Struggle

Serbia is a small country in Eastern Europe, and for me it has always been recognized in the world for sports. However, talking with foreign people since I came into the U.S., what identifies Serbia for them is war. No matter how hard it is for me to accept that, when I really think about, it might be the truth. Through history, Serbia has been involved in so many wars. Only during my lifetime in Serbia, which was the member of the former Yugoslavia, the country passed through two wars. One of them happened in a neighboring country, Bosnia and Herzegovina, while the second one we could feel on our land. Although it was not directly on our territory, the first one affected my family and me more. That war and the consequences during and after the war put fear in all of us, and made my family struggle for the food and money for a couple of years.

As a child, the first thing that was on my mind talking about the war was my father. What if he has to go there? I thought as a kid, I still didn't know that much about it, but I was old enough to see what was going on on the TV, what people can do to each other. Just in the beginning of the war, my family and I visited our relatives, who lived right on the border with Bosnia and Herzegovina, the country where the war started. The war was going on literally just over the hill. At night when everything became quiet, we could hear the bombs and the guns shooting. It was so scary. I knew people that went to war and never came back. My great-grandfather was a member of The Second World War. He was held in Germany for a couple of years even after the war ended. He came back home after all of my family thought that he was dead. That's why I was afraid. I was aware that if my father went over there, I could never see him again.

During that war and a long time after it, we had to deal with the devaluation of the currency. At that time, Serbia was the only country in the world where every citizen was a multi-millionaire. However, you couldn't even buy bread with those millions. The value of currency was changing every day. It would happen that people had to work the whole month for only ten dollars. I remember one day when our cousin visited us, he gave me some money to buy whatever I wanted. Even though I usually kept all money that I received from the others, I decided to go and buy something. I bought a big box of chocolate, but I guess I picked the wrong day. My mother wanted to kill me. Probably because the day after we could have bought ten of those. I just couldn't understand that. Some people took advantage of that situation and became rich, but many, like my family, didn't. Like a lot of other people, we had to struggle for months, even years.

Finally, what follows every war is the lack of food and the rest of the things that you need for normal life like gas and clothing. It is not that we really didn’t have enough to eat or that we had to suffer, but it was very hard to get to buy a bread or oil for example. There was a specific time during the day when they would deliver bread in the stores, so we had to wait in a line for maybe an hour or even two in order to get it. For oil, we had to wait for even couple of days. Besides that, stores were empty. There were not more than ten to fifteen articles that you could buy in the whole store. We also had to wait in a line to buy gas. Lines were long for miles. It was not easy and our borders were closed, so we couldn’t go out of country in order to get what we need. Therefore, some people started buying and selling on the black market because that was the only way for them to survive and help us survive as well.

In summary, can war bring you anything good? Definitely not! I felt it twice. I was scared like never before, and I hope I will never have to struggle with it again. Instead of playing at the playground or doing homework, I was spending my free time with my friends in the line for bread, oil or milk, cheering up other kids whose fathers were in the war. For me that war was just a sick game of three people, the leaders who wanted to take advantage of something that other countries had, and his country hadn’t. A game where thousands of people were killed and thousands of lives were destroyed. It took so many years for Serbia, Croatia and Bosnia and Herzegovina to recover after the war. I would not wish that to even my worst enemy.