You Don't Know What You Don't Know

We arrived in Sarajevo via train from Mostar in the morning. Previously, most of my travel to date had been small towns or cities or sparsely populated islands. I had forgotten what it was like to be in a capital city of half a million people. 

We took a tram from the train station to the old section of town and as I got up to get off, I put my phone in the front part of my small backpack for a second to take the handrail and descend from the train. A man in front of me blocked my way. Kristia, a young women I had met on the way to Mostar was already out on the street waiting for me. A man behind me bumped me, and I looked over my shoulder for a split second to let him know that I was trying to exit the train. Finally, the man in front of me began to move, I exited the train onto the sidewalk and the tram departed. Kristia reached for her phone to check the directions to the hostel and it was then I realized what I had done. I had put my phone in exactly the place to have it pick pocketed by the two men on the train. Classic traveler’s faux pas! And the worst part – I had known it. I opened the compartment and sure enough – gone – all my photos, all my contacts, all my notes and yes all my passwords on my non password protected phone. Crap! 

In case you are curious – it takes approximately three hours to go about the frustrating process of resetting every password you have, reporting your phone lost/stolen, seeing if you have insurance, seeing what you remembered to put on the icloud, remotely adding a password and suspending your service. Certainly it was annoying. But in the grand scheme of things – really not something worth stressing about, but hard to avoid that feeling of “Damn it – I should have. . .”

I could feel the frustration in my body and tried to shake it. I knew it was material, and I needed to just let it go. Being in Sarajevo was just the thing to help me put my little inconvenience into perspective. 

Over the course of the next 7 hours, we walked the streets of Sarajevo taking in the Turkish influence on the eastern side of town from centuries under the Ottoman empire, the Austrian and Hungarian influence on the western side of town. Mosques and minarets, a catholic church Notre Dame style, a Franciscan church and both a Sephardic and Ashkenazi synagogue gave the city an international feel that I had not experienced in the past. On the Turkish side of the city, small alleyways were lined with coffee sets, rugs for sale and copper offerings. Men in Kufi praying skull caps sat together on low benches drinking Bosnian coffee solving the world’s problems. Women in hijabs walked holding their children’s hands. Further down the street past the cathedral, the streets widened, bars lined either side of the street and patrons sat drinking beer solving the world’s problems as well. Everyone – on both sides - was smoking. 

And everywhere you looked, there were ruins, shells of buildings that had once stood before the war, in other places buildings still intact, riddled with bullet holes. The war had ended 20 years earlier, but all around us was the evidence of the devastation. I looked at the people walking around –men and women my age, younger and older. What had they been doing while the war raged on for almost four years?

The two-hour walking tour we took gave us insight into the different parts of the city and our tour guide, in typical Bosnian fanfare told each story sarcastically and with a punch line at the end. This was the third Bosnian man we had spent time listening and talking to, and I was starting to get the impression that Bosnians were not only proud of their culture, they had a bit of a dark, sardonic sense of humor. 

About every 30 minutes, I would look at Kristia and unrelated to what we were learning and observing I would say something to the effect of, “Do you know what’s most annoying about having my phone stolen. . .?”

Actually nothing. I mean of course it’s annoying and frustrating. 

But again I go back to what I said before – in the grand scheme of anything – losing a replaceable material object that I am far to apt to look at instead of looking around at my surroundings – is nothing. 

I was about to have that shown to me in the Srebenica Genocide Museum off the square in front of the cathedral. 

The thing about not knowing what you don’t know is that you don’t know that you don’t know it. I don’t know if that makes sense to you, but sitting here right now, rain falling on a metal roof outside the window of my hostel, an old building with a broken window in my sight, I know I am forever changed by what I saw over the last two days. I am struck by what I didn’t know.

In April of 1992, I was busy studying for my final exams in high school, deciding with whom to go to prom and picking out a beach house to spend senior week with my friends. At the time, my biggest conundrums were if I should take my boyfriend who had already graduated and might be bored or go with a friend. I know what your thinking, “OH MY GOD! However did you decide that – what a major catastrophe!” And I get it that high school kids – and maybe college ones too- are narcissistic and self absorbed and feel that the world revolves around them. I didn’t realize that at the time that I was like that, but if I hadn’t been, then this visit to Sarajevo’s tunnel of hope and the Srebenica Genocide Museum wouldn’t have thrown me so much for a loop. 

Sarajevo was besieged by the Army of Republika Srpska on April 5 of 1992 with the intention of creating a new Bosnian Serb state after Bosnia – Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Most people will remember seeing this on the news in the spring of that year. The thing is that the Serbian army figured it would take about four days for them to take the city. . . but the Sarajevans dug in the their heels and refused to quit in a siege that lasted 1,425 days. That’s over 4 years. That is the longest siege in the history of modern warfare. During the siege, access to water, food, and electricity was cut off completely. Buildings were destroyed and the entire city was a target. I tried to put myself at 18 in the shoes of a Bosnian 18 year old. 

