Bearing Witness

I was almost fourteen years old when things became a mess. My school was half Serbian, half Muslim, but no one recognized the difference, and we were all together. My best friend was a Serbian girl named Boriana. One day, she told me as we were coming back from school, “Lejla, fill buckets or whatever you have in the house with water. If you have food, put it in the house.” I said, “Why?” She said, “I cannot tell you.” But she knew it, they knew it, that it was going to start. Serbians knew it, but we didn’t. I didn’t see Boriana again after that day.

In the beginning they were shooting, shooting, shooting, but they hadn’t begun to kill yet. They were only in the sky, and it was like that for two or three days. My sister and I went to my aunt’s house, and one night we heard people outside the buildings. It was Serbs who called themselves “White Eagles.” They were the worst, they were not like regular soldiers, They walked around the building cursing as they called for us to “come outside!” We waited in the house. I was scared. I moved from window to window. I just wanted to find a place to hide.

My aunt’s husband didn’t have a gun, nothing, no weapon. Because there were three of us girls, he said, “If they come inside”-they didn’t, thank God-”If they come in, I have only gasoline, and I will use it to burn all three of you.” He knew that they would rape us, and he said he don’t want to watch them doing that to us.<...