…. I first met Alen when I arrived for work at a new job in the heart of Brisbane’s city. I was the new face amongst what was at the time, three other men from his homeland of the former Yugoslavia. There was also another foreigner in our ranks, “Raul” (Rah-ool!). Immediately, I was surrounded by their harsh, aggressive and perplexing language. I was aware of a humour, friendliness and curiosity inherent in their personalities. This was perhaps my first encounter with any “former Yugoslavians” – Slobodan, his brother Slaven, Dejan and Alen. Though they could have been intimidating (every word they said to each other sounded as though it were a declaration of a mortal war on their family, bloodshed soon to ensue) their help and guidance was more than forthcoming. I didn’t judge. Perhaps they did, but I didn’t and it might have inadvertently put my best foot forward. Slobodan signed me off early (mid week, a quieter night) and I joined him on what I soon gathered was his throne (a stool at the side of the bar) where he sat and enjoyed the privilege of being in charge, and watched his workers work: (In hindsight) Yugoslavian to the bone. Alen joined me soon after, once he was finished. Something started a conversation (in English – I think I mentioned something about drum & bass or killing someone or another of Al’s interests) and small talk became medium talk as Slobo hopped up for his obligatory pace around the bar/aggressive words to Dejan/pick at the food in the kitchen/top up of his soda glass. The tiniest little droplets of the spawning of our relationship. Alen and I.

….

Inevitably, though perhaps after some months, I began to ask (more) questions of Alen’s former life in Bosnia and the war, my curiosity constantly soaring to an unending peak. I think it was a fourteen hour conversation, rarely deviating off the topic of the war and Bosnia and the former Yugoslavia, that eventually inspired me to write this book: Such a life. So many daunting experiences. So many things that I couldn’t possibly understand. So much (if not all) of what shaped his mind, the experiences he learned from, grew from and what made him the man I currently knew, and would soon know everything there was to know about. It was with this in mind, that I embarked on the journey of understanding Alen’s past and the history of his country and its neighbours.

Alen is one of the most intense, passionate, energetic, inspired, driven, loyal, unpredictable, entertaining and individual people I have ever met or ever known. His views on life, his attitudes, his ethos, his morals, aims and desires stem, I believe, from his experiences growing up during the war. And this is why I wish to tell this amazing and inspiring tale. Through reading his story, I hope that you can empathise with what it was that brought him here. I hope to give you an understanding of just how such hardship can either make us, or break us. It must be understood that these sufferings are shared by many millions of people all over the world today, and in times gone by. While the individual experience itself is unique to Alen, it is in no way unique that he has endured hardship, squalor, death, starvation and genocide – the same fate has befallen many others who used to (and still do) call the former Yugoslavia home, and certainly many more humans alike of widely varied nationalities, religions and ethnicities either through war or other atrocities….

Alen is what he is today, because of what he lived through, yesterday.

Perhaps we will never truly know what it was like? – I doubt we will ever know just how he felt, while living in such times. But we can surely see what sort of man it can make. Al lives every day as though it were his last. Al does everything in order to survive, and live this beautiful life, where we can be whatever we want to be. Where there is no oppression. Where we are free to make a life via any avenue available to us, or those that we can make as such: His way, is “The Bosnian Way”.

Our senses alert us to all things, they recognise them and we know instinctively what they are. We feel wind. We hear traffic. We know thunder is thunder. The repetitive, sometimes constant experience of such things tells us so. It is something that you visualise in your mind – when you attach it to the feeling or paint the picture from the noise – vivid and real. Imagine if you knew the sound of a rocket-propelled grenade being launched through the air? “If you hear these grenades, you fucking run. These were the deadliest, but they gave us the chance to run”…

WEAPONS AND AMMO

From an early age, Alen and indeed, many of his fellow countrymen would wake to the sound of gunfire, shelling, explosions and missiles, and rockets and other projectiles in flight. Air-raid sirens, screams and the sound of panic. They would hear armies of tanks on the move and people fleeing from the aggressing army, or the aggressing army advancing towards them. The cries of the victims of brutal rapes and executions, sometimes for hours and hours on end. The wailing of a starving, sick or dying child. Then, they would go to sleep at night, with the same sounds filling their ears and consuming their subconscious and conscious minds.

