The Wolf of Sarajevo (5 page)

“Take a look at the flags,” Eric said. The lead tank was flying a tricolor flag with horizontal stripes of red, blue, and white. Similar flags were flying from the antennae of the self-propelled guns digging in for whatever exercise was under way.

“What is that? Serbian?”

“That's the flag of Republika Srpska.”

“I thought Bosnia had a unified army now. Wasn't that the one major accomplishment of post-Dayton integration?”

“It was,” Eric agreed. “But that deal has broken down and the army has splintered. Most of the heavy weapons belong to the RS now.”

“Is Dimitrović right, Eric?” Annika asked sadly, after they had navigated their way past the army encampment. They were driving through a small town of crumbling timber-and-wattle homes. It had been a mixed village before the war, with most of the villagers identifying themselves as Yugoslavs to the census takers. Now, the village was almost entirely Serb and it had something of the air of a ghost town. The High Representative's mood seemed to match that of the town, tired and forlorn.

“Right about what?”

“This,” she said, gesturing out the window. “That the people here can't live together, that they won't live together, that they're better off apart.”

“The old ancient hatreds argument?”

“Yes. What if it's true? What does that mean for Bosnia's future and what we're trying to do?”

“I don't think it is true,” Eric said, trying to project conviction, knowing how easy it was for peacemakers in the Balkans to slip into a kind of fatalistic despair about a region that seemed to work so hard at resisting accommodation and compromise. “Or rather, I don't think it's necessarily true. The reality is that the ethnic groups in this part of the world have lived together in relative peace for longer than they've been killing one another. Mixed marriages were common here before the war.”

“And what about Srebrenica? Or Jasenovac?” During the Second World War, the Nazi puppet regime in Croatia had murdered hundreds of thousands of Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies. The most notorious death camp, Jasenovac, was a cultural touchstone for the Serb side every bit as powerful as Srebrenica was for the Bosniaks or as Vukovar, the object of a vicious three-month siege at the outbreak of the Yugoslav wars, was for the Croats. Bosnia did not have a single history. It had three self-contained narratives.

“This isn't Disneyland,” Eric said. “History here offers up plenty of violence, shocking violence. And it's often organized along ethnic lines. But history is not destiny. When Tito died, the Communist Party held Yugoslavia together with Scotch Tape and glue for ten years. But in the end, it couldn't survive the end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. Nationalist feelings had been suppressed under the communists, not eliminated. Ethnic
nationalism was there right under the surface. It offered people a sense of identity, of belonging. The violence didn't have to be a part of that picture. A few leaders—MiloÅ¡ević on the Serb side, Tuđman in Zagreb, and even Izetbegović in Sarajevo—used nationalism to promote themselves. To take power. The more they took, the more they wanted, and like Mao said, ‘It's easy to ride the tiger. What's hard is getting off.'”

“But the hatred, the intolerance, it all seemed so real, so visceral. Was it all just made up?”

“Oh, it's real enough. The anger is real. The bitterness is real. The sense of historical grievance on the part of all the parties is real. Just about everyone in this part of the world carries around a mental ledger of historical injustices, and the books are never balanced.”

“But aren't the Serbs the ones responsible for what happened here?”

“Depends on where you want to start the narrative. It's largely true if you want to start the clock in 1991. But the Serbs don't start it there. They look back to 1941. Some go back to the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 as the starting point. And we in the West don't always understand it. Did you ever read Rebecca West's book
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
?”

“Well, I bought it, but I'd be lying if I said I read it.”

“It is awfully long,” Eric agreed. “Eleven hundred pages to describe a six-week trip through Yugoslavia in the thirties. She's not a great writer either, but she was a very perceptive observer. She wrote that Westerners who spend time in the Balkans have the unfortunate habit of adopting one of the nationalities as their pet, the one that can do no wrong. As she put it, ‘Eternally the massacree and never the massacrer.'”

“So Jasenovac explains Srebrenica?”

“No. Nothing can explain Srebrenica. And nothing can justify it. It was a singular act of evil.”

“Can we just ignore the history? Tell them it doesn't matter?”

“We can't. It's a part of what makes this place what it is. It makes the people who they are. I saw something similar up close with my grandparents. They were from a village near Trabzon on the Black Sea where they grew the sweetest grapes on planet Earth, or so my grandfather assured me. His family were farmers. My grandmother's father was a shopkeeper. They were only teenagers when the Ottoman troops started burning the Armenian villages. The soldiers drowned tens of thousands in the sea and left the bodies floating on the surface like pack ice. My grandparents were the only two people from their village to survive. They eventually drifted to America on a postwar tide of refugees, got married, built a good life. But they never really left the village. Even after almost seven decades in sunny Southern California, they considered themselves villagers from Trabzon. Old Grandpa Petrosian had a photograph of his family's farm, a sepia-toned picture of grape arbors and haystacks that he kept on his desk. Both the land and the genocide had worked their way deep into his soul, into his blood and bone. It was who he was.”

“And they never went back to the village? Just to see it again.”

“Go to Turkey? No way in hell. They wouldn't even eat turkey.”

