Ned Halilovic is a refugee. His earliest memories are of a war zone, where people were killing one another over their religion and nationality. Just like today’s refugees from Syria and Afghanistan, only Ned’s war was a generation earlier, and closer to home.
“I was born in ’86 in a small town in southern Europe, Sarajevo, Bosnia-Herzegovina,” he says, as if anyone alive in those years could have not heard of Sarajevo. “In ’92 the civil war broke out and my family and I were there during the siege. We were there from ’92 to the end of ’96, near the end of the war.”
His earliest memories are of living in the basement of their house to evade the snipers. There was no electricity in the basement, no running water. Some of the most harrowing times where when they had to go outside to get water to bring home.
“Almost every day we would go with two-gallon milk canisters, and the fire truck would park behind a building – that way the shelling couldn’t get to them,” Ned remembers. “A lot of times the shells would still drop on innocent people.”
Despite the ethnic and religious killing going on around them, he said, people clung to what their city had always been. “Sarajevo really was a multiethnic town,” he says. “On one street, you could find a synagogue, the cathedral, the mosque, the church,” Ned says. “Really, what we saw during that time was the strength of people of different religions, living.”
Then, when he was about 10, his family crawled through the so-called Tunnel of Hope, a narrow, 600-meter tunnel, secretly dug under the airport by people he calls “the civilian army,” to break the siege of Sarajevo.
Ned Halilovic:
We Were Strangers Once Ourselves