so I had to find an earthworm, and I did catch the trout with it. What a joy it was!"

MOVING

"I moved around the city in order to find food and water. There was no place where you could be safe from shelling and sniper fire."

BASEMENT

"We didn't have a real basement; when there was shelling, we sat in the staircase, I even slept there a few times, seated on a stair."

HEALTH

"People were desperate, there was shooting all over the place, but I was the happiest in the world because I was pregnant!"

INVENTIONS

"I made a small cooking stove. I took a big tin can and placed in it a smaller one filled with water. I lit some paper in the larger can and the flame heated water and food in the smaller can."

MARKETPLACE

"Out of three old bikes I made a decent one and sold it for good money."

TIPS

"Relax, be cool, be focused and ready for change, be creative, use your intellect, and do everything with a bit of humor."

RECIPES

"We were very careful with bread, taking care that everyone got at least the minimum needed to deceive hunger, but if during the day we didn't eat all the bread we had we'd use the leftovers to prepare a specialty: cevapcici made of bread crumbs. All Bosnians love cevapcici."

LIGHTING

"We made small oil lamps by getting a ribbon or cord wick through a cork."

DEFIANCE

"I'm going to 'work' out of spite."

SNIPER

"I stand between the buildings and watch the clock. After the first shot, I count the seconds to the next. Approximately 15 to 20 seconds. When I feel I'm ready, I wait for the next shot and start running across the avenue: had to cross it in 15 seconds. Fear is a fantastic thing: you stop feeling your legs, your muscles stop working, there is no air in your lungs."

SCHOOL

"At the end of each class teachers would tell us: Be careful. We greeted them with 'How are you?' There was no 'Hello' and 'Goodbye' any more. Even greetings totally changed. We didn't have to all rise when teachers entered the classroom, because they respected us as much as we respected them, we all lived in the same hell, and there was no need to be too formalistic."

CULTURE

"It was easy to figure out the meaning of life and death. Alcestis is a play exactly about that. Alcestis is a woman willing to sacrifice herself and die instead of her husband. We've all been in similar situations: shall I go to get some water and let my husband stay at home this time, or my children, or whoever. In a way we were all willing to sacrifice ourselves."

DOCTORATE

"I waited until late at night for the gas supply to be turned on so that I could work on my doctorate."

SPORT

"It was the 800 meter race. Children were warming up in the channel and on the north side of the stadium which was protected from shots from the outside. After the warming up, we gathered the children in a place different from where races usually start, because the actual 800 meter start was on the other side, the one that was not safe. The children started off in a moment when no one knew whether it was day or night, with just enough light for the athletes to see where to run, but staying in a sort of shadow so that they couldn't be seen by snipers. We asked the young athletes to wear maroon jerseys – maroon being the color of the running race track."

FEAT

"Except surviving one day after the other, I have achieved nothing else, but this in itself was a heroic feat, in my view."

MOVING

"I used to walk hiding behind shelter containers and buildings."

FEAT

"The most important one is that I stayed in one piece, and I graduated from university."

TIPS

"I isolated myself from the media and the news in order to maintain high motivation."

FOOD

"Every citizen of Sarajevo was entitled to 1,250 grams of beans, 300 grams of sugar, 300 grams of oil and 1 kg of flour from humanitarian aid."

BREAD

"That period was really difficult for bakers. All of us would come to the bakery regularly, and then wait for the electricity, or oil, or gas. Our motto was 'there must be bread' as we knew that bread was the only food that could be obtained in Sarajevo at the time."

READING

"During the war I was mainly reading books. They were my true peace of mind."

DEFIANCE

"I sleep long and soundly."

FEAT

"I stayed human."

GARDENS

"And when we got some spring greens it was a great joy, a leaf of a cabbage plant on our dining table was a real feast at the time."

CHILDREN

"We use to make puppet shows in our staircase."

FEAT

"I survived all of this and I haven't gone insane."

COMMUNICATIONS

"The aggressor blocked all telecommunications. And the destruction of the city begun."

EXCHANGE OF GOODS

"For a pair of boots you could get a kilo or two of sugar. There was a new market value system: a car cost 2 DM and a kilogram of sugar 100 DM."

SHELLING

"The shelling used to start at 9 o'clock; after some time at 10 o'clock, and then they change the rhythm and you could never sure of the timetable. We were often throwing ourselves on the floors."

SNIPER

"All the city streets were exposed to the most accurate sniper fire. There was not a single 50 meter length of street not exposed to it. That was a special kind of terror: it was made clear that there was no freedom of movement and that no movement was permitted on the streets. It can be said that such a thing has not been recorded in the history of urban areas, and the situation lasted for four years."