Annika's smile was tired but genuine.

“I hope you don't mean to tell me that it's all hopeless.”

“Not at all. We can't ignore the history, but that doesn't mean we should let it be the driver of policy, to dismiss them all as
prisoners of their own prejudice. We overcome it. And that means we have to understand it. To share in the historical memory.”

“Memory does seem to be something of a local specialty in the Balkans. It's like what Talleyrand said about the Bourbons: ‘They have learned nothing and forgotten nothing.'”

“Yes,” Eric agreed sadly. “They remember. They remember everything. Even things that never happened.”

JASENOVAC

MARCH 20, 1942

T
he gruel was thin and tasteless, a few lumps of starch mixed with water from the river that had not been boiled long enough to sterilize it. Natasa pushed away the battered tin cup that was almost her sole earthly possession with an expression of disgust. Her cousin, Ivan, pushed it back.

“You have to eat, Natasa.”

They were sitting on the back steps of the barracks. The wood was slick with mud and slime, but there was no place else. They were lucky. Most of the prisoners ate standing up. A few crouched in the muddy yard bent over their cups and bowls like dogs.

“Eat,” Ivan said, gently this time.

“I won't. It's disgusting.”

“It's life, Natasa. If you don't eat, you die.”

“I'll die anyway.”

“Maybe,” Ivan acknowledged. “Maybe even probably, but if you don't eat, you'll end up a
muselmann
first.”

The
muselmanner
were the living dead. Skeletons. They were empty husks who had lost the will to perform the most basic human functions. They would not eat or sleep or clean themselves. Some shuffled mindlessly through the camp moaning softly. Some cowered in the darkest corners of the common buildings, their rough cotton pants soiled with urine and feces. They were no longer human. The Croatian guards called them
muselmanner
. It was the German word for Muslims. The Croatian fascists, the Ustaše, must have picked it up from their Nazi overlords.

“Why do they use that word?” Natasa asked, as she grudgingly took a sip of the dirty water that passed as soup.

“I think it's because of the ones who lie curled up on the floor like Muslims in prayer. Don't worry about it, Natasa, don't worry about anything except living one more day.”

Ivan smiled and Natasa felt warmer even though the March weather was damp and cold. The winter had been harsh. Thousands of prisoners had died of malnutrition and exhaustion. Thousands more had been judged too weak to work and sent to the brick factory. What happened there no one knew for certain, but no one ever came back from the factory. The clouds of ash that spewed from the factory's tall chimney were thick and black and reeked of death.

Natasa finished her soup and firmly rebuffed Ivan's efforts to give her the last few swallows of his serving. Ivan was only a few years older than Natasa—twenty to her fifteen. But he acted as though he were the grown-up and Natasa the child. She did not mind so much. She wanted so desperately to be a child.

He had always been protective of her even back in the village near Mount Kozara, where the fields were fertile, the streams clean and clear, and the larders full of smoked meat and cheese, apricots and honey. That was before the madness.

Ivan's father and Natasa's mother had been brother and sister. They were dead, along with their spouses. Natasa's father had died back in the village resisting deportation by the Croatian fascists. Her mother had died in the fall from typhus. Ivan's father had died before the war, and his mother had been taken to the brick factory soon after their arrival in the camp. She had always been somewhat frail.

There were a few others in the camp who Natasa knew, even a couple of distant relatives. But Ivan was the only one she was close to. This was not a place you made friends.

There was nothing alive in the camp. No trees. No grass. No flowers. Nothing beautiful. Everything was colored in muted shades of gray and brown. Outside the barbed-wire fence, the landscape was covered in ash from the furnaces.

In truth, Natasa was not entirely sure why they were here. Ivan said it was just because they were Serbs, and the blue ribbon pinned to her thin jacket marked her as a Serb as clearly as the Jews were identified by their yellow stars and the communist Partisans by a red badge. Only the Gypsies were not marked by a color, and they largely kept to themselves in a part of the camp that was if anything even more squalid and fetid than the block of wooden shacks where Natasa and Ivan worked and slept. It was unfair, Natasa complained. They had not done anything wrong—nothing except to be born Serbs. But that seemed to be crime enough.

A pack of guards in their warm black greatcoats marched into
the yard as though they were on parade. Weapons hung over their shoulders or across their backs like oiled serpents.

“Oh, to be young . . . and fascist,” Ivan said, with the wry smile that not even a year in a concentration camp had been able to take from him.

“They do seem happy,” Natasa agreed.

The guards spread out, kicking a few of the prisoners to their feet.

“Up, you bastards,” Natasa heard one of the guards shout as he slammed a leather boot into the ribs of an older man who was slow to rise.

The prisoner, a Partisan to judge by the red badge on his threadbare jacket, lay in the mud on his side unable to or unwilling to stand. It was hard to believe that this old man was a fearsome guerrilla fighter. Maybe he was being punished for a son who had joined the communists. The guard swung one leg back as though preparing to kick him again then seemed to change his mind. There was no point to it. The prisoner was too weak to be of any value. Instead, he pulled a fingerless leather glove from the pocket of his greatcoat and strapped it tightly to his right hand with practiced ease. A short curved blade was built into the glove. It stuck out like the sharp spur on the gamecocks that the village men used to wager on. The guards called it the
Srbosjek
—the Serb cutter. It was good for only one thing, cutting throats. But that it did very, very well.

