by Glenn Meade
The guards, mean-faced men who scream at us, force us from the buses.
We all get off, dragging suitcases, laden with bundles and crying children. The rain pours down. We’re sodden. A sign says: Omarska 10 kilometers. The guards force us to walk.
We tramp along muddy forest track, exhausted. Luka begs me for water. We have none left. David asks a guard for some.
The man scowls and tells him to keep moving. The guards beat with their rifle butts anyone who’s slow.
All the mothers look desolate, terrified, and exhausted. The children cry.
A frail elderly man with a gray beard collapses. He can’t keep up with us. Someone whispers in disbelief, “They . . . they’re killing him. The guards are cutting the old man’s throat.”
I glance back and see the guards toss the man’s body into a ditch.
We’re all horrified. It makes me think of my father, his body left to rot, and it sinks my heart.
Another mile and a young girl soils her pants. Her mother struggles desperately to try to wash the child’s garment in a stream we pass, while the guards beat and jeer the poor woman.
But all this is nothing compared to what lies ahead.
It was freezing cold and 2 a.m. when we arrive at the “camp.”
Once an agricultural research laboratory, now it’s ringed by barbed wire and searchlights. The windows are barred with wire grilles. Armed guards patrol the grounds with German shepherds.
Exhausted, we are marched onto a big square. The guards separate the men and boys over fourteen on one side; the women and children on the other. David is forced to line up with the men and boys. The separation of men and boys from their families causes so much anguish and wailing among us all that a Serb officer draws a leather truncheon.
He’s big, with a boxer’s broken nose and a slit of a mouth, and he wades into the crowd, beating men, women, and children. “Get into line! Don’t speak unless you’re spoken to. Be quiet for the camp commandant!”
The crowd settles and falls silent. We later learn that this brutal man is Major Boris Arkov, the camp’s second in command, in charge of the guards.
Immediately a green painted door in the main building bursts open. The man who appears has a handsome, almost gentle face and he’s stockier than Arkov, wears an officer’s uniform, and his red beret is tilted arrogantly to one aside. He clutches a leather riding crop.
On one arm of his tunic is emblazoned an emblem: a Red Dragon.
My heart stutters.
I recognize Mila Shavik at once.
He stands under the blazing lights, hands on his hips, slapping the riding crop against his leg.
We’re in the third row and I’m terrified Shavik or any of his men will recognize me from my hometown, so I keep my head down.
Shavik struts along the first row of prisoners, smacking his crop against his leg.
“You Bosniaks will be our guests until we can exchange you for Serb prisoners. While you’re here you’ll obey the rules or suffer punishment.”
Shavik halts, staring hard at his prisoners. “Stealing, disobeying orders, or attempting to escape—all of these are serious charges, punishable by death on the orders of the district commander. Strictly women and children under fourteen will remain. Men and youths will be housed in a camp nearby. Guards, remove the male prisoners.”
Cries of protest erupt from the crowd, the men and boys fearful and uncertain, the women and children crying as the guards force the men at gunpoint toward trucks parked nearby, beating anyone who protests with rifle butts. Boris Arkov wades in again with his truncheon.
Guards force a grim-faced David onto one of the trucks. “Lana, stay strong . . .”
The trucks drive back down the road. I see David’s face. He waves bravely.
My heart is pounding with fear. We’ve heard stories of men and boys being shot by the Serbs. I’m terrified.
Luka clutches my hand and Carla’s.
I hear him whisper to her, fear in his voice, “Will we be all right, Carla? Will we? Will Mama and Papa be okay, too?”
Suddenly the woman named Alma from the bus speaks up. “Commander, may I ask if we can have some food and liquids for the children?”
Boris Arkov, crimson with rage, crosses the distance between him and Alma in a second. “I thought I said not to speak unless spoken to?”
“But, sir, the children are hungry and thirsty—”
He strikes Alma a savage blow. His truncheon smacks her jaw with such force that she reels back and her bottom dentures fly out of her mouth. The guards laugh when they see the false teeth skittering across the ground.
Alma’s face is cut from cheek to jaw and bleeding heavily. Arkov lashes out again, this time with his boot. “Get up. I said get up!”
Alma struggles to her feet. Arkov tears out his pistol.
Deathly silence settles over the crowd. We’re certain Arkov is going to shoot Alma. I cover Luka’s eyes and pull him against my leg.
Then I hear something metallic hit the ground. A moment later I realize that Carla’s dropped her silver dollar and it’s rolling toward Shavik’s feet.
Shavik looks down as it strikes his boot. He bends, picks it up, examines it.
“Who owns this?” he demands.
Before I can stop Carla she speaks up and my heart plummets. She was always strong-willed, quick to criticize an injustice.
“I do, sir. Please, sir, don’t harm the woman.”
Shavik stares down at her. “Come here.”
She steps toward Shavik.
“Hold out your hand.”
Carla holds out her hand. Shavik places the coin gently in her palm.
“Thank you, sir.”
“You’re welcome.” Shavik suddenly reaches out, gently strokes her hair. “What a pretty little girl. What’s your name?”
“Marianna Carla Joran, sir.”
