17/10/1992 | Voices from the Drina

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🧵 I’ve just discovered a book in Srebrenica’s library about the pogroms against Jews in Russia and Poland in the late nineteenth century. So Hitler wasn’t the first to start the mass killing of European Jews.

While my stomach rumbles from hunger all day long, I’m reading about Jews suffering and starving in Polish ghettos and prisons, persecuted and tortured because of their Jewish names.

Even my own suffering somehow diminishes in comparison. We, the Bosniaks, the Bosnian Muslims, are not the first – nor the last – people to be persecuted and murdered because of our names.

🧵 People from surrounding villages who trek to Srebrenica town in order to call their loved ones are paying with their comparatively abundant food sources from their farms.

Racks of dried meat protrude from their pockets, or they bring eggs, cheese or a slaughtered hen as a gift. The mouths of us refugees water as we try not to stare.

The refugees of Srebrenica town search inside their coats, look for a bundle of tobacco, possibly paid for with their last savings, in order to show they too have brought something, no matter how modest.

Hunger is changing me. It’s changed my personality. Before the war I was a shy and reserved boy. Now I’m aggressive and cruel. It scares me, but I’m quickly realising that it’s a matter of survival.