Elizabeth Rubin
Bosnia and Herzegovina, 1996
Dimensions: 117 mm x 167 mm
Much of the conversation and many of the observations went into my Harper’s Magazine piece in the February 1996 issue, titled “Surviving Sarajevo: A People Under Siege in a City Not Yet Saved”.
I found this notebook in a box filled with every kind of notebook imaginable that I used in Sarajevo. I was living with a family during the siege in an apartment building in the old town up above the cathedral. I’d run out of all my notebooks, grabbed this one from Vera’s son Petar’s room where I was sleeping, and ran out the door. Something had just happened, as it always did in Sarajevo.
I happened to open the notebook to a page where I’d scribbled down the words of an editor who worked at Vecernje Novine, The Evening News. I’ve never forgotten her rage or what she said. She had to run across Sniper’s Alley every day to get to work, and this day she was simply fed up. She saw all the photographers poised beneath the road, waiting to snap a photograph of someone getting shot by the snipers on the mountain above. And she yelled: “No work for you today asshole, I made it alive.”
Here on this page she explains why she lost her cool:
Today, I am so angry. When I came to the office there were 7 agency cars. All of them prepared their cameras, photos, waiting for someone to fall down. I was so angry and every time I am shaking from nerves and every time I yell at them. I feel like an animal waiting for a hunter to kill me. It’s not human.
They said nothing. Two people were wounded before me.
…For big money (she means the photographers would get a lot of money for such a photo).
I have a feeling that they are treating us like animals. They don’t feel anything what we must pass through. From an accident they make a top story. No one cares for us; they only want to make a top story. The world cares more about animals than us. If a normal city lost electricity for one hour they’d be in a catastrophe!
I ended up writing a story for Harper’s called Surviving Sarajevo, about the siege, about that summer, and about all the people connected to the building I lived in at 2 Fadila Jahica Spanca. The street was named after a Yugoslav hero of the Partisans, who fought in the Spanish Civil War. By the time I left Sarajevo, the street had reverted to its pre-World War II name, Hadzi Sulejmanova, a well-known Muslim citizen from the Ottoman period.