I recoil as I watch his hand linger on Carla’s hair. If only Shavik knew what I as her mother am thinking. I can’t stop my legs shaking with fear, with revulsion.
“And what good manners you have. You know this woman?” He nods to Alma.
“Yes, sir. Please don’t harm her, sir. She’s a nice lady.”
Shavik crosses to where the false teeth have fallen, picks them up, and hands them politely to Alma. “Yours. I believe.”
The guards laugh. Shavik silences them with a look.
Alma accepts the dentures.
Then Carla says something very brave that makes my heart quake.
She looks at Shavik and says matter-of-factly, “Please, sir, the woman was only telling the truth. We’ve come such a long way. Everyone is hungry and thirsty, especially the children.”
Shavik says nothing. Do I see his face pale with anger? In the poor light, it’s hard to tell.
Boris Arkov appears to lose it. He points his pistol at Carla’s head. I watch, mute with fear as Arkov’s hand shakes with rage, his gun pointing at my daughter’s face. Carla is terrified.
Then Arkov swings his gun back at Alma’s head. “You first, you old crone.”
Just when I expect she will die, Shavik lets out a roar, as if making the point that he’s in charge, and not Arkov.
“Leave her, Boris. Get the prisoners back in line.”
Shavik points his leather crop at Alma, her cheek cut from eye to mouth. “You heard me, madam, back in line.”
He steps over to Carla next, and almost smiles. “And you, too, little girl. You’ve got guts, I’ll give you that. But learn to do as you are told in the future; otherwise it could have some unpleasant consequences.”
“Yes, sir.”
Alma crawls back, grateful to be alive, and Carla burrows in to join me.
My heart is still hammering. It’s a miracle no one is killed.
Shavik looks to where Carla has rejoined me.
His face lingers on mine. Do I see a flicker of recognition in his eyes, or is it my imagination? I bow my head so he can’t see me. Please God, no
. . .
Shavik snaps his fingers at Arkov.
“Food for the prisoners. Soup and bread.”
A furious Boris Arkov has a look on his face as if he thinks Shavik’s decision is insane.
“You heard me, Boris. Bring food to the dormitories. And milk for the little ones. Now have the men escort the prisoners to their quarters.”
Later, Alma puts her arms around Carla and sobs, deep convulsions that rack her body.
“If it wasn’t for your daughter, I wouldn’t be alive. She has spirit, standing up to Shavik like that.”
One of the women, a nurse, has been in the camp a week already and stitches Alma’s bloodied jaw with a needle and thread, without an anesthetic. Alma faints twice, but bears up well. She’s just grateful she still has her dentures.
We are all given soup and bread, and there’s milk for the children, as Shavik promised.
Alma’s jaw is so bad she can’t eat or drink or put back in her dentures and when we finish our food she looks at me as if she wants us adults to talk. I tell Carla to take Luka to play with some other children at the end of the dormitory.
When she’s gone, Alma’s eyes are wary, and she tries to mutter a warning through her shrunken, bruised mouth.
“Shavik may have let me live, but I hear he’s crazy. Polite one minute, deranged the next. Be careful around him in the future.”
“They’re both crazy, Shavik and Arkov.”
The nurse dabs iodine on Alma’s wound. “Shavik comes and goes here. But Arkov oversees the place most of the time. He’s a complete monster.”
“You know about them?” one of the women asks.
“They call them Cain and Abel. They’re not related, but they were brought up like brothers, and they’re forever at each other’s throats.”
“Brothers?”
The nurse says, “Boris Arkov’s father is a top gangster in the Serb mafia, Ivan Arkov.”
One of the women nods. “That’s right. I heard Shavik’s father was a lawyer who worked for Arkov. The father committed suicide when Shavik was young and Ivan Arkov took him under his wing, and treated him like a son.”
“With Mila Shavik and Boris Arkov, it’s like a constant power struggle between them.”
“Why?”
“To be top dog of their mafia clan one day.”
“Who told you all this?” the nurse asks.
“It’s common knowledge. The old man, Ivan Arkov, is head of his mafia clan and controls the Red Dragons.”
“What do you know about him?”
“He’s so crooked they’ll have to screw him into the ground when he dies. A greedy brute. All that matters to him is power and money.”
“What else?”
“He’s the one who tells them to steal our belongings and property from us and massacre our people. To take a life means nothing to him. His son Boris is a chip off the old block. Another heartless killer.”
“And Mila Shavik?” Alma asks.
The nurse slaps the stopper back on the iodine bottle. “Shavik is simply a lackey who does Ivan Arkov’s bidding.”
I keep my mouth shut. I know all about Mila Shavik and his family in my hometown. And I know that’s not the entire truth. But the less I tell Alma the better.
It will only disturb her.
Our first night in the camp is hell. We learn from the other prisoners that this place has a name: the Devil’s Hill.
We’ve heard whispers about such places where people are tortured and killed in the most terrible ways. But nothing can prepare you for the reality.
The Devil’s Hill houses over five hundred women and children, toddlers and young girls and boys, ranging in ages from babies in arms to thirteen.
