I20 A night of fear

Narrator: Meris Muharemovic

My name is Meris Muharemovic, I’m 16 years old. I have been living in Italy since 1996 but I am from Bosnia. In 1991 a civil war had started and I got used to it. We had no electric light, lack of water and it was very hard to survive; but we had decided not to escape because we loved our house very much.

One night all our closest relatives came to sleep in our house, because it was safer being surrounded by other houses; it was more difficult to hit it. But to tell the truth, that night we did not sleep at all. We heard bullets, bombs; planes flew over our house and when we heard bombs falling and all the window panes trembled. I was really scared that night. There were soldiers around our house; tanks were going along the road. Any sounds or noises were awful. I could not even go to the toilet because I didn’t dare to go out of the bedroom. I really could not stand anymore lying and being silent. I started to make the others laugh to avoid thinking of the war, but when a bomb fell very close by the house trembled awfully and the window panes broke. At last that night was over; in the morning there were no more sounds of gun shots.

When I went outside, there were all the signs left by the bullets on the house. Twenty meters from the house there was a hole in the ground where the bomb had fallen and a few meters far from it there was an unexploded bomb. I went to call the soldiers who took it away.

This is how you live during a war. Your only concern is how you can survive. You even forget the hunger when you hear shots. And you see so many young boys dying for a stupid war. Anyway everything is quiet at the moment, fortunately.