One family's story: Broken up by war

SARAJEVO, Bosnia-Herzegovina - Hiba Hadzismajlovic patted her chest and leaned back from the kitchen table.

Then she spoke softly in Serbo-Croatian.

Her guests didn't understand the words, but the sentiment was clear from the 63-year-old grandmother's quavering voice.

"My heart is wounded," her words translated. "And my soul doesn't have any medicine to forget."

Psychiatry has developed various terms to describe this war phenomenon: stress disorder, chronic depression, post-trauma anxiety. Bosnian mental health officials estimate that every person in Sarajevo today - about 383,000 people - will suffer some kind of stress disorder caused by the war.

Sarajevans, including many elderly civilians such as the Hadzismajlovics, endured almost four years of bombing, snipers, starvation, destruction of their homes, death and injury of friends.

In a city where the family unit has been paramount for centuries, the war shattered families, sending thousands of people to their graves and hundreds of thousands to other countries.

Bosnian officials estimate about 60 percent of the city's prewar population has fled, either to other cities in Bosnia or abroad.

Mrs. Hadzismajlovic doesn't need a doctor's diagnosis. She knows this war broke her heart.

She spoke of "praznoca," the emptiness that many Sarajevans feel these days. This feeling hangs over the city despite relative peace after the arrival to Bosnia of 60,000 NATO troops to enforce the Dayton Peace Accord.

"I feel an emptiness in me always," she said through an interpreter. "Sometimes, it's just an empty hole; other times it's full of so much pain I can't stand it."

Mrs. Hadzismajlovic, a genteel woman 5 feet, 4 inches tall with silver hair and brown eyes, could be anyone's grandmother. Her round face, which her husband compared to Sophia Loren's, smiled regularly. But pain was always visible, in her watery eyes, in the downturn at the sides of her mouth.

She pointed to pictures on the kitchen wall. They were snapshots of her daughter, Jasna Secic, 30, who fled this city last year for Cincinnati with her husband, Adnan. They picked Cincinnati because Jasna's cousin, Sanja Velagic, had lived there for five years.

She also pointed to pictures of her son, Gordan Hadzismajlovic. He escaped Sarajevo two years ago and now lives in Antwerp, Belgium, with his wife, Anita, and their 5-year-old daughter, Ines.

Mrs. Hadzismajlovic showed her guests some prescription sleeping pills.

"At night, I take," she explained in broken English, frowning. "In the morning, tears."

She drew lines down her cheeks with each index finger.

"Every day I ask myself, Zasto, zasto, zasto? Why, why why?"

"Why did this have to happen, this terrible war? Children being bombed and shot at? My kids had to leave me, why?"

Asked if she could ever be happy after what she has witnessed, she said softly, "Nikada vise."

Never more.

Before the war, Mrs. Hadzismajlovic and her husband, Bedrudin, who friends call Brato, had a happy, middle-class life. Mr. Hadzismajlovic was a respected dentist in Sarajevo and provided well for his family. They lived in the comfortable Mejtas neighborhood, somewhat akin to Cincinnati's Mount Adams. They had a nice apartment and a Yugoslav-made Lado automobile.

When her son married and her daughter began to date seriously, Mrs. Hadzismajlovic looked forward to becoming a grandmother. Mr. Hadzismajlovic retired and spent time skiing and fishing. The family often traveled to a summer home on the Dalmatian coast in Croatia. They held parties in their Sarajevo apartment, where the living room had a beautiful view of the mountains that surround the city.

Then from the mountains Bosnian-Serb militia fired rockets, grenades and bullets into the city. The family found themselves living in a war zone.

The couple had never cared for politics. The Hadzismajlovics were a mixed marriage, with Mrs. Hadzismajlovic descended from non-religious Muslims and her husband the son of a non-religious Muslim father and a religious Catholic mother. Mr. Hadzismajlovic had fought under Communist partisans at the end of World War II, but only because the Communists held his father, a rich landowner, hostage. Otherwise, he led the modest life of a dentist.

The war changed everything.

Mrs. Hadzismajlovic walked her guests into the living room. The walls were covered with framed abstracts and watercolors. Half of the large windows were covered with radiators, wood, furniture and heavy drapes.

"Metak," she said. Rocket.

It had crashed through the apartment and caught the clothes closet on fire. All of her husband's suits were destroyed. Marks from the rocket are now covered by a watercolor.

She walked to the other half of the window and pointed to two holes covered with tape.

"Snajper," she said. "He tried to kill my Jasna."

Jasna was pulling down the shade one night when a sniper from enemy trenches across town opened fire. The two bullets missed Jasna but shattered the frame of an abstract painting, then ricocheted into a hallway, striking a door and coming to rest in Jasna's bedroom.

Another time, a grenade slammed into a small coffee shop on their street. Jasna was supposed to be there having coffee with her boyfriend. Mr. Hadzismajlovic ran into the street, pulling bodies from the wreckage. Mrs. Hadzismajlovic stayed in the apartment, her heart beating so fast she thought she would faint. Fortunately, her daughter was elsewhere.

This ever-present danger finally made it necessary for the Hadzismajlovics to get their children out of Sarajevo. Mr. Hadzismajlovic insisted the children leave. His father, whose property was seized by the Communists in 1945, had told him that Bosnia was an unlucky country.

"He said I should leave and never come back," Mr. Hadzismajlovic said through an interpreter. "Now, I see he was right and I have told my children the same thing."

Mrs. Hadzismajlovic's head understood the reasoning; her heart did not. She told a guest that she dreamt, whenever she was able to sleep, of seeing her children and grandchild.

"Always this question, why did my kids have to leave?" She pursed her lips and looked at the flower patterns on the tablecloth. Tears welled in her eyes.

With her children gone, Mrs. Hadzismajlovic spends much of her time crying in her apartment. The other day, when she heard the radio report of an American soldier killed in northern Bosnia, she cried for hours.

"What do his mother and wife have now?" She pointed to her chest. "My pain is the pain of others."

Published Feb. 8, 1996