Hasan Zahirović

"When you think of Brčko, it's a plain. You're in some houses and you're shooting at other houses, there's other troops there and you're shooting at other people's houses. There weren't many shelters, but there were some. And usually you were shooting through those houses somehow and you knew where the boundary was. I felt sorry and I used to ask, if there were any books. And they said there was no roof there anymore, so it rained inside, but sometimes they would bring me books. Imagine I got the whole Mesha Selimović, Ivo Andrić. At that time I thought of it as saving other people's books, but today it makes me want to cry because I realise that they were actually other people's things. And that I would like very much for the books to be returned to those people, but I don't know whose books they are. In those journals I write who brought me what book, and I have exact descriptions of the books. And even some, sometimes there were papers in those books, or notes, or even photographs. One time I found a picture of a kid, so I taped it up in my journal, but I realise that half my library in my parents' house is strangers' books from those demolished houses. So did I save them or do I have stolen things on me, I don't know."

"This village is really huge. It's hills and hills, and I used to walk a kilometre and a half to school within the same village, even though I wasn't that far. There were kids who walked three kilometres. I don't know why the village is so vast. When I moved to the Czech Republic, I understood that a village is somehow compact, but not here. In our country, I guess because of the way the people hid in different ways, the village is still called the same, but it's huge. It's just up in the hills. Where my parents and I are from, people are always in the hills when there are some. Then the village kind of spreads out. For example, my grandmother was on the other hill and I could see the house, but I had to go down into the valley and then up the next hill. But when I was at my grandmother's on the other hill, I could hear our little dog barking down the hill when he was alone. And in the village, as there were hills everywhere, they made a mosque in the middle of the biggest hill so that everybody could see or hear the Azan from those hills during Ramadan when there were lights. There was no television and people didn't listen to the radio back then, so they would know when they could eat, when they could stop fasting."