The youngest children are frightened and filthy, and never stop crying.
The guards are brutal, heartless beasts who instill constant fear. That first night we are herded into bare dormitories. We have barely laid our heads on the bunks when at least twenty drunken guards stagger in and drag away the prettiest young women.
They are dragged outside and in through the green doors of the main building, past Shavik’s office just inside the entrance.
Those green office doors will come to terrify us—once you enter, you are destined for brutal interrogation, or rape or a beating, or all three.
And sometimes death awaits you.
We hear the women’s screams as they are raped all through the night.
The terror on the children’s faces is too terrible to witness. I try to cover Carla’s and Luka’s ears to the screams but it’s impossible.
I pity the poor, wailing mothers who have to listen to their young daughters being raped. One of the girls was barely fourteen.
We learn that even young boys are taken by a few more deviant guards.
It was daylight before the screams stopped.
From now on, not a night will pass without guards dragging victims away.
The things I see here, and the inhumanity, are beyond description.
Guards stare lustfully at mothers or their young daughters.
Some guards are gangsters who rob our few possessions. If a woman has jewelry or gold rings, they take them. One woman had a mouthful of gold teeth. A guard took a pliers to her mouth and pulled out her teeth.
Prisoners are either Christian or Muslim, Bosniak and Croat, but mostly Muslim.
Apart from the soup, bread, and milk the first night, for the next four days we have little food or water. Our tongues are swollen from thirst. Our children cry, but the guards ignore them. Some women carry the lifeless bodies of their infant children who didn’t survive.
The guards tell them to toss the bodies aside. When one woman refuses and swears at a guard she is dragged away. We hear her screams.
She is never seen again.
Mila Shavik has a liking for pretty young women.
Sometimes he strides into the dormitories and points out a good-looking woman in her late teens or twenties to Boris Arkov. The woman is taken to Shavik’s quarters.
Shavik hasn’t recognized me yet. But like many of the guards, he’s often drunk, slow to recognize anyone, and for that I’m grateful.
Besides, I’m so gaunt and wretched-looking he’s unlikely to remember me.
But one day Boris Arkov passes us, halts, and points to Carla with his truncheon. “What age is she?”
“Nine,” I lie. Already I’m shaking.
Luka speaks up, innocently. “No, Mama, Carla is ten.”
Arkov rubs his jaw and grins. “Maybe ten is old enough? What do you think, woman?”
“Sir, please . . .”
Arkov grips Carla’s face between his thumb and forefinger, studying her looks. She is rigid with fear.
I want to kill Arkov.
How dare he.
How dare he talk about my daughter like that. How dare he even touch her. But I can do nothing.
Arkov lets go of Carla’s face. He looks at me, a cruel glint in his eyes. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep a look out for her until I think she’s ready.”
Then he laughs aloud and walks away.
The world we live in is bizarre.
We never know how our jailers will react.
I hear a story today. A drunken guard rapes a child of twelve. She’s left bloody, dazed, and crying outside a dormitory by her attacker until her frightened mother dares to come out to calm and hug her.
Shavik marches past and sees the woman and child. “What’s going on?” he demands
The poor woman is too distraught to tell, and fearful the truth may condemn her.
“I asked what’s going on.”
Shavik’s tone is so fierce the woman has no choice but to tell him.
“Which guard did this?”
The woman points a shaking finger toward a bunch of uniforms playing cards by the camp entrance gates, fifty yards away.
Shavik marches over and confronts a truculent, middle-aged guard with a fat beer gut and a drooping mustache.
“You assaulted the child?”
The guard grins, wiping the back of his mouth with a grubby hand. “Defiant little brat, she was. She needed a lesson, Commandant. I gave her one.”
“And what order did I give you?”
“To guard the entrance, Commandant.”
“Not to leave your post, correct?”
“Well, yes, Commandant, but—”
Without a word Shavik tears out his pistol and shoots the man point-blank in the head. He slumps to the group, body twitching, blood pumping from his skull.
“No one disobeys my orders in future. They follow orders, not their own lusts. Or else they’ll leave here in a box.”
The guards drag the dead man away.
And every adult prisoner wonders the same question: Did Shavik kill the guard because he disobeyed orders or because he felt something for the child?
“Mama, how long are we going to stay here?”
“I don’t know, my precious.”
“Why are we here?”
“It’s because . . . it’s because these men see us as their enemies.”
“Why? We’ve never harmed them, have we?”
“No. But they see us as different.”
“How?”
“Just . . . different.”
“We don’t behave differently. I heard one of the women say we are Bosniaks. Are Bosniaks different? But we’re not different, are we? And if we were what does it matter? We’re just people.”
Luka chimes in. “Yes, we’re just people, Mama.”
The questions go on. I’m sure every parent here has to try to answer such questions. But how can you explain over five hundred years of history to a child, when a child sees only the present?
So far we have survived the brutality around us.
But I fear our luck won’t last.
For more than five hundred women and children there are six toilets and showers.
There is never hot water, except when the guards want the women to wash before they abuse them. Winter is hard and we have to wash our children in icy-cold water. The women make a roster, but sometimes there are arguments and fights.
