What seems to interest the world the most about Bosnia is the recent four-year-long war though our country has plenty of other distinctions. Festivals and the 1984 Winter Olympics had brought many international visitors and media here before. For those of us who lived the war, there is no fascination, but rather disbelief that we survived and how.

In 1992, life as we had known it before stopped. This country was a cage for about four million people for more than 1,000 days. We didn’t have any electricity, so we couldn’t listen to the radio or watch TV. We lived in crowded basements with our neighbors, suffering together. That was a time we learned how to respect each other and sympathize. We shared all, the good and the bad. How can I describe to outsiders what it is to sit crouched with one another, hearing the world overhead explode, wondering if we would find our flats and friends when we could emerge? This solidarity kept us alive.

We often didn’t have any food or drink. If anything, we ate stale rations provided by humanitarian organizations. We called their hard biscuits which had to be soaked in whatever liquid available “Viet Nam cakes.” They were unhealthful. For water to drink, we had to go a few kilometers with as many containers as we could carry, sometimes under bombing. We never knew if we would come back alive. Indeed, a lot of us didn’t make it.

Theatres, cinemas, and pubs were opened only rarely. “School” was conducted in cellars, lessons maybe held once a week. We students could study only if we got next to a candle. It was at least a way to forget the hard times.

Now our minds are on a better future. I don’t want anyone else to see a picture of her friends’ mother headless in a swanky coffee table book with a caption. We ourselves must learn not to feel bitterness just because of someone’s last name, whether characteristically Muslim, Croat, or Serb. Fortunately, we are alive and determined to go on.