Projects: Innocents: Innocents Lost

Innocents Lost

When the Serbs came to our door, they gave us five minutes to get out. We couldn’t take anything with us, except two blankets.

The soldiers made us go to a concentration camp at my school. All the tables and chairs were broken, and they had ripped our art work from the bulletin board. I wanted to scream, but my mother said, “Shut up. If they hear you, they will kill you.”

They put the men behind barbed wire, and the women and children in the schoolrooms. We were always cold, because it was winter, and the windows were broken. Some days our neighbors brought us food, but usually we had nothing to eat.

At first the soldiers said they would protect us, but little by little they killed us. Children were not allowed to cry. I learned to keep my mind and face blank,
so that I would not die.

One day the guards took a three-year-old boy and hung him from the swing set. They made everyone watch. My mother put my head down, so that no one could see me crying. Later they killed his mother, too.

What I miss most from before the war is my doll. She was a real doll, made from cotton, with a bonnet. My father gave her to me before he died. In the refugee camp, the Red Cross gave me a Barbie doll, but she isn’t real — you can’t hug her. Still I take her to bed with me, and talk with her and tell her fairy tales. Sometimes I say, “Barbie, we are going back to Bosnia soon.”

Alisa Canovic, 12
Prijedor, Bosnia