My Personal Journey to Understanding the Genocide in Bosnia
Why did I become so invested in the genocide of Bosniaks (Bosnian Muslims), which took place in Bosnia beginning in 1992? What thread runs through me that has led to this point of needing to know what it was like for someone to survive, and do their best to thrive after such a horrific event? Who am I to portray the lives of people that circumstance led me to? I’ll try my best to answer these questions, but as is often the case, I am left with many more questions than when I started this project.
There are many points in the book I am currently writing where the reader must take stock in what genocide looks like from inside the lives of those in its crosshairs.
I have immersed myself in the story of one family as they traversed the horrors perpetrated against them, and how they continue to haunt them going forward.
How did I get here? I am almost finished with the book, and I am reminded of the bigger picture. Perhaps the better question is, how can human beings target and participate in the killing of others for no other reason than they are threatened by a group they’ve identified as “less than.” Yet there still is the myriad of people who I’d like to believe are otherwise good neighbors, concerned citizens, and caring of one another? Here is what led me to telling Mirela and her family’s story, and with an understanding that there is a greater lesson here for all of us. Before I tell about my own family, let me tell you about my wife, Pina’s.
I was introduced to East Utica when I was eighteen. As a Jewish boy growing up on Long Island, living in a kosher household with politically progressive parents, I had no occasion to head to central New York.
That is, of course, until I met my wife Pina, in 1973.
We met as freshmen at State University College at Oswego, which was adjacent to Lake Ontario, and the coldest and snowiest place I’d ever been. Her roommate was a high school friend of mine, so the introduction was inevitable. I was so taken by her that I could hardly contain myself. Beautiful, smart, studious, quiet, and gentle, and so different from any girl I had met growing up.
The youngest of nine, Pina was born into the poverty that enveloped most of the residents of San Donato Val di Comino in the Apennine Mountains of south-central Italy. Ten years after the end of World War II, San Donato was still feeling the effects of the Nazi occupation, which included twenty-eight interned Jews as was part of the fascist policy under Mussolini in coordination with Hitler’s “final solution.” Of the sixteen who were found by the Nazis while in the town, and deported to Auschwitz, twelve were murdered. The others were in hiding in the hills surrounding her small enclave.
This history most surely had an influence on what would transpire for Pina and her family. The town was reeling emotionally and economically. It survived off of a barter system, which took hold during the war, and that meant instability.
In 1955, her sister Mirella, only seventeen at the time, married a U.S. soldier, an Italian-American named Dominick, and moved to his hometown of Utica. I can only imagine how traumatizing this must have been for a young girl who only knew the ways of her small town, spoke no English, and left the rest of her family some 3,000 miles away. The culture shock alone must have been extraordinary. Yet, after sixty-five years of marriage, they still exude the strength and commitment most can only dream of.
When Dominick brought Mirella to East Utica the dye was cast.
In 1959, “Papa” as he was called by all who knew him, moved to Utica to work with Dominick in his construction business, and to live with them until he could save up enough money to send back to San Donato so that “Mamma” and five of their children could purchase tickets for a ship to bring them to New York. Their trek across the Atlantic happened in 1962.
In Utica, they were greeted with a strong Italian Catholic culture that was not unlike many ethnic neighborhoods around the country, which made it an easier transition to life in America. But they were still poor.
Pina was almost eight at the time, and she quickly understood that education was her ticket out of poverty. It took three years before she felt comfortable with both English, and Utica. And it didn’t take long thereafter for her to begin to map out her future.
East Utica was a world unto itself. For hard-crusted, out-of-the-oven sandwich bread you knew to go to Napoli’s; sweet cream cannoli-Florentine Bakery; cheeses, pasta, and meats-Caruso’s; funeral homes-Eannace’s.
On a Sunday morning in East Utica you could walk down the streets smelling the tomato sauces simmering in big pots as the aromas wafted invisibly in the air, destined to smother the pasta to be enjoyed after church. You could hear Italian spoken from most homes, usually dialects reflecting the regions of Italy that families arrived from. The Sons of Italy hall was always booked for events. Joe Putruele’s show played old Italian records that the family listened to from the flimsy plug-in radio on the kitchen counter. When “Volare” came on all would croon. When Joe played “Mamma” all would choke up. When he played the Tarantella, all hell would break loose.
Pina’s house on Webster Avenue was a three-story walk-up with her family crammed into the first floor, and the occasional renters on the top two. Eventually, the older children moved into their own apartments and houses leaving Mamma and Papa as sole occupants.
This is what I walked into in 1974. My first meal there was indescribable. I voraciously dug my fork into every morsel because it was the most delicious food I had ever eaten. Her family must have thought I was a victim of famine. I can still remember eating six meatballs, four sausages, and two plentiful helpings of lasagna. This was my introduction to East Utica.
