Ill share a little story with you… last dec I went to Osijek to visit my father’s sister, whom he hadnt seen for 50yrs. It was the first meeting for me with my aunt, uncle and 2 cousins. They showed me their old house where they lived when Osijek (which is 20km from Vukovar). The house was riddled with machine gun holes, they told me the couch and beds were disintegrated by bullets, there are still bullets embedded in the bathroom tiles… then they showed me the half-basement where the four of them hid for 4days during the worst seige, my cousin Peter was my age… he told me how he held my aunty in his arms as she sobbed, unsure whether they would live or die… And I in my head thought what was I doing at that time, Dec 1990… I was graduating from Architecture at University… unaware of any of this… then my uncle told me as the seige cleared and they slowed resumed their life, but still Osijek was under attack. They had a small land holding some 800m from their now bullet riddled home, where they grew vegetables to sell at the daily market… uncle and aunty walked their every day to tend their crop.. often enroute the Serbs would fire at them, my uncle would lay down to dodge the bullets and he would try to pull my aunty down with him, but my aunty stood tall, and would keep walking, and say “Im not laying down for any Serb”… they survived thru this… They built a new house now, and they still grew their vegetables and sold them at the daily market… in March this year my uncle was walking home from his days work at the vegetable patch and a reckless driver hit him, and he died at the scene… but not from Serb bullets… how sad is that, he lived thru the homeland war, he walked thru those bullets so many days, and he survived them, but this one simple walk home that day, he didnt survive… life is that fragile.
Like you I sat before these people, strangers to me until that day I met them, and felt so inadequate, so pathetic for all the times I complained about stupid, inane things in my life, and thanked God and my parents that I was fortunate enough to have been born in Australia, and that thur that fate, I am now able to enjoy living in my beloved homeland .
Keep on writing… And I’ll be waiting to read 🙂
Paula