One Day the Soldiers Came by Charles London

legs won’t carry me on this journey.” He hid himself between some trees.
    They took one of her uncles, though. They shot him with a silencer and dragged him inside his house and burnt him there. They wrapped him in a blanket so he would burn easier. “We knew it was him later by how we was wrapped and that his face was not burned. I saw him after the house burnt down.”
    As she told me this story, I felt overwhelmed. So much could happen to a little girl on a sunny day in May. It happened near her school where we were sitting five years later. There were three other young people from the village with us, all of whomhad also suffered terribly at the hands of the Serb paramilitaries. The others wanted to tell their stories too. Nora told them to hold on. Her frightful tale was not yet done and she wanted to make sure the narrative was complete.
    “We went to our neighbor’s home and lots of people were gathered there listening to the news. The paramilitaries came and beat us with rifle butts and clubs and their fists and told us to say good-bye to each other because they were going to kill us soon. We stayed there two more weeks, though, and the Serbs didn’t come back. We stayed two more weeks until some other Serbs came, put us in a line, and made us leave.”
    The children began to describe this line, which, at the time, they and all their families joined. It was a line of people and vehicles starting in the center of town and directed to head out of Kosovo towards Montenegro. There were buses on the road. Those who had cars loaded them with their families and whatever property they could fit. People rode on tractors and horse-drawn carts. People also walked. It was Gibbon’s highway “crowded with a trembling multitude.” It was along this line that the next wave of horrors occurred.
    “Army men in black masks stopped us,” Nora said. “They took some men from the line, who disappeared.”
    Mark, who had been eager to interject, finally cut in.
    “They took my father when we were in this line. They took him from right in front of me and two of my first cousins too, and shot them. But my father survived. He lay under the bodies until they were gone.”
    “They tried to take my father,” another boy, Karl, said. “They didn’t though. The truck driver that was taking us, turned around.”
    “I was with Karl on the same truck,” Valerie added. She brushed her long blond hair from her face. “They took my father and five of my uncles. They killed them.”
    Human Rights Watch reports that nineteen people were killed in Zahaq on May 14, 1999.
    “They killed my father later,” Karl said. “When the Serbs were pulling out [after three months of NATO air strikes on Serb positions], a yellow Mercedes came into the village, and the men in it shot him.”
    The retention of details amazed me, as did the way these stories played out for children of all social classes. In Africa, it had mostly been the poor who were forced to flee, as most of the fighting took place in or around villages. Wealthier citizens stayed in the cities, hired protection, or left the conflict areas altogether with resources to pay bribes and avoid refugee camps. The youths I met in the Balkans, in the villages of Zahaq and Lubeniq and Pavlan, were poor even before the war, and Kosovo remains the poorest province in the former Yugoslavia. But in this war the wealthy also had to flee and children of well-to-do families were no more protected from the terror of expulsion than anyone else.
    Eric, an energetic twelve-year-old, and his fifteen-year-old-sister Alice, are the children of a wealthy Kosovar Albanian businessman.
    “In the afternoon on the Saturday after the NATO bombing started,” Alice said, “the Serbs came to our house.”
    Eric interrupted her with a great deal of eagerness:
    “Captain Death came to our house.” The children didn’t know his real name. But according to Human Rights Watch, Captain “Death” (“Mrtvi”)