Pina and I got married in 1981 after living in Albany to go to grad school, surviving a brief break-up, and moving to California in 1985. In the early 1990s we had two incredible children.
She told me what she knew of her family history. I even did a genealogy project in graduate school tracing her family’s roots. I was able to identify family as far back as the mid-1800s. This was before Ancestry dot com, and 23 and Me.
I was also becoming curious about why the family left San Donato. I have had the fortune of visiting there several times with Pina and our children. This has also allowed me to get a better understanding of its history, particularly its recent history, and the influences that led Pina’s family to immigrate.
Immigration is a fluid thing. People of various ethnicities and religions have either fled, or voluntarily sought new surroundings for economic and educational opportunities. East Utica and its Italians were no different.
I had been pondering the fate of Pina and her family were they considering immigrating today. We have a government that is resistant to taking in those fleeing violence and hate; persecution and despair. Would it have been easy for my wife to come here and become the PhD cancer researcher and executive that she has been since 1985?
My own family history is less clear. I know that my grandparents on both sides escaped the pogroms of Eastern Europe and funneled through Ellis Island in the early 1900s. They fled the violence and antisemitism that has plagued Jews for centuries, especially in that part of the world.
I know little about extended family that perished at the hands of the Nazis in concentration camps.
On a relatively recent phone call with one of my mother’s childhood friends I asked whether she had any first-hand information that my mother might have shared with her about relatives who were in Europe at the time of the Holocaust. Ruthie and my mother began a lifelong friendship when they were children. Since my mom died in 2002, and this conversation had not come up when I was younger. I asked Ruth what she knew.
“Jordie, she said, “when we were about twelve, I came to pick up your mother in her Bensonhurst apartment to walk over to a local park. It was spring, and lovely, and the flowers were just beginning to open up, and your mother and I loved to talk. Wow, could we talk!”
“She came downstairs where we always met up, and she was sobbing. Her mother had just received a letter from an uncle who had fled to Brazil from Poland. In it he informed your grandmother that several members of her family had perished in Auschwitz.”
I had never heard this story before. Though seventy-five years have passed, the news knocked me back a bit. I had done a lot of reading on the Holocaust, and even had a friend in high school whose mother bore the numbered tattoo on her wrist of a concentration camp prisoner, but this news affected me differently. It was truly personal. This was family that I would never know because of the cruelty perpetrated by unspeakably evil people.
When I interviewed people for my first book, Our Neighbors, Their Voices: True Stories of Immigrant Exodus, I did so with all of the preceding in mind. I spoke to people from countries as diverse as Lebanon, Iran, Mexico, Guatemala, and Czechoslovakia when it was a communist state. I learned that people didn’t leave for any other reason than to find better lives, which for many of them included fleeing from persecution or worse.
The seed for writing that book began to sprout when I saw how our current administration began to treat immigrants and refugees, as I noted earlier. It became clear that America was turning away from helping those who were fleeing violence and oppression. Coupled with Pina’s family experience, and my own family history, I saw the need to speak out through my writing. Sharing stories of immigrants became one way to open the eyes of those who were now distancing themselves from what I see as a moral imperative.
For Our Neighbors, Their Voices, I interviewed two women, who were girls at the time, who fled Bosnia with their families to escape the genocide being committed against Bosniaks. Their stories were quite different.
I was introduced to Dina by my great-niece, Alyssa, who as a professional photographer did a photo shoot of Dina and her newborn.
At age ten, she left with her family for a refugee camp in Pakistan barely escaping the Serb invasion. They stayed for a year-and-a-half before moving to Utica. She told me that in Pakistan life was quite difficult residing in a country very different from Bosnia. They lived with many families in a cement structure surrounded by barbed wire, and they required police escorts into the city to shop. Still, she felt that they were the lucky ones.
Mirela, who was seven, endured the torment and torture of the genocide before she and her family found their way to safety in Germany, and then Utica. It was Mirela’s story that took hold of me. It haunted me until the fall of 2019 when she agreed to tell me about their plight during the genocide perpetrated by the Serbs in the early 1990s. This book is almost done, but my work in sharing their journey is just beginning.
Utica, it turns out, had a rather large population of Bosniaks, many of whom survived the Serbian atrocities. U.S. and UN refugee resettlement programs identified Utica as a welcoming community for those fleeing the former Yugoslavia and in the mid-to-late 1990s many arrived.
I had heard of the influx of Bosnians from Pina’s relatives in Utica. “Hard-working people,” they would say. “Keep to themselves,” or “Fixing up the run-down neighborhoods,” included in their refrain.
I did not know much about Bosnia, or the genocide. In fact, truth be told, I knew very little. All I knew was that there were many Bosnians moving to Utica. I didn’t even bother to find out why, or to understand that nearly 300,000 now lived in cities around the country.