This soon became life as Alen knew it: “When I was nine or ten years old, I’ve learned what calibre is what gun, what cannon, which is the most deadly!” – “In our case, it was the shoulder mounted grenades”. We might hear: Be careful when you play near the road, there might be traffic on the street. Or look out for those magpies, they’re swooping at this time of year. While Alen heard: Be careful when you go around to Aleksander’s place – watch out for grenades. “If im walking to your place, I stick to the northern wall, because I know that the grenades are gonna fly too far over. The frontlines were 20 kilometres away”. Such that it is necessary for survival during a war, this intuition was merely something that everyone learned, the same way that we adapt to what we hear, see and feel. Alen lived in a world where these instincts were the difference between life and death, harm and safety, near miss or direct hit…

… A long time after the war, Alen could still hear the sounds of these explosions as he was falling asleep at night. The sound of constant gunfire and of grenades, rockets and mortars in flight. For him, and many others, this was a sound that literally shook them to sleep for days, then months and for a lot of them, years. As the advancing army destroyed more and more of each city, so too did the human cost of the war continue to climb. “These rocket launchers took the most lives – luckily they had big tails!” – “In the air it spins, that’s what makes the noise and that’s what saved many lives – you could hear it coming.” he then continued to explain the tank’s downfall: “Tanks couldn’t go on the other side of the buildings, these grenades could”. And with yet another brutal and harsh realisation, he told me “The Serbs would fire grenades at intervals, knowing that there would be some civilians helping the injured and the wounded on the other side of the wall that the tanks had blasted. If you hear these grenades, you’re outta there”…

… “I can still close my eyes and remember the sounds of all that. Clearly.

Some of the stuff you only see in movies, we did.

It was war.

We were bandits.

… I carried a gun… My brother carried a gun…

We would steal grenades from soldiers who were barbequing or swimming – sneak in and take them. – We were kids! Trying to steal guns as big as us, that’s how small we were”.

War throws lives around, without consent, or the possibility of control. And while Alen didn’t choose to exist in such a way he grew up fast, with a brutal reality before him. While one’s childhood can be the most pleasant and innocent, carefree years of their life, Alen’s childhood was perhaps the worst years of his life, when everything he had would be taken away – when his views, beliefs, psyche and a lot of what he learned would be built around violence, destruction, warfare, death and survival. Perhaps the most valuable lesson to be learnt was indeed, that of survival and endurance. A people in constant battle, with no sign of the end. The feeling of the fear, and the never-ending fight against it. The infinite risk of each and every day. He was so young when it all began, and without a Bosnian resilience, one that would grow and soon be taken with him all through his life, he might have been so young when it all ended too.

“At first, in the beginning, its weird. You feel as though you’re being set free of something. You don’t feel bad because at that moment you are saved from something worse.” To me, life as a refugee played a major part in shaping Alen’s psychology, not only because it consumed so much of his life during the war, but also because of the experiences, hardships, trials, tests, dramas and deeds he went through. I spoke to him about all of this extensively:

BEING A REFUGEE

“Even though we’re forced to become the refugee, in the first moments, you were running into something better – because of what you were running from – the war itself – you just want to get out of the war. Then, later on, you start realising that that is the point of your life. There is no turning back…

no turning back”. The tone in Al’s voice changes, as though he regrets himself and his family being thrown into this dire situation. Sad, regretful, even though it simply wasn’t their choice.

“It took us a long time to grieve for everything we lost, because the entire time, you were struggling to survive, you had no time to sit down and cry “Oh my god! Oh my god!” – there was no point. Al pauses. “So the entire time we were refugees, we encountered danger upon danger, which made you think constantly: how where you going to get through? How could you make it? Its only after time do you acknowledge that fear, and it goes away.” “You relax and think about these things – the circumstances that you feel you can control – but the entire time you’re really thinking about survival, so you don’t think about loss. – its not that you don’t, you just know that there’s no point. That would only hold you back”.

…“Things change when you’re moving. In a camp you begin to realise that you’re gonna spend a year here, or another year in that centre, which is no better than the other, you realise that that’s what some refugees think they’ll do forever!” “They start killing themselves or getting depressed”. Did you ever think that way? I ask: “No, I didn’t think that way”. So, once you realised this, did it lead you to take the next step (towards rising above it): “Most of what im telling you now” explains Alen “I didn’t take any steps. Im only realising all of this now”. – “I couldn’t do much – you’re a refugee in a centre, you have certain privileges and that’s it. You have no opportunity to become something or someone, the only steps to take, the only ones you have are don’t get killed, don’t die and hope for (a) better tomorrow”…

excerpt from a biography i am currently writing called “The Bosnian Way”.

Copyright Carlos Hurworth