‘A true hell’: How three Srebrenica survivors defied dying 30 years in the past | Genocide | USAEMALL.com

Before the war scattered his family, Nedzad Avdic loved geography.

He had just entered his teens. Growing up in the village of Sebiocina in Srebrenica municipality, close to the border with Serbia, Avdic could explain the difference between clustered and dispersed settlements. He learned how one could tell north from south by noticing which side of a tree the moss grew on, and discovered how to find constellations and navigate by the North Star.

“I didn’t study it for survival,” Avdic, now 47, would later write in his memoir. “I studied it because I loved it.”

But in the spring of 1995, three years into a conflict that still scars the Balkans, he would come to live in the geography of eastern Bosnia, trudging through forests alongside 8,000 other Bosniak men and boys, trying to survive.

Avdic was 17 by then and living in a United Nations-run refugee camp in the valley of Slapovici, just south of Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia nestled in a deep valley near the Drina River, which has historically served as a natural border with Serbia. At the time, Srebrenica had a population of just 6,000 and was locally known for its ancient silver deposits, from which it took its name – the Bosnian word for silver is srebro.

The UN camp, built on previously uninhabited land, was home to more than 3,000 displaced Bosniaks, South Slavic Muslims native to Bosnia and Herzegovina, who lived in rows of Swedish-donated wooden cabins. There was no electricity, no plumbing and never enough food.

Bosnia was a young country then, newly independent after the collapse of Yugoslavia, having declared independence on March 1, 1992, after a public referendum. At the time, Bosnia’s population was ethnically diverse – roughly 44 percent Bosniak, 31 percent Serb and 17 percent Croat – making it one of the most multiethnic republics of the former Yugoslavia.

By then, Bosnian Serbs had proclaimed what they would call Republika Srpska, a notional quasi-state that the community’s political leaders wanted to carve out from Bosnia, ostensibly to defend its interests.

Only a month later, on April 6, Bosnian Serb forces, backed by Serbia, launched a war to seize territory and expel non-Serbs towards that goal. Towns close to the border were shelled, civilians forced out, and families like Avdic’s had to flee.

His family – father Alija, mother Tima, and three younger sisters – would be uprooted several times throughout the war: first from their home in Sebiocina, then from makeshift shelters in Srebrenica town, before they reached the refugee camp in Slapovici.

In 1993, after a Serb attack on a schoolyard that killed 56, many of them children, and wounded more than 70, Srebrenica and its surrounding villages were declared a UN “safe area,” by the UN Security Council along with five other towns and cities in Bosnia. The declaration demanded an “immediate cessation of armed attacks by Bosnian Serb paramilitary units against Srebrenica” and that Serbia and Montenegro, then called the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, “immediately cease the supply of military arms” to the Bosnian Serb paramilitary forces. But the Serb bombardment of the town and its neighbouring villages never stopped.

At the time, Avdic told Al Jazeera, “We believed the war would eventually end – that it had to.”

“The United Nations was there, the Blue Helmets, and we told ourselves the darkness couldn’t last forever. Of course, we all feared for our lives – we knew that on any given day we could be killed,” he said.

“But the scale of what would happen next was beyond anything we could have imagined.”

The offensive begins (July 6–10, 1995)

At dawn on July 6, 1995, the hills around Srebrenica thundered with artillery fire. It was the start of Operation Krivaja ‘95, an offensive ordered by Radovan Karadzic, then president of the self-proclaimed Republika Srpska, aimed at capturing the enclave.

In the Slapovici refugee camp, Avdic woke to the sound of shelling.

“It just wouldn’t stop,” Avdic said. “It was clear it had become too dangerous to stay.”

As Karadzic’s troops approached, Avdic and his family left on foot – he says on July 8 or July 9 – fleeing into the hilly forests towards villages near Srebrenica.

“Reaching those villages was our last refuge,” he said.

Inside the town of Srebrenica, Hajrudin Mesic, 21, heard the same explosions from his family’s apartment. He had already lost two of his four brothers to the war – Idriz, 36, on March 3 from a sniper, and Senahid, 23, from shelling in the 1993 schoolyard attack on Srebrenica. Now, in July 1995, it felt like the town itself was about to fall.

“That morning [July 6], everything shook,” he said.

