She was born in Sisak. Even if her parents had been left without jobs at the Sisak iron factory, they would have had a more dignified life. They would have lived in their house in Kostreši. They would not have been renting. They would have had their own land, and not have had to work as day labourers. There would have been light at home, tractors would be turning over the soil, and children would have stopped to sip fresh well water on the hot summer days while taking a break from their games. Sadly, Banija is empty now; barren and derelict just like their village. It had all looked so big before, and now it seems so small. The world of our childhood shrinks as we grow, but that’s not what did it. It was Oluja, the military operation. She feels hurt when people tell her that they want to leave. His family didn’t want to leave. They had to flee to avoid death. They ran as hard as they could while their breaths were full of fear and uncertainty.
Slađana remembers it in fragments. The whole family had gathered at her maternal grandparents’ house.
They were stacking up hay. Slađana had tied her grandmother’s shawl around her head. In the early morning of the 5th of August 1995, they were awakened by gunshots. Grandma packed up a ham and they walked, not knowing where they were going or how long they might be gone. They watched from the hill as everything they had left behind was in flames. They did not know then that they had left behind their happy times. They travelled for two weeks through Bosnia and Hercegovina to Serbia. They stopped in Kraljevo, in a sports hall full of people from Banija. Her father was barefoot, in shorts and a white t-shirt, reading the newspapers on the stairs, when the army came to recruit all men over 18. They sent him to Erdut, where he distributed food to the soldiers. Slađana, her mother and brother arrived in Bršadin village at the very the end of 1995 to be closer to him.
Slađana carried on school in the Borovo housing complex. She was a timid, obedient child; aware that she was there by chance. She felt that she didn’t belong there and unaccepted. Her mother took care of her and her brother, and occasionally took on badly paid jobs. They moved often. During the times of peaceful reintegration, she mostly remembers Franjo Tuđman’s voice when he arrived in Vukovar on the Peace Train. He spoke of forgiveness, reconciliation and cooperation. She didn’t know why she felt the way she did. No one had said anything to her, but she didn’t trust him. Her family had hoped they’d return to Banija, but they were entitled to 5000 kuna for the reconstruction of their house. Without that, they wouldn’t have had a way to survive. The village was deserted. “I could invest in the house and then hang myself on the first tree I find,” was how her father ended that conversation. Perhaps where they were living now wasn’t the best of places, but it was better than Banija.
That’s the difference between peaceful reintegration and a military operation.
Later on, as she read about peaceful reintegration and talking to people, Slađana saw that it had been the right start. However, it was not a completed process. “It starts well, but then it all goes back to square one,” she says. One example of this was the loud protests against Cyrillic signposts being put up and their violent removal. Another example was connected to schooling. She could not decide which school to enrol her children in. As well, there was the time when the Intercultural School Dunav Project failed. This was a project where students were to
study together, regardless of their ethnic origin, about the shared cultural heritage of all of Vukovar’s people. She was also judged for her Serbian accent and her Croatian pronunciation. Sometimes people have said that it would have been better if Oluja had taken place in Podunavlje (Eastern Slavonia). Slađana considers herself to be a child of Oluja, and she knows well what a tragedy that is.