From 1992-1995, all regular functioning activities in Sarajevo ceased to exist. And while I went to class and frat parties and lay in the quad, 18 year olds in Bosnia cowered in basements praying their apartment building would be spared. More than 11,000 of them, many of them civilian men, women and children were killed. The only access to any kind of supplies, food or water was through the tunel spasa or tunnel of hope, located under a home near the Sarajevo airport. In just 4 months in the spring of 1993, a Bosnian engineer created the plans for the tunnel’s construction and was dug by hand for 24 hours a day. That 800 meter tunnel was the only access point to humanitarian aid during the war. 

Now maybe you knew all of that – again, you don’t know what you don’t know. I remember seeing the images of the war on the television, reading it in the news, but until I landed in Bosnia earlier this week, I have to say, I just think I really didn’t know.

Samija was our tour guide in the Srebenica Memorial museum. She was just five when the war began. Her descriptions of the genocide and Srebenica as a “safe space” in addition to her later stories of her own experience changed me forever. Samija stood in front of us in the foyer of the museum, dressed in all black and fidgeting with her ring and black shirt and pants before she began, “You may want to take a seat,” she gestured to one small wooden bench in front of her, “I am going to give you a brief – not so brief introduction – before we proceed to the rest of the museum.” Samija was a slight woman and she began by apologizing for her raspy voice – likely from having given the tour multiple times a day every day that month. 

The 20^th anniversary of Srebenica’s mass killings had just passed in July, but you could feel that for Samija, the pain she felt was raw, as if it had happened recently.

She gave us a brief history of how the war began and the events leading up to the UN naming Srebenica a “safe” area for refugees from other Bosnian cities under attack by the Republic of Srpska. The two documentaries we watched and her account of the events leading up to the massacre sent chills into every part of my body. One of the photos on the wall in museum were the words graffitied, United Nothing which described the betrayal that the people felt after having traveled all the way to Srebenica only to be turned away to meet their death. 

She talked to us for more than an hour in a gallery the size of a studio in San Francisco and still I wanted more – how had this happened? How had the UN peacekeepers just stood by and watched it? How had military leaders around the world just closed their eyes and allowed more than 8000 Muslim boys and men to be killed execution style and thrown into mass graves. The Srebenica massacre was labeled the biggest genocide since the Holocaust in the 20^th century. 

After the Holocaust, we said, “Never again.” We blamed the German civilians for turning a blind eye, for saying that they didn’t know about the concentration camps. And this before the Internet, before the world could watch what was happening. 

 In July of 1995, I began packing for my year abroad in Spain. I was leaving the country for the first time. Again when I think back to what was happening my head – I was worried about leaving my boyfriend and if we’d stay together. I was nervous I’d “miss out” on my senior year. And while I was “busy” worrying about myself, men and boys between the ages of 12 and 77 were being separated from the women and shot execution style in school playgrounds outside of Srebenica. Ethnic cleansing was happening. Still to this day, over 1000 of the men and boys killed in the massacre remain unidentified and missing. Sometimes over three generations of a family were knocked out, and there is simply no one to provide a blood sample now to match the DNA. And still today, mothers and wives wait. They wait for their sons and husbands to be identified so that they can finally put them to rest.

I felt like I had been punched in the stomach. Samija’s passion oozed out of every pore of her being. She was outraged and overwhelmed with emotion, as she led us through the gallery and showed us the heinous acts of violence and racism that had occurred. “It happened here. It can happen in any society.” She said over and over again.

When the tour concluded, my head was spinning, my heart was full and tears welled, waiting to spring. Kristia and I walked into the lobby and I asked Samija how old she had been. “I was 5 when the war began and 11 when it ended.” Her voice wavered as she spoke and her eyes were red around the edges. “We had to eat this –“ she interrupted herself switched into Bosnian and spoke to her colleague on staff, and laughed as she continued, “horse meat in a can.” The girls both began to laugh as they recalled the taste of the meat. 

Sarajevo Rose - Red paint around former explosions

 

She described the tenacity of the people of Sarajevo and showed us a woman that every day, got dressed as if there were no war and put on make up – “people had to keep living.” She looked at her feet, “But our childhood – it was stolen. I remember in November of 1995 after my baby brother was born at 7 months, I was washing his diapers outside in minus 5, 200 times, I was doing this.” 


She laughed, a bitter sad laugh. A generation of young people, robbed of their childhood. 

I wonder about as this group of young people as they come of age and have children of their own. . . the casualties of the genocide and the war in Bosnia from 1992-1995 are great. But what of the survivors? What happens to them as they try to make sense of the international travesty that happened to them in their own home.

I think about what I didn’t know. And I wonder now what I still don’t know.

In 1999, UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan wrote: 

“Through error, misjudgment and an inability to recognize the scope of the evil confronting us, we failed to do our part to help save the people of Srebrenica from the Serb campaign of mass murder.”

Our not knowing, our silence, our inability to act when action is needed allow these types of despicable actions to occur.

What will we know in 5 years about the refugee crisis that we don’t know right now? 

What will we know about the death of young black men in the United States at the hands of law enforcement? 

What will we know that is different than what we know right now about the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan in this century. 

We don’t know what we don’t know, but it is our obligation as human beings to find out.