Gloves—a paramilitary group, mostly armed volunteer thugs and criminals under the loose command of the military—the unit wearing ski masks, the executioners, poked my father with their guns and demanded money. He was using a fake name until we got to Tirana, in Albania.”
Eric’s memory for the details is astounding. He also remembers when there was artillery fire near their house early in the war, and his mother picked him up to carry him, she slipped, and he fell. His father carried him the rest of the way. Eric thought it was important for me to hear this story too, to have a complete picture of his experience. He wanted to make sure I knew as many details as possible. He searched out and showed me a photograph of the neighbor who had been shot. I should see it, he said, and I could keep it if I needed to. I told him I didn’t, but I wondered why he was so insistent on every detail, on remembering events so precisely. He had been correcting his sister when she spoke, which might have been why she left the room.
Other children showed the same attention to detail.
In the village Lubeniq, a fourteen-year-old boy, Leo, told of walking with his mother and siblings to Albania.
“The police came early in the morning, at six A.M. , and made the whole village come out of our houses. They sent the women and children to Albania. They made the men stay. If we stopped walking to rest, the Serbs would say, ‘If you don’t get up in five minutes, we’ll kill you.’ They burned all the identification papers they found so we could not come back. When we left, I heard shooting. They killed eighty-four or eighty-six men.”
Human Rights Watch reports that “between March 24 and June 10, more than eighty villagers were killed by Serbian forces.”
Leo wanted to be very precise about the numbers—and his accuracy impressed me. The numbers must have come from adults around him, if not directly told to him then from his own active assimilation of information he overheard. Most of the children I met in Kosovo had this same impulse, get the numbers right, get as much information as possible about what happened, tell the names of the dead. It seemed to be a trend: The countryside is filled with memorials to fallen KLA soldiers, to civilians massacred. At a school in the mountains near the Montenegro border, a plaque commemorates an eighth grader who was killed in a mortar attack. The students I met, even the ones who were very young at the time of the war, knew his name and what had happened to him. Telling their story, for these young people, for this nation, seemed a way to validate their past, to prove they could not be expelled or exterminated. The story of individuals and the story of the people as a whole were bound together.
“There were nine survivors that day,” Leo told me. “They were wounded, the rest were executed. Only twenty of the bodies have been recovered.”
Leo, Karl, Valerie, and Nora, as well as many of the other youths I met, were bothered by the bodies that had not been buried, even if they were not the bodies of their family or friends. The unburied, missing bodies are a constant reminder of the horror these communities experienced. The wounds heal over time, but without the ability to properly mourn their dead, the scab leaves some painful grit underneath that never stops itching, will never stop until the missing dead can be put to rest and proper healing can begin. The stories they tell, five years after the war, are fresh and vivid in detail. I believe this is due, in part, to the fact that the story is not complete. Kosovo still does not have its independence from Serbia, though the UNadministers it as a separate territory and NATO forces defend its borders with Serbia. No war criminals have been indicted in connection with the massacres or “cleansings” in Kosovo. This leaves the young feeling uneasy about the future. Their vivid memories are not “flashbulb memories,” moments burnt into
Eric’s memory for the details is astounding. He also remembers when there was artillery fire near their house early in the war, and his mother picked him up to carry him, she slipped, and he fell. His father carried him the rest of the way. Eric thought it was important for me to hear this story too, to have a complete picture of his experience. He wanted to make sure I knew as many details as possible. He searched out and showed me a photograph of the neighbor who had been shot. I should see it, he said, and I could keep it if I needed to. I told him I didn’t, but I wondered why he was so insistent on every detail, on remembering events so precisely. He had been correcting his sister when she spoke, which might have been why she left the room.
Other children showed the same attention to detail.
In the village Lubeniq, a fourteen-year-old boy, Leo, told of walking with his mother and siblings to Albania.
“The police came early in the morning, at six A.M. , and made the whole village come out of our houses. They sent the women and children to Albania. They made the men stay. If we stopped walking to rest, the Serbs would say, ‘If you don’t get up in five minutes, we’ll kill you.’ They burned all the identification papers they found so we could not come back. When we left, I heard shooting. They killed eighty-four or eighty-six men.”
Human Rights Watch reports that “between March 24 and June 10, more than eighty villagers were killed by Serbian forces.”
Leo wanted to be very precise about the numbers—and his accuracy impressed me. The numbers must have come from adults around him, if not directly told to him then from his own active assimilation of information he overheard. Most of the children I met in Kosovo had this same impulse, get the numbers right, get as much information as possible about what happened, tell the names of the dead. It seemed to be a trend: The countryside is filled with memorials to fallen KLA soldiers, to civilians massacred. At a school in the mountains near the Montenegro border, a plaque commemorates an eighth grader who was killed in a mortar attack. The students I met, even the ones who were very young at the time of the war, knew his name and what had happened to him. Telling their story, for these young people, for this nation, seemed a way to validate their past, to prove they could not be expelled or exterminated. The story of individuals and the story of the people as a whole were bound together.
“There were nine survivors that day,” Leo told me. “They were wounded, the rest were executed. Only twenty of the bodies have been recovered.”
Leo, Karl, Valerie, and Nora, as well as many of the other youths I met, were bothered by the bodies that had not been buried, even if they were not the bodies of their family or friends. The unburied, missing bodies are a constant reminder of the horror these communities experienced. The wounds heal over time, but without the ability to properly mourn their dead, the scab leaves some painful grit underneath that never stops itching, will never stop until the missing dead can be put to rest and proper healing can begin. The stories they tell, five years after the war, are fresh and vivid in detail. I believe this is due, in part, to the fact that the story is not complete. Kosovo still does not have its independence from Serbia, though the UNadministers it as a separate territory and NATO forces defend its borders with Serbia. No war criminals have been indicted in connection with the massacres or “cleansings” in Kosovo. This leaves the young feeling uneasy about the future. Their vivid memories are not “flashbulb memories,” moments burnt into
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