War Hospital

by Sheri Fink

  He borrows a gun and takes two young men on a scouting mission. At first unsuccessful, they eventually find a path that diverges from the main road into a forest with good cover. They return and form up into a column again, proceeding with the aim of getting off the road and into the forest before daybreak. Very soon, as the elevation climbs, they reach an area of open plains. Afraid of being seen and anxious to reach better cover, Ilijaz and other leaders prod the exhausted group onward at a brisk pace.

  At last they encounter the scouting group. Ilijaz, furious, confronts them, accusing them of leaving the column behind.

  “That’s not true,” they counter, insisting that they’ve just been scouting terrain and would have come back for the group. The scouts instruct everyone to rest in a valley surrounded by forests. They’ll move again around 5 P.M. Some people lie down and go to sleep. Others search for fruit in the forest.

  I won’t let them out of my sight this time.

  Ilijaz’s vigilance keeps him from sleeping much during the day. Cracks of gunfire echo from the outskirts of the valley. Ilijaz wonders whether Srebrenica soldiers have been placed around their perimeter and are fighting the Chetniks. When he asks, he’s shooed away.

  “Take it easy, get some rest. We won’t let another massacre happen.”

  Ilijaz prepares his group. Around 4 P.M. they hear a couple of gunshots.

  “Those shots mean something,” says his friend Naim, “some kind of warning.”

  Ilijaz and Naim walk to where the commander Ramiz is. Another scouting group has departed the valley and is heading over the hills. A Motorola held by Ramiz’s young assistant crackles to life.

  “Those who were supposed to leave have left,” a voice says. “Make sure the right and left wings work together.”

  Ilijaz freezes. It sounds as if the Motorola’s tapped into the Chetnik frequency and that the Chetniks are planning to catch them in a horseshoe. Ilijaz and Naim give each other a silent look that says, “What can we do?” Obviously their officers know where the Chetniks are.

  Ilijaz and Naim agree not to tell their own group about the Chetnik plan, to avoid demoralizing them. When they return to the group they don’t mention a thing, but they place armed men on the outside of the column.

  All evening, as his part of the column inches over the hill and into the next valley, Ilijaz feels as if they’re being watched by the Serbs. At any moment he expects shellfire to burst open the night. Beyond fear, he is numb.

  Just before dark, the column comes to a stop and an order passes down the line for anyone armed to come to the front. The Srebrenicans successfully fight off an ambush. Some are killed, but not as many as before. A few soldiers have light wounds, and Ilijaz examines a dying man with a serious head wound.

  The column breaks through to an area called Snagovo, crosses the main road leading west from Zvornik—the back part of the column encountering and shooting off a vehicle—and re-enters mountainous terrain, stopping to rest at a meadow called Križevački Neve in the morning.

  The Serb officer who organized the ambush, a certain Captain Janković, has been captured in the fighting. Ilijaz and hundreds of others are eager to get a look at him. He sits, hands crossed and bound in front of him, looking at the ground. He appears unharmed, though Ilijaz hears that another Serb soldier who tried to fight back when captured was killed. From the officer, the Srebrenica forces learn that the Serb army is sparing no expense in the effort to capture as many of them as possible. The Srebrenicans hope to exchange the captain for free passage across the lines to Tuzla. However throughout the day, repeated attempts to negotiate fail. Ilijaz hears that the Serbs won’t even discuss it.

  Sitting in the field, the medical team members are down to their last sour breadcrumbs. Their shoes are in tatters. Avdo, the hospital director, has his shoeless feet bound up in bandages and carries a walking stick. Fatima has her period, and, with her tampons in her lost backpack, she uses the two dishtowels in which her mother had wrapped the bread. They chafe at her skin.

  They’re very close to the front lines—only two to two and a half miles as the bird flies—but a difficult forest lies ahead of them, Baljkovica, consisting of two hills with a valley in between. Rumor spreads that it’s impassable. People are exhausted, jumpy, panicked. Ilijaz just feels hopeless. He grieves for himself.

  I’m still so young and would have had so many beautiful things ahead of me.

  They sit and wait. People around them hallucinate. Compared to the others, the medical group seems stronger. They’ve stuck together, shown each other kindness, and it seems to have protected them.