The army of Republika Bosnia and Herzegovina in Srebrenica – part of the country’s main military force, formed in April 1992 to defend against Serb aggression and made up largely of local defenders – had been disarmed by the United Nations two years earlier in exchange for peacekeeping, and had few resources with which to fight back. Dutch peacekeepers were present, but by then, their positions had already been pushed back several times by the 25,000-soldier strong Army of Republika Srpska, the Bosnian Serb military force, leaving the town’s outskirts exposed.

On July 10, Serb forces started entering the town. Mesic was in the bathroom when his mother began pounding on the door.

“‘Hajrudin, son, get out, the bullets and shrapnel are falling in our living room,’ I remember my mother screaming. They [the Bosnian Serb Army] were already in the town.”

He grabbed a makeshift bag and slipped out with his elderly parents, mother Zaha and father Selim, and his two remaining brothers, Hasan and Safet, darting through side streets, using buildings for cover.

Srebrenica falls

Across town, 16-year-old Emir Bektic and his family realised it was time to run on the morning of July 11.

That day, Bektic’s father, Redzep, returned to their home in Srebrenica covered in blood. A child had died in his arms after a shell hit a nearby village which was under bombardment and where Redzep had volunteered to help carry the dead and wounded. “Srebrenica is no more,” he said. “We have to leave.”

After years of surviving shelling, starvation and isolation, the enclave had collapsed. At about 4pm on July 11, General Ratko Mladic, leader of the Bosnian Serb forces, entered the UN-declared safe area. They started separating Bosniak women, young children and the elderly from men and boys, promising that the first group would be allowed UN shelter.

Word spread among the 60,000 people in the enclave at the time – Srebrenica municipality’s pre-war population of 35,000, and the rest people who had been pushed out of neighbouring areas by the Bosnian Serb forces.

Bosniaks fled in two directions: women and children moved towards the UN base in the village of Potocari, while between 12,000 and 15,000 unarmed men and boys set off into the hills, bound for Tuzla, the closest city beyond Bosnian Serb reach, nearly 100 kilometres to the north. It was a “free zone” that would guarantee their safety.

Bektic and his father joined the forest-bound column. His mother and sister went to the UN base. “One question hung in the air,” he said. “Will we ever see each other again?”

Meanwhile, Mesic and his family also chose to split – his elderly parents went to the UN base in Potocari, while he and his two brothers went to the woods.

It was the same with Avdic, his father and uncle. Avdic’s mother and his sisters headed to the UN base in Potocari, while they marched towards Tuzla.

On July 11, at about 6 -7pm local time, after two days of travelling on foot from the refugee camp in Slapovici, they reached the villages of Jaglici and Susnjari, approximately 15 kilometres (9 miles) away, where they joined thousands of other men and boys. But the villages were under bombardment. The horses and cattle that people were using to ferry the dead and wounded panicked, running helter-skelter. “In that chaos, I lost my father,” Avdic said.

He suddenly found himself engulfed in a crowd of strangers. “I didn’t recognise a single face around me,” he said. In a panic, he began shouting for his father, pushing through the mass of people, calling his name over and over.

“But I never saw him again,” he recalled. “Surrounded by thousands of people, I still felt utterly alone.”

He joined them on the long walk through the dark forests of eastern Bosnia, hoping to reach Tuzla.

The death march

The route to Tuzla, which remained under Bosnian government control throughout the war, was thick with oak, beech and pine, but also scattered with a dry, brittle fern native to Bosnia’s forests in summer. Temperatures were punishing, climbing as high as 34 to 36 degrees Celsius (93–97 degrees Fahrenheit) in the July heat. Every step through the dry undergrowth risked exposure. The crack of a branch or the rustle of dried ferns could give away their position to nearby Serb forces.

“We walked in silence,” recalled Bektic. “Not out of discipline, because of fear. No one wanted to attract death.”

“I was exhausted, hungry, and thirsty. We’d only managed to grab whatever food we could find in the house before marching through the woods. There was no time to prepare. That journey … all of it … was almost unbearable for me at 16.”

On the night of July 12, at Kamenicko Brdo, 40 kilometres (25 miles) from Tuzla, the group that Bektic and his father were part of reached a stream.

Overwhelmed by thirst, Bektic bent down to drink, but the water was thick with mud. “It wasn’t really water. It was more like muddy sludge. I felt sand in my mouth,” he said.

Still, that single mouthful was all he had. Moments later, chaos erupted. Serb soldiers cut through the column, pulling out 15 to 20 people who had crossed the stream. They were ordered to climb a small hill and sit. Then came the words that changed everything: “You are prisoners.”

