Ivana Pauerová

"When I say 'about it,' my father came up with the idea of making a music rehearsal room for us in the basement of our house to keep us teenagers from hanging outside under grenades. So they set up what they called Prostoria. It's legendary in the Sarajevo context for the whole neighbourhood. Most people will know it when they hear it. So we went to Prostoria in our house all those years and spent a lot of time there. We had a couch and chairs there, some musical instruments, like drums, guitars, keyboards and so on. And we pretended we were going to Prostoria. Prostoria is the exact translation of 'room' in English, or maybe it would be better to say rehearsal room. So we would go to the rehearsal room of Prostoria and there were some love affairs going on, some of our projects, and we were doing a bit like Roberto Benigni in La vita è bella, like 'there is no war going on'."

"I guess we are divided into two camps. One is the naive romantics, which includes me and my whole bubble, where I come from, and my family. Nobody noticed splitting up at school, but there was a whole other half of people living and co-existing next to us who were very conscious of who they were and what they were feeling. Suddenly, even at school. I remember one of those early days when everything was different in the ninety-second. It was late April, May, and suddenly a lot of these kids didn't come to school. There were about half of us who had no idea what was going on or what was going to happen, and the other half knew, or at least their parents [knew], and they didn't come to school."

"At the beginning of the war they turned off our gas, electricity and water. And now that they've cut off these resources, the winter has become really harsh. So what we did is we suddenly found some stoves where we could heat with wood or coal. We specifically had trees in our garden, so we took advantage of that and cut down some trees. Then we burned all the unnecessary pieces of furniture, everything that wasn't needed, and all the stuff we had in the basement or whatever up to that point. We used everything we could get our hands on, and we dressed up more, and then we were just looking forward to when spring would finally come."

"The ways to escape from Sarajevo, there were several. In my case it was that when I was finally of age, of legal age, my parents arranged, through many difficulties and complications, the necessary paperwork so that I could go to Germany, to Munich, to my father's brother, with the goal that we had, to start studying abroad. The escape, if you can say that, the departure, the departure from Sarajevo was that we also went with a friend who was going to see her aunt in this way and we got on a bus one evening. It brought us to the tunnel. Then we passed like everybody from that bus through the tunnel. For many months, maybe years, that tunnel was our only link to the outside world."

"When I finished the second grade of primary school, the war in the former Yugoslavia started. It started in 1992, specifically in Sarajevo. Sometime in March it was the first barricades, and from May onwards we kind of felt that something was happening. Nobody knew exactly what, and from my point of view as a kid at the time, we were pretty confused, and at the same time it was kind of adventurous, and we went to school less. We didn't understand why we had more time off. However, my parents were getting more and more nervous until it culminated on May 1, 1992, when military planes were involved and there was open fighting. By then it was clear that the war had started."