  Hakija Meholjić, Nedret’s former confidante, chief of the “Hotel Fresh Air,” who became chief of police after demilitarization, has been walking in a group just behind Ilijaz’s. During rest periods, the two men have frequently talked. Hakija has often thought of Nedret on this trip, remembering their old conversation at the “Hotel Fresh Air” about how long a man could survive without food if he had access to salt and sugar. When Hakija’s grip on reality faded, he asked people for salt and sugar and found that they indeed renewed his strength.

  Now he limps toward Ilijaz with a walking stick, his unshaven face looking haggard. He suspects the medical staff are taking drugs to keep strong.

  “Doctor, it looks like the only normal people left are these few around you. Let’s try and do something.” They find two men with some knowledge of the region and make a back-up plan to split off from the main group if necessary. The sunny, warm day stretches toward evening. Around 4 or 5 P.M., they receive instructions to line up.

  As they do so, clouds blow in and the sky turns dark. Icy-cold raindrops fall, drenching them to their skin within minutes. Then actual ice begins to fall. Pieces of hail as big as walnuts crack the ground, the trees, and Ilijaz’s head, momentarily disorienting him as he runs for shelter beneath the trees.

  Hail in the middle of the summer? This is the culmination of hell.

  In a while the hail stops, but it continues to rain. They line up again, dripping.

  An explosion about fifty yards away startles Ilijaz. The line scatters. People run up to Ilijaz.

  “Kemo killed himself, and he wounded ten people around him.”

  Kemo, the head nurse’s husband, had held strong throughout the trip. Ilijaz last saw him about an hour ago, giving water to his exhausted brother. Nobody can explain why he suddenly snapped, pulling out a hand grenade and activating it as they lined up. The hail saps the will of many men.

  After bandaging the survivors, they set out northwest, wending their way for hours in the rain through pathless, mountainous terrain. Night falls, and clouds diffuse the light of the nearly full moon as it rises. Ilijaz hears explosions coming from the direction of the minefield they have to cross. When they enter it, he is exhausted, numb, wet, and cold, barely able to keep his legs moving, keep upright, keep from tripping, keep concentrating on the obscured footsteps of Naim, walking ahead of him.

  Ilijaz grips the hand of Fatima, behind him.

  If we survive this together, I will marry her.

  He takes one careful step. Then another. Then another. Moans waft through the darkness of the minefield, distracting him. He hears a woman’s voice nearby pleading for help.

  “I’m going to at least try to help her,” Ilijaz says.

  Someone tells him it’s too dangerous, and he knows it’s true. Nobody can save these people. For the second time that he can ever remember, Ilijaz is being begged for help and can’t even try to respond. This time is worse. He can hear the injured. The calls from the sides of the path continue, one fading, another starting up, over and over like the howls of ghosts.

  When he had pledged the Oath of Hippocrates, becoming a physician, he had sworn himself to the service of others. Now, he does not even think he can save himself.

  Ilijaz begins to shiver, then shudder with cold. His body shakes with every step. He can barely control his movements.

  I wish this w
as over. If I have to die, then let me die. Just let my suffering stop, my exhaustion, hunger, cold, fear. Just let it stop.

  The terrain flattens and they’re told the mine danger has passed. Ilijaz falls asleep as he walks. He dreams he is tired and talks in his sleep.

  “I hate walking, and when I buy a car, I’ll never walk again.”

  Someone shakes him awake. Naim.

  “Hey, what are you saying?”

  Ilijaz smiles in the dark, because he remembers himself talking in his dream. Then he scowls, not wanting those around him to know he’s so exhausted.

  “I’m fine,” he whispers, pretending to be angry. “Be quiet! Just shake me from time to time.”

  Around dawn they emerge from the wood into a valley echoing with shellfire. People who’ve arrived before them are sitting around campfires, some drying their clothes. Ilijaz flies to a campfire like a moth.

  “Doctor, we made it!” a young man, some sort of officer, approaches him with enthusiasm. “We’re fine. There’s no more danger!”

  “How come there’s all that shooting?” Ilijaz asks him.