“At that moment, they [the Bosnian Serb soldiers] were only debating one thing – how to kill us,” he said. “Some of them said, ‘Let’s kill them right here,’ while others suggested, ‘No, let’s take them down to the stream and slaughter them there.’”

Exhausted and terrified, Bektic laid his head in his father’s lap.

“No matter what happens, we’ll stay together. Just stay with me. Don’t fall asleep,” his father said.

But Bektic did fall asleep and woke up only the next afternoon to find that he was leaning against a beech tree, alone.

“My first instinct was to search for my father,” Bektic said.

He called out. Waited. Searched. “Maybe he had gone to get water. Maybe he would come back.”

He didn’t, leaving Bektic with a lifetime of questions: What had happened to his father? Had he been marched to his death by the soldiers? Had his father propped him against the tree in the dark to hide him from the Bosnian Serb Army? How had he slept through it all?

“The last thing I remember from that night is his embrace.”

After days on his own in the forest, Bektic found another group of Bosniaks, among them his uncle and his two cousins. But Serb soldiers soon surrounded them again, demanding surrender. Some tried to escape and were shot. As they were marching down the road, Bektic passed “hundreds of murdered people” in the heat, and he had to be careful not to “step on a body”.

They were taken to a hill and ordered to sit in rows. A Serb commander announced that some boys would be released, and that any boy who wanted to go should stand up. Several boys about Bektic’s age stood up.

“At that moment, none of us really understood what was happening”, Bektic said.

“My uncle insisted that I get up and go, and we quietly argued,” he said. “I just wanted to stay with my uncle. I had started to feel safe again, and no matter what happened, I wanted to remain by his side.

“My mother and sister had gone to Potocari, and I had no news of them. My father was somewhere in the forest – killed or taken, I didn’t know. I was completely alone, and just being with my uncle and among other people I knew made me feel a little more safe.”

But eventually, he caved to his uncle’s pleas.

“Go,” the commander said. As he stood up, he saw buses lined up in the valley below and ran towards them. He caught the last one just as its doors were closing. The bus was packed with women and children coming from the UN base in Potocari, going towards Tuzla. “Don’t ask anything,” one woman told him as they covered him with a blanket.

‘Clapping for our executioners’

Further west in the forest, on July 13, near the village of Kamenice in Bratunac municipality – a former Bosniak village that had been burned and destroyed by Serb forces in 1993 – Avdic’s group was also cut off by soldiers. “They [the Bosnian Serb military] threatened us over megaphones, saying they’d bomb us if we didn’t surrender,” he said. “Then they promised to treat us under the Geneva Conventions.”

“At first, they acted civilly. Then it started. The beatings. The insults. The humiliation.”

Avdic was somewhere near the front. The soldiers told them to leave their belongings, that everything would be returned. He left his bag, with family photos inside, next to a tank. Standing there on the road, he still remembers that tank in front of him, and the vehicles nearby. On one of them, written in Cyrillic, were the words: The Queen of Death.

Other vehicles began to arrive – civilian Volkswagen Golfs, packed with soldiers sitting on the hoods, roofs, and inside. More soldiers followed. Then came blue and white police cars, still the pre-war Yugoslav models.

The police remained behind as Bosnian Serb soldiers ordered men and boys to start jogging towards a meadow about a kilometre from Kamenice. As they crossed the asphalt road, buses filled with refugees from Potocari pulled up and were forced to stop. The captured men were now blocking the road.

“Among them, I recognise a girl I went to school with,” said Avdic. “And it’s obvious that some of the refugees in the buses recognise some of the people in our column, too. Women are crying as they probably recognised their family members among us – sons, brothers, fathers.”

Eventually, the men and boys were ordered to continue running towards Kamenice, while the buses moved in the opposite direction towards Tuzla.

They reached a meadow in the destroyed Bosniak village of Sandici. “The grass was already trampled, as if someone had played football there,” Avdic recalled. “Others had been there before us. And they had already been taken away.”

Only later, while testifying before the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) in The Hague, would Avdic learn what had happened on that same meadow just hours earlier: Ramo Salkic, a captured Bosniak refugee, had been filmed calling out to his teenage son Nermin to join him where the Serb soldiers stood. That footage, used as key evidence in the prosecution of the Srebrenica genocide, showed the chilling moment of surrender. Both father and son were later executed.

