Photograph Source: Stefan Miljuš – Public Domain

One distant April in 1992, the Sarajevo sky was, I remember well, ominously purple. The Muslim holiday of Kurban Bayram was approaching, and at the moment when the lights on the mosque near our high-rise turned on, the eerie purple sky was slashed by tracer bullets—hundreds of them.

I remember it well; it was a weekend my brother and I usually spent at our grandparents’, Branka and Milivoje, a retired lead singer of the Sarajevo Opera. That Friday, the last day of our pre-war childhood, our teacher, the strict yet soft-hearted man from Romanija, Mlađen Lopatić, divided us, the third-grade students, into groups. Our task was to finish a story from our reader in different ways, though I no longer remember its content. I only remember that we agreed to meet on Monday before classes started to compare our stories. Our stories did indeed continue, but mostly in a way that ensured we never saw each other again.

“What is this, Grandma?” I asked when the bullets tore through the sky.
“It looks like the Serbs and Muslims have decided to kill each other,” she replied in her characteristic way, comforting me with a brief explanation and without showing her own fear.

That “decision” marked the rest of my childhood—and my life. However, for those of us who were born and raised in Bosnia, it did not merely signify a gaping chasm dug between “us” and “them”—it was a decision that quite literally tore apart different parts of our own identities.

Because when people live with one another, or even just next to one another, whether consciously or unconsciously, willingly or unwillingly, that “other”—even if despised—becomes a part of our human identity.

The “decision” to “kill each........

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