  “It’s a bit of fighting just to keep the corridor open. We’ll stay here until we get orders to march to safe territory. You should gather some of your people and march up front. Take ten of your people and get up to the front right away!”

  He has the delirious air of a man planning a victory parade. It seems odd that they haven’t passed any trenches or signs of fighting. Ilijaz peers at the man and sees his eyes are bugged out. He’s hallucinating.

  A more oriented person explains that the Chetniks have a double front line and planned to trap the Srebrenicans inside. The hailstorm was a godsend, helping the armed Srebrenicans achieve an element of surprise. They are attacking the Serbs’ first front line and have already captured two tanks, one of which is functional.

  Ilijaz climbs a hill to catch a glimpse of the battle. The earth shakes and the air reverberates with the detonations of gunpowder, shells, and mortars. Machine guns rattle away. Tanks fire. The ground burns. Ilijaz has only seen it in the movies.

  From time to time men arrive from the hot-fire areas to collect ammunition and grenades and lead newer arrivals to the front. Nobody appears afraid. Many men volunteer to fight, more than can be supplied with weapons. They head to the front, prepared to pick up the weapons of those who fall. Now everyone has hope. Nobody wants to stay back.

  With the few supplies left in their bags, Ilijaz and the other medical staff try to give first aid to the masses of wounded who are dragged back to a sheltered area behind the front lines. People call for help. Soldiers offer their bandages. There is enough work for a hundred doctors and nurses, let alone their dozen. They try to prioritize the severely wounded and designate someone to carry each casualty once the lines are opened.

  As the morning wears on, Ilijaz, impatient, decides to see for himself what’s going on. He walks toward the battle with a group of soldiers, emerging from the woods at an unfinished one-story house. Three or four Srebrenica soldiers are lying beside it with their weapons. One waves him to approach. Ilijaz jogs over.

  “There are some injured people inside.”

  Ilijaz gets busy providing first aid. The commander of the brigade has heavy wounds to his chest and legs. The others have only minor injuries. But the loudest moans of all come from the mouth of an uninjured man, bound foot and hand, tied up because of hallucinations and aggression.

  “Free me, doctor,” he pleads. “These guys want to kill me.”

  Ilijaz tries to calm him and persuade him to take an anti-anxiety tablet, but the man refuses.

  “Now you want to kill me, too,” he yells and continues screaming.

  “Untie me!”

  “Keep him tied,” Ilijaz says and steps back outside, bewitched by the sight of an apple tree a few yards away. He starts walking toward its beautiful orbs when he’s knocked to the ground by one of three soldiers lying nearby.

  “We’re right in the line of fire!” cries the soldier, and a burst of riflefire underscores his remark. Ilijaz retreats to the sheltered area. Then a young man enters, saying that he needs a grenade.

  “There’s just one APC left,” he declares. “When we destroy it, we’re going through.”

  Someone hands him a grenade and tells him, “This is the last one. Don’t miss.”

  * * *

  SOMETIME AROUND 2 P.M. word reaches Ilijaz that the Serb lines are broken. The young man strode right through the line of fire with the grenade, right up close to the Serb armored personnel carrier, and threw it. Then the Chetniks started running away.

  Ilijaz gives Naim the word to start moving out. On improvised stretchers made of uniforms and tree branches, the injured are carried past empty trenches.

  Ilijaz, Fatima, and the other doctors, medical technicians, and nurses walk uphill through tall, yellowed grass toward a road. Some around them hobble, some around them run, some look dazed, others burst with newfound energy. At the top of the hill, people in camouflage uniforms with yellow arm bands greet them, offering a hand to help them to the road: Bosnian army.

  “Guys, you’re free!” they welcome them. “You’re in free territory.”

  29

  FREEDOM

  A FEW DAYS AFTER ARRIVING IN TUZLA, Ilijaz, Fatima, and the other medical staff reunite at Tuzla Hospital. Ejub, though he left Srebrenica a month before its fall and in any other situation would have been considered a traitor, comes, too, forgiven in light of the catastrophe. Here, on July 21, 1995, they draw up a list of the medical workers of Srebrenica. The first column, “those who’ve arrived in Tuzla,” begins with the names Dr. Ilijaz Pilav, Dr. Fatima Dautbašić, Dr. Branka Stanić, Dr. Avdo Hasanović, and Dr. Dževad Džananović and continues down the page and onto a second with the names of the medical students and nurses and student nurses, fifty-four in all, who’ve made it safely to Tuzla. The last name on this part of the list is Dr. Ejub Alić.