That night, a Serb soldier told Avdic and others, “You’ll be returned to your families. Everything will be fine.” But the voice dripped with sarcasm, Avdic recalled.

“They placed us all in rows and laid the wounded ahead of us.” Then came the order: lie down, hands behind heads – and applaud. “All of us, together, as hard as we could,” Avdic said. “We spent two to three hours doing that.” By the time the clapping stopped, the wounded were gone. “They had been taken into nearby houses and killed,” he said. “Gunfire echoed all around us.”

Then came the shouting: “Long live the king! Long live Serbia!” The soldiers forced them to chant with them in unison, like a choir.

Packed into trucks, Avdic and others were then driven through Bratunac town near Srebrenica and beyond. “Serbs cursed us from the sidewalks, threw stones,” he said.

The July heat, he recalls, was “unbearable” inside the truck. “I remember peering through a hole in the tarpaulin [on the side of the truck]. In fact, that hole is what helped me breathe, so I wouldn’t suffocate. People around me were losing consciousness. They couldn’t breathe,” he said. “A true hell.”

With no water and unable to bear the thirst, people started drinking their own urine, he said.

“They were screaming, shouting, asking for water, saying: ‘Open the tailgates, or kill us already. We can’t take it any longer.’”

Avdic tried to keep track of time, but after hours without food or water, he could no longer focus. Bosniak men on the truck who had earlier seen a UN vehicle pass by – and had hoped it was coming to rescue them and take them to Tuzla – began to lose hope. Rumours spread that they weren’t heading to Tuzla after all, but to Bijeljina, a city northeast of Tuzla near the border with Serbia, where Serbian nationalist paramilitary groups were maintaining a concentration camp.

They drove like that for about 50km, until they arrived at a school in Petkovici, about 70km from Srebrenica. By that time, it was already the morning of the next day, July 14.

As the men were offloaded from the trucks and forced into the school, soldiers began beating those in the front with rifles and pipes.

“It was chaos,” Avdic said. “They couldn’t strike everyone fast enough.”

Inside the school, more Serb soldiers were waiting. One shouted, “Whose land is this?” Another answered, “This is Serb land – always has been, always will be.” The men were forced to repeat the phrase in unison.

The ground-floor classrooms were already packed. Screams echoed from behind closed doors. Avdic and the others were taken upstairs to the second-last classroom on the first floor. Inside, he recognised his uncle. He learned that they had been together earlier in the meadow, but Avdic had not noticed him then.

At one point, people started whispering about escape. “We should try jumping out the windows … or making a run for the doors,” someone said. “Maybe someone would survive that way, otherwise, we are all going to be killed.”

Hearing the commotion, Serb soldiers stepped in and tried to calm the crowd. “The Red Cross is coming, prepare to be exchanged.”

“And we all believed it. In a situation like that, you’d believe anything for a chance to survive,” Avdic said.

His shirt was still soaked with urine from the journey, so he turned to the person next to him and asked if they had a spare T-shirt. A man sitting next to him pulled out one and handed it over. “The Red Cross was coming, and I felt embarrassed to be seen like that, all soaked. I was shy,” he said.

The soldiers started taking men out of the classroom, five or six at a time. When it was his turn to go outside, Avdic asked his uncle to come with him. “But he refused. He stayed behind.”

Once out in the hallway, soldiers ordered him and others to undress, tied their hands and marched them downstairs. He followed with others, leaving the clean shirt behind.

There was blood in the hallway, bodies in front of the school, and more at the main entrance. He expected to be shot right there. But the soldiers loaded them back onto a truck.

Once the truck was full, the soldiers fired a few bullets through the tarp to scare those inside. Screams filled the air as some people were hit and wounded. Bodies crushed against each other, but Avdic, who was not hit, managed to stay on his knees.

Amid cries around him, Avdic recognised a voice behind him: “It was my geography teacher.”

The truck started moving. When it finally stopped, it was about midnight. The men and boys were again ordered to get out.

Soldiers began pulling people out again. By now, Avdic was sure that they were to be executed. “It all happened so fast,” Avdic said. “I tried to hide behind others, pressing myself into the crowd – but so was everyone else, each person trying to shield themselves behind someone else.”

But Avdic had also accepted that he was going to die.

“The only thing I wanted at that moment was to drink some water. I felt devastated that I’d die thirsty.”

