The Bosnia List Quotes

“For six years, you showed Pero reverence and admiration. So Pero, a sociopath, didn’t want to extinguish the rare flame of respect that illuminated his worthless ego,” Brian explained. “Killing you would have made him feel less powerful, not more.”
― Kenan Trebincevic, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return

“The first sacrifice of the war was her flowers. We kept our shades closed to avoid being sprayed with bullets. Without sunlight, her cactus and hibiscus withered. During the fighting, patriotic anthems took over the radio - when we had batteries to listen. To avoid any trouble, she turned the music off. She had to watch, mute, while her plants died one by one.”
― Kenan Trebincevic, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return

“I'd thought we were the ones who'd suffered more, torn from everything we'd known, sudden strangers in a new town with no friends or family, having to start everything over - penniless, car-less, petrified, stuck in other people's houses with a strange accent and foreign tongue. I'd flown back to my homeland still feeling rejected and bruised and twelve. I'd expected apologies and atonement to heal my old wounds. I had no idea I'd been insensitive myself. I'd been so myopic, I didn't even know that I'd neglected my closest relatives.”
― Kenan Trebincevic, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return

“In reality, there was no happy ending. There was not even a clear military defence that we could mourn and start to recover from. The war was an open-ended, ongoing disaster, with no point, no positive outcome, no conclusive wisdom, no closure. But I couldn't settle for that unsatisfying stalemate.”
― Kenan Trebincevic, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return

“I looked around their small, modest, unfinished home, filled with other people’s ragtag, twenty-year-old furniture. Zorica’s Croatian house had been taken from her; her family had also been persecuted for their ethnicity. She’d battled cancer. Milos didn’t want to fight in the war. He was driving a cab to keep this roof over their heads. They were victims too. •”
― Kenan Trebincevic, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return

“After World War II, Germany apologized to Jewish victims of the Nazis, offering billions in reparations.”
― Kenan Trebincevic, The Bosnia List: A Memoir of War, Exile, and Return