  Next, the medical workers list those killed in Srebrenica. They begin with Dr. Nijaz Džanić, who died in the air bombing of his clinic. Next is Sulejman Pilav, Ilijaz’s cousin the medical technician, who was mortally injured near his medical station in Kragljivoda. The names of two other nurses follow.

  Next, under “those who started out by convoy, and haven’t yet arrived,” they write the names of the only four male medical staff members who sought protection with the Dutch in Potočari. Then they write the names of “those who started out in the column, and haven’t yet arrived.” Among the eleven men listed is Sadik Ahmetović. The well-liked twenty-six-year-old medical technician walked farther back in the column with friends and relatives, rather than up front with the rest of the medical staff. Nobody has seen him since the Serb attack.

  The final category on the list is “killed doctors.” It includes the names of the five men who tried to reach Srebrenica during the war and never arrived. Dr. Naser Siručić and Dr. Avdo Bakalović are listed first. They were the two who were lost, unarmed, in a snowstorm in the mountains west of Srebrenica in 1992 and ambushed by the Serbs. The staff end their list with Drs. Sead and Huso Halilović and Dr. Muharem Deljković, the three physicians who set out nervously on a helicopter from Tuzla one dark night just three months ago and died on a mountainside near Žepa.

  * * *

  AS THE DOCTORS ARE MAKING THEIR LIST IN TUZLA, Christina and the MSF staff members and Dutch soldiers are finally receiving permission from the Serbs to leave Potočari, eight long days after most of the rest of the population was removed. Christina refused to depart without official clearance for every one of the local MSF and UNHCR staff members, their family members who managed to stay, and a few elderly people whom the Serbs found in Srebrenica during the week.

  She despised having to meet with a Bosnian Serb army colonel and listen to him talk about art, paintings, and Van Gogh. So cynical! She had to smile and play along. He even teased her once that she would be forced to stay behind.

  Although
she carefully prepared the remaining fifty-five injured patients, insisting the Serbs recognize and document that all were indeed wounded, when the Red Cross came to evacuate them, the Serbs still separated some men and took them away. She gave the unaccompanied baby to the Red Cross. She never saw its father again, but she telexed MSF headquarters to alert another nongovernmental organization to begin tracing him. As for the forty-five patients being held in Bratunac—it’s been too risky for her to leave Potočari and attempt to see what is happening with them. She heard that a girl died of diabetic ketoacidosis and that several of the patients are in urgent need of surgery, which cannot be performed in Bratunac’s small clinic. Christina has heard even more worrisome rumors—that hundreds of Srebrenica men are being held in the Bratunac stadium after having been captured on their way to Tuzla.

  Those at MSF headquarters have backed Christina’s plan to evacuate her local staff, and the Belgrade MSF staff fought hard for days for clearance from the Serbs. Finally today, after an approval process so complicated that someone at MSF Belgrade writes, “The whole thing could not have been imagined even by Kafka,” Christina has all the permissions she needs to leave. Instead of proceeding directly to Tuzla through Serb territory, the evacuation route the Serbs have approved takes them through Serbia, Croatia, and back into Bosnia.

  The three MSF cars are filled with eight local staff, five of whom are male, five of their family members, and two old people. They join a convoy of 163 U.N. Protection Force vehicles. The local Serb commander bids them farewell at the gate of the Potočari compound. When they reach the Bosnian side of the iron bridge to Serbia, Serb Military Commander Ratko Mladić meets them with the press. They cross the bridge and proceed to the Croatian border. Immigration officers keep them for two and a half hours, interviewing local staff, chiding the U.N. Protection Forces for not protecting civilians, and shouting at Christina. At 4 A.M. on July 22, they arrive at U.N. Camp Plešo in Croatia. The MSF local staff are lodged in a hotel and given their pay for July.