How could one know that the Bosniak you were speaking with at Price Chopper supermarket watched in horror as her husband and son were executed in Srebrenica? Or that the man you exchanged “how are you” with was spared torture in the concentration camp because one of the Serb guards remembered him from high school and the kindness he showed, raising money after the death of the guard’s father preventing him and his mother from being homeless? Or the woman cleaning the floors at office building at the end of the workday was brutally raped in Priejdor?
Mirela works as a receptionist in a nursing home in Utica. She does so much more than answer phones. She is the first person you see when entering the facility. She has a smile so wide it quite takes you in. You know that your relative is in good hands if Mirela has anything to say about it.
In her declining years after a stroke, Pina’s mother could no longer be cared for by the daughters living in Utica and New Jersey where she rotated every few months. Papa had passed in 1980, and Mamma’s resilience and independence was a marvel until the neurological trauma occurred. The family moved her into the nursing home where they became acquainted with Mirela. Mamma was well cared for and content, understanding that she could no longer burden her family with the physical care she required. For Pina, me and the children, who live in California, we met Mirela the couple of times we visited Pina’s mother, but more in passing.
When my brother-in-law, Bob, heard that I was looking for people to interview for my first book, he suggested that I speak with Mirela, and she readily agreed to tell her story.
She invited me into her home to speak with her and her parents, Fikret and Sabi, who only spoke Bosnian, and she translated for us. I had entered a world that I couldn’t begin to fathom as they told me of what they had survived. My heart ached. I was beginning to understand why so many Bosnians fled to America.
Just two stories; just two families who had survived an ordeal most of us could never fathom. Their journeys opened up my exploration into what happened to Bosniaks in the early 1990s.
As a student of European history, it is understood that the genocide of Bosniaks was considered the worst atrocity in Europe since World War II. Subsequent readings and research enhanced my knowledge. That awakening on my part was heightened by my own family’s destruction in the Holocaust, and even the persecution of earlier times. It was time for me to delve deeper into what the experience of genocide was like on a human level for those who were targeted.
I concluded that if I wrote about Mirela and her family, I would be honoring the memories of those who perished, the psychological and physical outcomes of the survivors, and the strength with which those survivors must summon to move forward as best they can. This is what drives me to shed light on the genocide in Bosnia.
Their trek exemplifies resilience in the face of adversity, but not just for the trauma of the genocide they survived that included imprisonment in concentration camps three times, but the residual effects that shadow them in their daily lives. I am doubtful that anyone fully overcomes what they experienced in the face of such hate, but they have so many lessons to teach us.
There is a great deal of denial on the part of many in Serbia that these atrocities were real. For them, it was a matter of keeping their culture intact, of protecting themselves from losing Serbia.
The reality is, they were never in danger of losing anything. There is a long history that ultranationalists abide by which says that Muslims are seeking to overbreed, so that they can destroy white Christians in Europe. They see the Crusades as the beginning of their defense, the Ottoman Empire as proof of the need to defend, and millions of Muslim refugees flooding Europe from Syria, as the latest evidence.
Many throughout Bosnia suffered at the hands of the Serbians, yet Bosnia’s Muslims did not commit acts of war against the Serbs of Yugoslavia, or the Bosnian Serbs who were their neighbors. Their crime: being Muslim. They got in the way of the creation of a “Greater Serbia,” which included the removal of Muslims in any way that assured this goal. So, the Serbs view themselves as justified in doing what they did.
The results today take the forms of genocide apologists and genocide deniers. It also means that too many war criminals still walk the streets of Serbia never having been tried for their crimes.
Can anyone deny the facts when 100,000 people were murdered, and upwards of 50,000 women and girls were raped and sexually assaulted, with thousands upon thousands who were beaten and tortured?
The Muslims of Izba, which was Mirela’s village, those of other villages and cities in Bosnia, and in Srebrenica, the site of three days of mass executions of men and boys, must never be forgotten
Mirela and her family’s story is that of just one who survived, but their journey is universal.
They have exhibited the strength, faith, love, and resilience that many of us question in ourselves were we thrust into the horror that they lived to tell about. What lessons can we learn from them? What do we as the human race need to do to quell authoritarianism, ultra-nationalism, or even extreme political divisiveness that can result in the desire to eradicate those we perceive as unworthy of sharing our planet?
Here is the universality in Mirela’s story. We are left with the questions that have plagued us when witnessing hate against others. Therefore, the answers can only come from us when we’re ready to take those giant steps to ensure that we stand up to tyranny, and evolve as the highly compassionate species that we are meant to be.
Jordan Steven Sher is currently writing a book about one family’s experiences fleeing the genocide in Bosnia. His other previously published book, Our Neighbors, Their Voices: True Stories of Immigrant Exodus, can be found on Amazon. He lives in Northern California with his wife. For more on his writing go to jordanstevensher.com