As he looked ahead, he saw what felt like an endless crowd — thousands of men. Then, the gunfire began, sudden and fierce. He couldn’t recall the exact moment he was hit. There was chaos, shouting, bodies dropping all around him. Then – blackness.

When he regained consciousness, pain surged through his body. His right arm and side were burning; his whole body trembled. The stench of gunpowder clung to the air. Bullets had been fired at point-blank range – they had torn through the group without mercy. Bodies lay all around him.

In the haze, he heard voices, soldiers nearby. One said, “Check if anyone’s still alive.” Another replied coldly, “They’re all dead.”

Then came silence, followed by the sound of vehicles pulling away. Somewhere nearby, he noticed a man still moving. He called out softly, “Are you all right?” The man responded, “I am. Come. Untie me.”

“I can’t … I can’t …” Avdic whispered. His voice faded in and out.

Somehow, after what seemed like eternity, he managed to gather his strength and crawl over to the man, who had survived, almost unharmed, because he had been crushed under the weight of the bodies falling on him, and so, was saved from the bullets.

With nothing else to use, Avdic began chewing through the ropes that bound the man, slowly and painfully. Thread by thread.

The soldiers were gone, so the man stood up and began to walk. Avdic, still tied and injured, crawled beside him, over the bodies of executed men and boys, some still warm. They stumbled into a concrete drainage canal hidden in the brush, where the man untied Avdic’s wrists and began to carry him. When the man grew too tired, Avdic would drag himself forward on his stomach, inch by inch.

They survived on wild apples plucked from trees. Weakened and bleeding, Avdic would beg the man, “Please, leave me behind. Save yourself.” But the man refused, every time.

For days, they crept through dense forests, dodging Serb patrols, slipping past scorched Bosniak homes, and sleeping in the ruins of villages burned years earlier. Each time Avdic could go no farther, the man pointed to the next hill and whispered, “Just that one more … then we’ll stop.”

Eventually, they crossed into Bosnian-held territory in Zvornik near Tuzla, barely alive.

“Someone poured water on me,” Avdic later recalled. “And I cried. That’s when I knew. I had survived.”

A shoelace

After surviving the shelling of his apartment in Srebrenica, Mesic joined the column fleeing through the forest with his two brothers, Hasan, 36, and Safet, 34, on July 11, while their parents had already taken refuge at the UN base in Srebrenica.

After a day or two of moving, the column stalled – likely near Kamenica, a village in the Zvornik municipality near the border with Serbia – and was attacked by soldiers. Kamenica was one of the deadliest points along the escape route from Srebrenica, where Bosnian Serbs killed hundreds of men through a series of ambushes as they tried to flee through the forest.

A fierce barrage of gunfire rained down on them. Mesic’s brother Hasan was shot in both arms.

Amid the chaos, Mesic and his brothers tried to keep moving, but he lost sight of both Safet and Hasan.

“I couldn’t see them any more,” he said.

He pressed on with a small group of survivors, carrying the wounded through the woods.

At one point, rain began to fall, and the survivors welcomed it. “It masked our steps,” he recalled. “Soaking wet, exhausted, we lay down and slept side by side, in the mud, under the rain.”

Along the route, he reunited with a close friend, who shared his brother’s name, Hasan. “Only then did I feel a little safer again,” Mesic recalled. “I wasn’t alone any more.”

But Mesic, Hasan and their group would have to face more gunfire. In the forests above Kamenica, the narrow trails had turned into visible roads, beaten down by thousands of desperate feet.

Locals called it the trla, a tragic corridor etched into the landscape by death marches. Serb forces were already there, lying in wait.

“They let us pass, and then opened fire,” Mesic said. “Many were killed.”

He hit the ground along with Hasan. “I remember the sound of them changing rifle magazines,” he said. Hasan was shot. “Please don’t leave me,” he begged.

“I didn’t, I couldn’t,” Mesic said.

Once again, Mesic survived, with Hasan.

By the time the two reached Brezik village, 50 kilometres (about 30 miles) from Tuzla, Mesic’s shoes had long fallen apart. He was walking in thin socks that had torn, and his feet were blistered. In one hand, he clutched several small, bruised wild pears which he had picked up in the forest – “the kind even livestock wouldn’t eat,” he said.

“But we were starving. I couldn’t let them go.”

They were close to what they believed was free territory when bullets hit the dirt around them again. “We have made it so far,” Mesic told his friend. “But I don’t know if we’ll make it this time.”

