1/3 ”After my mother died, my father compensated so much to make us happy that we sometimes forgot about our loss. When the war started, we moved to Srebrenica. My older sister, two younger brothers, father, and grandmother were all living in one room. When the Bosnian Serb Army invaded Srebrenica, we all went to the Dutch UN base in Potocari to find shelter. Except for my father. Like most men during the fall of Srebrenica, he tried to escape through the woods. We spent one night at the UN base. Thousands of refugees arrived there. It was complete chaos. Everybody was whispering and trying to guess what was happening. The next day, we saw Ratko Mladić, the head commander of the Bosnian Serb army at the UN base with a camera crew. He started throwing food and candy to us kids as a part of his propaganda campaign. He told us the buses would be ready to bring us to the safe zone in Tuzla. Right before entering the bus, men and women were separated. When I got to the bus, they wanted to take my little brother. He was only ten years old. I took his hand and pushed him inside the bus. During the bus ride, I hid him under a blanket underneath my seat. That’s how he survived. During the trip, you could see captured men with their hands tied behind their backs. Some women on the bus recognized their husbands or their relatives. We looked for our dad, but he wasn’t amongst them. The ride took about 3 hours. When we arrived, it was already dark. After spending a few nights in several different places, we moved to a house near Srebrenik with our grandmother. After one month, a social worker came by and said that my grandmother didn’t have the right resources to take care of us. A few days later, we got transferred to an orphanage.”