Blood Without Honey

"If you don't have an enemy, your mother will give birth to one."The Bosnian conflict of the 1990s was only the latest of the barbaric fratricidal wars that have plagued my beloved hometown in my former homeland. After finally uniting in 1918, following the assassination of Crown Prince Ferdinand in Sarajevo and WWI for which it served as a pretext, the South Slavs were torn apart by the German invasion in 1941, which inflamed four years of a religion-driven genocide. The country was made whole again, thanks to the partisan war of liberation and the strong hand of Tito's "fraternity and unity" movement, but after his death, the country disintegrated. In the 1990s, the sons and daughters of Yugoslavia fought against each other and divorced in the flames of a cruel genocide. The marriage had lasted less than three-quarters of a century.The irrationality of the atavistic Balkan conflicts makes them hard to explain. Angelina Jolie's recent movie "Land of Blood and Honey" tried to do so and in the eyes of Sarajevo witnesses of the infamous three-year siege failed. ____________________Born Jewish in 1921 in Sarajevo, I felt the ripples of Hitler's rise to power in Europe, took part in student demonstrations which overthrew the pro-Nazi Belgrade government in 1941, escaped capture by the German Quislings, and became a rubric in the Geneva Convention as Civilian Internee of War in Asolo, Italy. There I taught school to refugee children and took them to matriculate at the Venice Ghetto schools. After the fall of Mussolini in 1943, I fled again from invading German troops and lived underground in Rome until in June 1944 general Clark liberated it. I returned back home, and back in Dalmatia, on the Adriatic Coast of Yugoslavia, fought against the German troops until the end of war in Europe.