Serb soldiers were positioned on nearby houses, so the two crawled through high, uncut grass to avoid being noticed until they fell into an abandoned Serb army trench. Inside, they found two wounded Bosniak men and a boy, who had been shot by the soldiers. The men died in front of them. The boy, 16-year-old Musa, was bleeding heavily from his leg.

“He looked at me and said, ‘Do you have a shoelace? Anything I can tie my leg with?’” Mesic recalled. “You think I had shoelaces? I didn’t even have shoes.”

In pain and panic, Musa began to cry out: “Serbs! I’m wounded! Come help me!” From somewhere beyond the trench, a voice called back: “Drop your weapon first!” Musa answered, “I don’t have a weapon! I’m a kid!”

“He still believed someone might help,” Mesic said.

But no help came. Musa was shot and killed where he lay.

Realising they may be next, Mesic and Hasan ran for their lives under fire, slowing down only once the soldiers were out of range. “I still had the pears in one hand.”

It was night, and they decided to wait for dawn before moving again.

But suddenly, Mesic heard someone calling out to them.

About 30 metres away, there was a soldier waving, motioning for them to come over. Mesic said to Hasan, “He’s calling us. Maybe he’s one of ours?” Hasan replied, “Are you kidding? That’s a Chetnik [a Serb nationalist fighter or paramilitary].”

“If it was a Chetnik, he wouldn’t be smiling like that – he’d shoot us from here,” Mesic said. Hasan still didn’t want to go.

Mesic was torn. He said again, “He’s smiling, that’s something only a friend would do.”

Then, next to the soldier calling out to them,  Hasan recognised his friend Sakib. “It’s our army! It’s Bosniaks!” he told Mesic. The terrain of Brezik is rugged and broken up, and the two had crossed into Bosniak-controlled territory without realising it.

They ran towards the Bosnian soldiers, who gave them bread. They had survived.

The ones who lived

Days later in Tuzla, Mesic was reunited with his parents, who had given him up for dead.

Meanwhile, the bus Bektic had boarded in Potocari took him to Tisca, from where he walked as part of a civilian column to Kladanj, near Tuzla. “Even though I was part of a long column, I still felt completely alone,” he said. “But I survived. And that means I have to speak.”

In 2004, the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) ruled that the Srebrenica killings were genocide. Serb leaders Radovan Karadzic and Ratko Mladic were both convicted of genocide – Karadzic in 2016, Mladic in 2017.

In 2007, the International Court of Justice recognised Srebrenica as an act of genocide and found that Serbia failed in its obligation to prevent it.

In just a few days in July 1995, more than 8,000 Bosniak men and boys were murdered. Their remains were scattered across mass graves, many of them later disturbed in efforts to hide the crime. At least 25,000 women and children were expelled from the town. According to the State Commission of Bosnia and Herzegovina, approximately 25,000 women were raped during the war. The actual number is believed to be significantly higher, as many survivors likely have never come forward because of the stigma associated with rape. In 2006, Bosnia and Herzegovina became one of the first countries to legally recognise survivors of wartime sexual violence, but children born of wartime rape weren’t recognised until 2022.

To this day, more than 1,000 families are still waiting to find and bury their loved ones killed in the Srebrenica genocide. Those found are being buried in Potocari.

In the early 2000s, Avdic testified at The Hague in the trials of those accused of committing genocide in Srebrenica. He later co-wrote a book with his sister, The Hague Witness, now translated into English and being translated into Arabic. He lost his father, three uncles – including the one who was with him in the school in Petkovici, three cousins, and many others in the genocide. From his immediate family, his mother Tima and his three sisters had survived. He never got back the family photographs he had left in his bag. Today, he lives in Srebrenica.

Mesic lost four brothers, including Hasan and Safet –  the brothers he was fleeing Srebrenica with – and 24 relatives on his mother’s side. Hasan, who was shot in both his arms, was eventually killed by stepping on a mine placed by Bosnian Serb forces. His remains were found and laid to rest at the Potocari cemetery, while Safet is still missing to this day. Mesic lives in Sarajevo, where he teaches history and geography. Each year, he takes his students to Srebrenica and the memorial in Potocari.

Bektic lost about 10 of his family members and relatives, among them his father Redzep, who was found in a mass grave in Kamenica. His uncle and two cousins, who were with him, were also executed. Today, Bektic lives in Sarajevo and is the author of A Dawn Alone, a personal account of his survival during the Srebrenica genocide, translated into English and Turkish.