BLOCKADE

"On 4 May 1992 a circle 60 kilometers in circumference closed around Sarajevo. Sixty thousand (meters) divided by 2,100 (that's how many pieces of artillery were deployed around Sarajevo) tells you that at every 35 meters there was an artillery piece."

AIRPORT

"Each UNHCR or UNPROFOR plane brought 30 tons of food and first aid supplies to Sarajevo. It was the longest airlift in the history of aviation, in the history of modern warfare: 467 days longer than the Berlin one."

WATER

"All the city water sources were kept by the aggressor; the water supply was reduced from a total of 2,500 l/s (before the war) to a flow rate of 5 l/ s coming from a small water source within the city, and the Hrasnica source at the city outskirts with approximately 30-40 liters per second."

TIPS

"The invention for survival: work and work only, it's best to keep your mind occupied by work."

ELECTRICITY

"The Electro Distribution workers were doing their best to repair the transmission lines. It often happened that a transmission pole was raised only to be knocked down during the following night. The workers sometimes had to climb the same pole as many as 15 times to replace a damaged insulator.."

BREAD

"When the French president Mitterrand arrived to Sarajevo, he brought a plastic bag with 2-3 kg of yeast, and he promised to the French peacekeeping forces that France would send us larger amounts of dry yeast at the earliest opportunity. Seven days later the first quantity of dry yeast arrived to Sarajevo."

TRANSPORT

"It is an extraordinary experience! To ride a bike at night in a city full of holes, with opponents who also drive with no lights – on the other side."

SCHOOL

"It was extremely cold. Students would bring bags of firewood, one log at a time, and we'd collect enough for two or three fires – enough to mitigate the cold air in the classroom as otherwise it wouldn't be possible to work in there. Students were coming to school between shellings."

INVENTIONS

"I made little stoves using tin cans and pieces of tin. They were good only for brewing coffee or tea."

HEALTH

"During the siege, I lost 15 kilograms, but I was healthy."

TIPS

"I have no other tip but: all you need is work."

CIGARETTES

"I smoke chamomile wrapped in newspaper, and from time to time I smoked lime leaves."

TIPS

"I worked so much and I was so tired – physically and mentally – that sleep was the best medicine."

WATER

"So once I got fever in the evening, which meant I could not go to fetch water. But during the night I wrap my feet in cold vinegar packs and the fever was gone. My wife said "I'm afraid to on my own" and so, with vinegar packs and all, I put my children's big shoes on and go with her to fetch water."

HEATING

"I spent one whole winter without heating; then I obtained a stove and next winter kept the fire lit with anything that could burn: plastic, rubber, textiles, shoes. Later on we got gas, but only from time to time."

FREE TIME

"I studied English and was preparing my exams."

FEAR

"I was doing my best to hide my fear of death but it was noticeable nevertheless. I was aware that everybody who knew me noticed it, but – whatever happened, gunfire and the war – in every possible way I tried not to show my fear of dying."

WATER

"Once the water pump was set, if there was a sniper threat we'd stay on watch during the day, to make sure that only two persons at a time approach the pump while others waited behind a building or any other object offering protection from snipers and shells."

PARTIES

"There was no electricity at the time, so we guys from school pedaled the bike all day to fill in an accumulator. The girls made cookies and one of them brought a bottle of champagne her father had been saving for her graduation ceremony."

HOSPITAL

"When coming on duty, we used to bring some water, or a log, everyone brought whatever they could. That was the only way; we would put those logs in the oven to dry a little bit, but also to warm them up so that we could hold them to warm our hands; we didn't want to touch patients with hands so cold, especially the young children."

SPORT

"I played tennis – in the basement, of course."

HUNG OUT

"I had a lot of free time, and used to hung out with some new pals."

READING

"I spent it reading because that relaxed me and made me forget the everyday life."

FREE TIME

"I enrolled in college and walked to my classes every day."

ESCAPE

"I tried to feel as good as possible."

HEATING

"All gas installations were beyond the siege lines. The aggressor cut all gas supply to the city, they simply closed all gas valves."

CHILDREN

"The most significant event was the birth of my son."

HOSPITAL

"It was so cold that sometimes patients slept together under several blankets, wearing their coats, and scarves, woolly hats, gloves."

FOOD

"Lunch packs we were getting through humanitarian aid seemed magical at the time. We could make a lunch for five people from one savory ready-made meal wrapped in foil. So the whole family would have a good lunch, relatively speaking."