Within seconds, the elderly prisoner was lying dead in a puddle of mud and blood. The guards left him there. A team of prisoners on corpse duty would be by soon enough to add him to the pile of bodies waiting to be dumped into mass graves or burned in the great ovens at the brick factory.

Natasa felt nothing at watching the old man's death. It was one
of hundreds of murders she had witnessed. One of thousands of dead bodies. Death would come for them all. A part of her, the part that was still a girl from a large family in a small village, despaired at her own lack of feeling. This act of senseless violence should have filled her with horror. That it did not, that she had grown numb to the brutality of the camp, made her wonder if in some important way she was not already dead.

“Come on,” Ivan said, helping her to her feet. “Let's get to the factory before little Adolf takes an interest in us.”

He rose unsteadily to his feet. Malnutrition brought on spells of dizziness and vertigo. Ivan extended a bony arm to Natasa to help her to her feet. The skin on the back of his hand was like parchment paper. The veins under the skin stood out in sharp relief. Her cousin had once been handsome, with strong features and curly brown hair. The features had hardened into something vulpine, and his head was shaved to deter lice. Ivan was no longer handsome, but he was her whole world. Natasa did not know what she would do if she lost him. It would be the end of her.

They shuffled through the camp toward the factory where they stamped sheet metal into bowls and plates for the Croatian army. It took almost five minutes to cover the three hundred meters. None of the prisoners had the energy to do more than push themselves forward at a speed just above a pace that would earn a kick or a club from one of the guards. No one seemed to care. The goal of Jasenovac was not efficient production. The goal was extermination. The world had gone mad.

“Factory” was perhaps too grandiose a term for the building where they worked. It was just a single-story wooden structure, no
different from the overcrowded barracks. The carpentry was shoddy, but the roof at least did not leak. The machines inside were valuable. The factory was a relatively good work assignment. The prisoners who worked the fields or those sent to dig coal in the mines did not last long. The factory work was at least indoors.

This was a shift change. The factory never closed. The machines ran twenty-four hours a day, and the prisoners worked in twelve-hour shifts. The guards would have worked them harder, but the death rate among the workers was too high. The prisoners were expected to die when the Croats told them to, not on their own schedule.

Natasa went about her job like an automaton, moving slowly to conserve energy. If they were lucky, there would be beans for dinner. If not, it would be half a litre of turnip soup. The diet offered barely enough calories to stay alive.

Natasa's job was to dip the bowls into a vat of enamel and stack them to dry. She did it again and again, thinking of nothing. Ivan was working the stamping machine alongside a tall blond girl from Zagreb named Jelena. Natasa and Ivan were from a village and they were used to hard physical labor. Jelena was the daughter of a physician, and she had trained as a pianist. She was stick thin and her blond hair was falling out in clumps, but there was a vestige of her former beauty that had survived life in the camp. Tuberculosis had given her skin a glow that could almost have been mistaken for health.

Ivan was sweet on Jelena. Natasa saw him pull something from his pocket, a small hunk of black bread, it looked like, and press it into Jelena's hand. She tried to give it back, but not too hard. The second time he pressed it on her, she kept it.

One of the guards had seen them, however. And not just any guard.

He was an enormous villager from Herzegovina with a face as round as the moon and a sadistic streak that was well known to the prisoners, who called him the Hand of Satan. He was one of the guards who always wore his
Srbosjek
and he used it without provocation.

“What's in your pocket?” he demanded of Jelena

She looked at her feet.

“Nothing,” she said dully. It was a mistake. You should always make eye contact with the guards when you lie to them, Natasa knew.

Jelena turned out the pocket of her coat. It was empty.

The guard reached for her wrist and turned her hand over. The crust of bread was clutched in her palm.

“Food in the factory is forbidden,” he said menacingly. The Hand of Satan reached for a wooden truncheon at his belt.

“Stop!” Ivan screamed, as he stepped in between Jelena and the guard. “The bread is mine. I brought it into the factory. The punishment is mine.”

“Very well,” the guard agreed.

He slipped the truncheon back into the holster on his belt. Natasa stood rooted to the floor.

With a single smooth motion, the guard swung his Serb cutter across Ivan's throat. Her cousin's neck was so thin that she could hear the scraping sound as the razor-sharp knife cut into the bone.

Blood arcing from Ivan's neck fell on Jelena like a red rain, soaking into her clothes and the piece of bread she still held in her hand.

Natasa slumped to the cement floor, her vision gray and blurry.
The guard hit Jelena casually with the back of his hand, knocking her head against the stamping machine. The doctor's daughter fell alongside Ivan. Dead maybe. Maybe not. It didn't matter.

The guard turned to look at Natasa as though seeing her for the first time.

“Clean this up,” he commanded.