The Washington Post
January 16, 1993
SARAJEVO – Shivering as her life went up in smoke, Elza Vukmanovic, 65, wept while she fed the pages of a book into her tiny stove. She was trying to stay warm.
Her husband, Branko, 72, was out on the apartment balcony, doing what he does every day — cutting up furniture for firewood. Now he was sawing through a white cupboard. The day before, it was a bed frame.
The stove, about the size of a hatbox, keeps the Vukmanovic living room heated to 45 degrees during daylight hours. The couple goes to bed — fully clothed under a pile of blankets — at about 7 p.m., and as the embers die out the temperature falls to near freezing.
The Vukmanovices are losing the battle to stay warm, but it’s just one of Sarajevo’s many lost causes as the bitter Balkan winter joins besieging Serb militia forces in punishing the city. They live on the 11th floor of an 18-story apartment house on the Street of Socialist Revolution, a building in which as many as 90 other families are living through their own particular hell.
There is no running water in Sarajevo — and no electricity or central heating, either — so apartment dwellers must fetch water in buckets from a well two miles away and then haul it stair by stair up to their icy kitchens and bathrooms.
In the Vukmanovice family, that is Branko’s job. It takes him at least 30 gasping minutes to climb to his apartment. He totes one pail of water up one flight of stairs, leaves it there, then goes back down to fetch a second pail. It is like this for 11 floors.
The water is for drinking and for flushing the toilet. Elza and Branko, retired hairdressers, are no longer troubled with the chore of washing their clothes or bodies. They can’t spare the water. They aren’t much troubled with cooking, either. Their larder the other day consisted of just two cans of processed meat, a few handfuls of rice and a bag of beans. All of it came from a charity and would run out soon. They don’t know when they will get more.
Elza weeps because she thinks she will die soon. Her husband does not shed tears, but the same thoughts are in his eyes. “We could perhaps manage with the hunger, but not the cold,” said Branko, who was held in a German prison camp during World War II. “The camp was a hotel compared to what we are suffering through today.”
The Vukmanovices are just one old couple among thousands in Sarajevo whose lives are crumbling under the onslaught of numbing cold and the relentless Serb siege. Their 20-year-old concrete apartment building is crumbling, too, along with most others in the shattered city.
The hallways, unwashed for months, are as dirty as a mud hut. Windows have been blown out by Serb artillery fire, and the wind whips through the plastic sheets residents have tacked up in their place. People cut firewood in the corridors, and the shavings are strewn everywhere. Sewage pipes have frozen, and human waste has started backing up from the first floor to the fourth. Much of it has frozen in place after oozing out onto bathroom floors.
Most people on the upper floors have stopped using their toilets, realizing that what goes down will sooner or later come back up again. They now collect human waste in buckets, carry it downstairs and dump it into a nearby river. Some old or infirm residents just throw the waste out their windows.
“Believe me, for the last three days I haven’t gone to the bathroom,” said Ismet Delahmet, 22, a member of the Bosnian government’s Muslim-led defense forces who lives on the third floor. “Tomorrow, I will go back to the front line and do it there, outdoors.”
Esad Dzaferagic is the head of the building council. He is in touch with the other council chiefs in the neighborhood, and he says the situation is the same for all of them. “First, we lost the electricity,” he said. “Then heating. Then plumbing. Then bread.” Dzaferagic, who lives on the sixth floor, has removed his toilet bowl and cemented over the pipe so that sewage will not spill into his bathroom.
Like everyone in Sarajevo, Dzaferagic is being shorn of almost everything that symbolizes civilized life. He uses homemade candles to light his apartment; the wicks are made of shoelaces. A couple of days ago, he swapped his car for two cubic yards of firewood. “We were happy that we were able to arrange it,” he said. “This morning, I traded one of my son’s winter jackets for two sacks of coal.”
Seid Hasanefendzic, 58, a renowned painter whose works are noted for their vivid shades of blue, was given an 18th-floor apartment years ago in recognition of his international standing. It was a prize then; now it is a curse. He, his wife and son have nearly worn themselves out carrying all their daily needs up to their apartment — pails of water, firewood, food. And, of course, the buckets of sewage must be carried downstairs.
Hasanefendzic was flat out of breath when he reached his apartment the other day, and it took him a good 10 minutes to regain his composure. He has lost 30 pounds, he said, and his shirt collar looked like a hula hoop around his neck.
He is accustomed to vacations in Western Europe and is repulsed by the primitive conditions in which he lives. He has a Japanese stereo, and his living room table is stacked with books in several languages and catalogues from exhibitions of his work. But none of this is of much use now, except perhaps for the books and catalogues, which might make good fuel for the stove.
