Igor Blaževič

"As a foreigner in the Czech Republic, I was several times in a situation where I thought, 'God, why are these people doing this?' It happened to me that I was in a car with really very young people from the Czech Republic on Mount Igman. Along the way, humanitarian aid let themselves down to Sarajevo. And Serbian troops shot to that road. One didn't know if he would get down. As a native of Sarajevo, I had private reasons why I wanted to get to Sarajevo. My family was there and I wanted to bring help to them. But why did a group of young people risk their lives? Part of some tourism, it's a lot of adrenaline, it was there. But at the same time, when you find yourself in those extreme situations, the question arises: 'Why are you doing this?' It wasn't worth the money. It was out of authentic motivation. They did so because they felt they had a deeper collective responsibility. Many of those people had someone in their family who was a political prisoner persecuted by the communist regime. They felt they needed to use their current freedom to help someone else.”

"I remember when I first got to Sarajevo. I flew by plane, not with People in Need, but with another organization. At that time, I was still a citizen of Bosnia and Herzegovina. I did not yet have a Croatian passport, but an old Yugoslav passport. I was a so-called war party, so I couldn't get on a plane. You needed a UN card for that, I didn't have one. I organized a visit by a foreign delegation. There were five people there. For three months, I was preparing for the visit, and in all the faxes I sent, I put my name on the passenger list everywhere as an organizer. I had papers with stamps that the delegation could be there. There were five names. So, I was smuggled there. I slipped through the paper to Sarajevo. I didn't tell my parents and sister that I was coming. I didn't want them to panic. It wasn't until I was in Sarajevo that I called from one phone number that I would be home in five minutes. I came home. My sister ran to me and jumped into my arms. As I caught her, she had no weight. They were hungry, they completely lost weight. I was holding a living being, my sister, and I was shocked to be holding a living being that had no weight. Šel jsem nahoru a táta seděl vedle ohně, který udělal doma, protože neměli topení. Dělaly se improvizované ohně. Jak zhubnul, vypadal jako želva. Pamatuju si... toho tátu, který vypadá jako želva, a sestru, která nic nevážila.”

"I haven't had any news of my family for six months. There were no mobile phones, no internet, sometimes someone had the internet, but the city was cut off, without electricity, without water, in full siege. No matter what I did, I didn't really know for six months if they were alive, dead. Every day there was a sentence in Czech and world news: 'Attack on Sarajevo peaked today.' Today, and tomorrow again: 'Attack on Sarajevo peaked today.' Six months, every day. Every day you had a picture of dead people on the street in the paper. I used a magnifying glass to identify their faces to see if I know the people or they are any of my relatives. One day the news came saying that Bajič was dead. I didn't know which Bajic. I knew two. One was a neighbor, very close. The other was my sister's boyfriend. I didn't know which one, then it turned out he was my sister's boyfriend."

"We were a little specific in Sarajevo. Sarajevo is truly a mixed city. Traditionally, not only under socialism, Muslims, Croats, Jews, Serbs lived there. A strange, delicate, nice neighborhood culture was cultivated there. We lived well as neighbors. We were different, but we were close, we visited each other, had some food, celebrated holidays. We were connected. The parents had a cottage in the mountains, in a traditional Serbian village. When I was in that village, the boys were drinking Rakija brandy there at night saying, 'During World War II - we were here and they were there.' 'We' meant the gendarmes, and 'they' meant anyone else. So different narratives, different traditions, persisted in other parts of Bosnia and throughout the former Yugoslavia. We didn't experienced it in Sarajevo and we didn't believe it could happen."