“Danger Mines” – end of January 2004

“Danger Mines” – end of January 2004

We passed Beli Monastir and enormous brown fields. Grey houses and grey neighborhoods, falling apart, caving in. Poor. We passed Osijek, where we stopped on a park bench to eat. One man passed us by, took a look at our bikes, and kept saying, “Jesus, Jesus.” The suburbs were grey and ugly. Large, cheap apartment buildings and little shacks. We passed entire neighborhoods that were abandoned. Apartment and office buildings with the windows blown out. Along the road were signs with skulls and crossbones: “Danger Mines.” We decided that there was no way we were going to camp in the woods in this country.

We wrote up a little sign in Croatian: “May we please set up our tent in your backyard?” We knocked at the first house we came to after night fell. The neighborhood was visibly wealthier than the surrounding towns we had passed through. They invited us to stay in their guest room, and served us brandy and tea, popcorn, and the best spicy chorizo ever! Homemade, of course. We spoke with Stevo and Edita and their nephew Robert and his wife Ivana, who spoke perfect English. Robert worked for the local paper and wanted to know if he could do an article on us, and we thought “why not?”, so he set to work asking questions and taking photos, especially of our little sign asking to camp in their backyard. We found out that a fisherman had been killed by a mine in the town that very day and that a de-miner had been killed by one five days previous. We were happy to be in a safe house.

Robert came back the next morning with a photographer from the paper. He apparently had taken photos during the war that had been broadcast around the world. The subject of the war with Serbia came up during breakfast and we found out that the family had been forced from their home at the start of the war and that the Serbian military had set up headquarters in their house. It was still occupied when they came back nine years later and they had a difficult time reclaiming it. The grandmother, however, who lived only four houses down the street, was allowed to stay in her house because she was Serbian. The rest of the family had to move from the Serbian-occupied territory to another town in Croatia.

After the photos for the paper were taken, we continued on towards Vukovar, the symbol of Serbian destruction in Croatia. Again, the warnings for mines. When we arrived in the town, we were so surprised by the first block of houses that we stopped to investigate. The houses and many of the buildings were peppered so full of holes as to look like sieves. I sat down on the wall of an abandoned building to eat handfuls of my Honey Nut Cheerios, and Stephane pulled a bullet out of a hole in the wall. There were many others in the bullet-ridden walls.

Just then, a woman walked by. A woman dressed in a big fur coat and heavy fur boots who looked different from the rest of the population. She was Joelle-Rose, a Swiss woman who had come to Croatia for six months to work in “The House of Europe,” an organization to inform people about the future of the European Union. She asked us to stay with her for the night so that she could show us around town.

We took a little tour of the town that night, and the streets were deserted. Maybe because of the cold…? But there was another atmosphere that reigned, too. One of misery and destruction. One of a town haunted by its violent past. Becuase it was unable to forget its past. Unable because the large majority of its buildings, its businesses, its homes were riddled with bullet holes, if not destroyed completely by bombs. Entire streets were abandoned. Slowly – very slowly – new buildings were being constructed. But it will take many, many years before the physical reminder of the war will start to fade away, even if it will never be erased completely. Most people are unable to find the money to repair their roofs or to fix their shattered windows, let alone think about rebuilding their homes.

As we walked around the town, we couldn’t think of anything but the recent war and the devastating effect it had had upon the lives of the people who lived through it. You couldn’t think of much else even if you had wanted to. The reminders were too constant. At the same time, I know that even if we could sympathize with the people and understand that war was a tragic thing for all people touched directly by it, we could never really understand all their suffering unless we had lived through something similar. I thought of the quote of the Hungarian architect who had designed Monument Park, the Communist graveyard, in Budapest:

“Inevitably, a tourist coming from a foreign country, to whom dictatorship means nothing more than at maximum a reading experience, very different thoughts arise than a person with a tragic past, who lived here, lived through hard times, carrying the drama of their own broken life under these statues into the park. Silence is common.”

Substitute “war” for “dictatorship,” and the phrase has the same sense.

We walked around the following day through a heavy snow and saw more of what the town had to offer: ruins upon ruins. More abandoned buildings, more bomb holes, more bullet-strewn walls. Stephane found more bullets. As he tried to dislodge one, an entire portion of the wall broke loose with the bullet and crumbled at our feet. It seemed to symbolize the fragility of the population and their town that was crumbling down in ruins around them.

We looked at the castle which was tortured by bullet holes and thus turned into a museum; we looked at the massive holes in the grocery store, where an entire wall was blown out; we admired the lone tree on the Danube side of the castle, which was the one thing that stood out charred and black against the backdrop of the innocent white snow which was quickly covering the ground. We remarked with striking contrast the shopping strip under the arcade in the town center: one upscale shop which sold fine suits and menswear, surrounded by a row of empty window-fronts in now-closed stores. The tourist office, even, bore marks of indiscriminate bullets – perhaps as a preface to let visitors know what to expect on their journey through the city. Even the streets were not spared. The pavement was covered generously with holes and bumps which reminded you with every footstep that this town had a history.

That physical history, of course, was paralleled by an even more profound psychological and social history. Each group – the Croats and the Serbs – had their own stores, their own bars, restaurants, markets. Even sadder, they had their own schools. In fact, they shared the same building, but one group had class the morning and one group had class during the afternoon. So that in consequence, they were kept separate and taught to dislike and distrust each other from the earliest age.

As we cycled out of the town in the late afternoon, we looked for the destroyed water tower, which had become the symbol of Vukovar and all the misery and destruction that the town represents in the minds of Croats. But we were unable to see it through the thick fog and the falling snow that was quickly enveloping the town, hiding Vukovar forever from our view but not from our memory.