The First Words

A child waits for the United Nations to evacuate the town after the fall of Vukovar in 1991. (Photo by Peter Denton.)

War is truly the most terrible and destructive thing to happen to mankind. Up until yesterday, many gestures, individual words and signs that we once used so arrogantly, have now, in the maelstrom of death, become clearer.

Vukovar must be the most honest city in the world, as every word is almost immediately mirrored in the heart.

In Vukovar, it is impossible for someone to wish you good morning without actually meaning it. When they ask after your health, they do not ask you whether you have a cold, whether you have rheumatism, or something in that vein.

What they are actually referring to is your life and the wounds you may have sustained, even though you were sitting obediently in a cellar. You might have got them while trying to help someone in the street. Bomb fragments, shrapnel, bullets are quicker than your thoughts and will callously cut short even the most beautiful of innocent dreams, like the dream dreamt by a six-month old baby in the arms of its mother. They will destroy even those rare moments that those plagued by war manage to salvage in which, if only in their imagination, they are with people dear to them.

Believe me, war is the basest form of mankind’s ignobility, which he has concocted in his debauchery, probably so that afterwards he can sully it all over again in remorse.

It seems to me that I am one of the lucky few who has managed to note down his thoughts in search of what has been lost, or that which has as yet not been acquired, no matter.

And as I write, somewhere deep in my thoughts, or sometimes even faced by a living portrait of blood, death anddestruction, I have not forgotten the fighters, the defenders of Croatia who did not have the luck to welcome their own thoughts, let alone their families and their loved ones. In their stead, I give you my introductory note, a note on truth and love.

Siniša Glavaševic