CLOSE YOUR WINDOWS, A STORM'S COMING: This text has got Facebook talking and shows all the horrors which the Croats made
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"What's that on your plate" I asked him at one point because neither by color nor shape could I make out what it was.
"You can morter with it, that's what that is" the answer came from the other side.
"Go to his right when you ask him, he can't hear anything from the left side," added the young man, leaning against the wall of the canteen where there were a few school desks and hardboard panels on the floor. Red - gray, slightly damaged.
Vedrana Rudan about "Operation Storm": Croats won't like this!
The mixture smells of stale food and oily rags that you clean tables with, making me lean towards the window. I feel sick. But I'm ashamed of him seeing it. Because that's their house.
"Since when can't you hear," I ask a little louder. "Since the shells blew directly into the classroom. I said we should have hidden in the church, no one would have shot at us there. "
"Is the church whole?" I ask.
"No," and he headed slowly towards his house, which is formally called a container.
He put boxes of UNHCR on a chair. Without a word, he moves around the tables of the cafeteria. He stacks them in a line, looking for the best position for each in order to get some sort of meandering path, which only he knows how it should look like.
He opens the first box and cautiously and gently with both hands, as if holding a dove, slowly, not to squeezed too much, and that it does not escape, while descending to a predetermined place on the table, and says: "This was my house."
He arranges around the house a barn, cattle and fence. Then his uncle's house. At once, all four tables are filled. There is also a school and a church. On the church a bell tower and in front of the school a basketball court. All made of paper. Some are only white, some with squares, what ever he had available. The cut-out windows, only with edges drawn by a colored felt-tip pen, where a wooden shaft would have been. Edges precisely welded together, where you can not see where they meet. With a little red felt-tip pen and the houses have roof tiles.
He made the church marvelously. A bell that gently swings in the bell tower. All with paper. Children gave him, he says and then people heard he was making his village from paper and brought him themselves.
He walk around the tables. He tells me of his village. Who lived where, how he played hide and seek with his brother. And later, how he also played hide and seek in his elementary school classroom, where he was struck by a shell, and since then is deaf in his left ear.
We are interrupted by a sound, the cafeteria ladies are collecting plates. They opened all the doors and windows, "to give us some air," they say.
"This foul smell refuses to leave" says this seventeen year old, who moved from the wall just enough to raise his shirt. Scarring of the left shoulder diagonally down the entire torso and abdomen. A burst. It's a miracle he's alive. His brother and dad are not.
A draft has encased the paper village. The uncle's house has moved a little forward. One by one, he places it in boxes of humanitarian aid. The whole village fits into one box.
He removes everything. Just in case the draft accidentally blows the village away. When a STORM has already taken his life.
I filmed the story of this young man in 1996. Then,, he was 27 years old. He came with part of his family on a tractor and was placed in a refugee center.
At that moment he did not know where the rest of his family was.
We cried our hearts out when we sat in the van."
(Telegraf.co.uk/ tatjanavojtehovski.wordpress.com/ Foto-ilustracija)
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