(4/4) "Years later, we found out, through a reconstruction based on stories from different people, that Sadif was seen carrying Enesa through the forest while she was already dead. People had told him to leave her body behind. Sadif had told them that he wouldn’t...

(3/4) "Years went by without any information about what happened to Enesa and Sadif. My mom had put the set of bed sheets in a plastic cover under her bed. Once in a while, she would take them out of the cover to wash them. Sometimes she would sew a flower on it....

(2/4) ''Days went by and we didn’t hear from Enesa and Sadif. Every day new refugees came in from Srebrenica. My mother and I would go to the refugee camps and ask people if they had seen Enesa and Sadif. We would show them pictures but nobody recognized them. Every...

(1/4) ''Because of my father's medical condition, we decided to try to go from Srebrenica to the city of Tuzla. My father and I managed to get on a truck. Unfortunately, my mother and sister could not get on a truck and had to stay in Srebrenica. However, my father’s...

I wanted to create this series because I believe that what happened 25 years ago in Srebrenica is part of Dutch history. Yet, before coming to Bosnia, I knew very little about what had happened. To be able to hear these stories, first hands from survivors was painful...

3/3 ''When we arrived, another aunt who lived there picked us up and brought us to an apartment. I remember finally having access again to electricity, bread, hot water, and food. In the following weeks, we dreaded waiting for somebody to bring news if my father was...

2/3 ''It was the 8th of July 1995, and we could sense the fall of Srebrenica. I could hear the sounds of shots being fired. My mother, my sisters, and I went to the UN-base to seek protection. We spent a couple of days sitting on concrete floors and waiting for a...

1/3 ''We lived in a small room in an apartment. That room was our kitchen, living room, working space and bedroom. There were five other families in the apartment and we shared one single bathroom. We all fled from different villages in the area and found safety in...

"My mum says that every day I look more like him. After the war, we moved to Sarajevo. In high school, I didn’t talk about my father and what happened in Srebrenica. Most kids in school had experienced the war in Sarajevo. They couldn’t relate to what happened in...

3/3 ''When my brother left the orphanage, he moved to Sarajevo, and we managed to get my youngest brother to come live with us. All those years, we had no idea what happened to my father. In 2009, my brothers got a phone call from my uncle. He had received a message...

2/3 ''If it had been up to me, I would have stayed with my grandmother. However, nobody asked us what we wanted. There were many children in the orphanage. We were divided into “families” of 20 kids. Luckily my siblings and I got to stay together. Every group had two...

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...

6/6 ''I don’t know how long I slept, but at some point, the man woke me up and said it was too dangerous to stay. We had no idea where to go, but we just kept moving. We slept in destroyed and abandoned houses. Sometimes we would find some food. I could barely walk....

5/6 ''I was waiting for it. Suddenly, I felt a sharp pain in the side of my stomach. I waited for the next bullet to end my suffering. I saw people falling down around me. A moment later, another bullet hit my left foot. Everywhere, I heard the voices of people crying...

4/6 ''Finally, we arrived in front of a school building. We were all crying out for water. When they opened the truck, they started beating almost every one of us. They lined us all up and took us to a classroom. Again, they forced us to chant: ‘Srebrenica is, and...

3/6 ''We emerged from the forest onto an asphalt road. The Serbian soldiers acted calmly. When everybody got out on the road, tanks surrounded us. They separated the wounded people and started to torture us. They made us chant: ‘Long live the king, long live Serbia.’...

2/6 ''When the Bosnian Serb Army took over some checkpoints near us, the Dutch soldiers immediately left their checkpoint and left us behind in the refugee camp. I remember feeling extremely disappointed. We thought they would protect us, but they didn’t. My mother...

1/6 ''Our house and village got destroyed at the very beginning of the war. We escaped from the Serb soldiers in time, but we had nowhere to go. We wandered through many different villages, and we would sometimes stay in the woods. The area was already under the...

"My father was often hired to work on construction projects in Germany and Croatia. He would be away for weeks, but every time he came back, he would bring presents. Whenever he returned, we would walk a few kilometers so we could meet him halfway to welcome him home....

4/4 "After the war, we moved to Tuzla. We didn't hear anything from my father. In 1997, two years after the war, we received a call from the Missing Persons Institute. They had found my father. Back then, they had not started using DNA identification, so they would...

3/4 "There were thousands of people surrounding us as we began saying our goodbyes. By the time I gave my father a final hug, everyone was gone, and it was just me, my father, mother, and my two little sisters. Someone shouted that we had to leave, or we would get...

2/4 "We were having dinner when all of a sudden we heard that the Serbian military had invaded Srebrenica. I was only ten years old, but I understood very well that something terrible was happening. We quickly packed some stuff and left. I took my schoolbag, and...

1/4 "My parents tried to have children for seven years. From the moment I was born, my father and I were inseparable. I remember he would always come home after work and lie down on the couch. I would sit next to him and feel his pulse. He explained that people have...

2/2 ''When we arrived at the safe territory, we lived in a school for a while. Later we moved here to Tinja. In the beginning, we lived with four other families. I started going to school for the first time. I remember seeing other children with their fathers and...

1/2 ''My father had heard that men and women got separated at the UN base. All the male family members tried to escape through the woods. Still, my father didn't want to leave my mother alone. My mother was pregnant at the time, and I was only three years old....

5/5 ‘’In February 2020 I went to the old factory, which is now a museum, as a translator with a group of students. While the students were going through the museum, I sat down. On the table, there was a file with some documents. I randomly scrolled through the pages,...

4/5 ''In 2008, I received a phone call that Abdulah's body had been found. Thirty percent of his remains were found in a town called Zvornik. They made a reconstruction and told us that Abdulah had been shot. We had been waiting for so many years that we decided to...

3/5 “On our way to Tuzla, people on the side of the road cursed and threw stones at us. After driving for an hour, the bus stopped. A Serbian soldier came on board. I remember how big he was. He was wearing military pants, and he had no shirt on. He had a knife in one...

2/5 ''From 8th to 11th of July 1995 the city of Srebrenica was under final attacks by the Bosnian-Serb army. On 11th of July we went to the old battery factory, which was the Dutch UN base in Potocari, to find protection. My mother walked with the four youngest...

1/5 ''Before I was born, my parents decided not to have more children. When my mum became pregnant again, my father joked that it wasn’t his baby. I grew up in a small village near the Serbian border. When I was ten months old, my father passed away. My mother had...

In the past ten days, I have been collecting stories of people whose childhoods were marked by the Srebrenica Genocide (1995) in Bosnia and Herzegovina. Starting tomorrow, I will begin sharing these stories on Humans of Amsterdam. These are stories of survival, pain,...