My Childhood Under Fire

My Childhood Under Fire

Juvenile/YA autobiography
"Today, in a backyard, children were picking cherries. They
were still unripe, but it was the first fruit the children had seen in
months. Suddenly a shell hit. Seven innocent children were killed--
and only because they wanted a few cherries."
We hear the phrase "collateral damage" bandied around quite a
bit in talk about countries like Afghanistan and Iraq. It is one of
the most demonic phrases ever invented because it desensitizes people
to the unthinkable. On what should be the most wonderful day of her
life a woman loses sixteen friends and family members including her
betrothed. Collateral damage. Can we help it if those civilians keep
getting in the way? Where is Dante when we need him to create a new
ring of Hades for the spin doctors who came up with that?
Nadja Halilbegovich's My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary
should be required reading for the United States. The author feels
that she has lived three lives: her innocent childhood that lasted
until she was twelve, her adulthood in America, and the war years in
between. Her journal covers those years candidly and poignantly. Can
you imagine:
*knowing that even stepping outside your home to play or go to school
can be the last act of your life;
*waiting in terror for the parent who is at work because there is no
guarantee that he or she will return;
*running to a crowded basement shelter every time shelling gets too
close;
*seeing corpses so often they invade your dreams;
*lacking the basics--enough food, water, electricity--much of the time;
*living for years with shrapnel painfully embedded in your legs;
*having to abandon all you love to travel to safety...
What amazed me the most about this book is that its author lived
through all she did and emerged able to feel hope. Fleeing her native
land she had to walk through a long, dark tunnel. In the chapter
entitled New Hope the tunnel becomes a symbol for the civilian
tragedies caused by wars. "...But our common dream is a world of peace
and tolerance, in which we're respected and embraced for who we are.
For this dream, we walk through the mud and darkness together because,
in the end, the tunnel will take us to the world we want to live in.
We must remember our dream and keep walking."
On a personal note, I can't imagine what it would be like to raise
children in this kind of peril. As I write these words and you read
them somewhere there are parents who can't imagine letting their
children out to play. This is so very wrong. It will take a world
working together to change things.
A great big shout out goes out to those parents and children who
deserve so much better.
Julia Emily Hathaway


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