The Washington Post
January 11, 1993
SARAJEVO – A British relief worker, seeing an old woman sob as she was being evacuated from her freezing nursing home near Sarajevo’s front line, spoke a few magic words into her ear: “Don’t cry, darling, you’re leaving.”
Nearby, Milan Petrovic, 85, was wrapped in a blanket but still trembled in the outdoor fog as he waited his turn to enter a United Nations armored personnel carrier. A green fedora was on his head, but like Petrovic himself, the hat was half-frozen, soiled as a mop, in wretched shape.
“I want to leave as soon as possible,” Petrovic whispered, uncertain that his deliverance from the tomb-like nursing home was really happening. “These people should have come much earlier.”
It was a pitiful farewell at Sarajevo’s Old People’s Home today as 16 of its most fragile residents were moved by U.N. soldiers to a hospital far from the factional warfare that has gutted this city. Some of them were carried off in army stretchers, staring up at the sky in terrified silence.
The evacuation ended an ordeal in which dozens of occupants of the home had slowly frozen to death.
U.N. relief workers said they have been swamped by the enormity of their task — moving thousands of tons of food into this besieged city and distributing it among the 380,000 residents — and the home’s hazardous location has prevented all but a few aid deliveries from getting through.
“During two months, about 50 old people died,” said Lidia Groznik, one of the home’s workers. “They would probably be alive if we had enough stoves earlier. There are no deaths since we got the stoves.”
Now, the United Nations has installed wood-burning stoves to heat the home, where indoor temperatures often have fallen below freezing. U.N. officials are trying to arrange an evacuation for the 90 Muslims, Croats and Serbs who remain behind, threatened by nonstop sniping in their front-line neighborhood.
The nursing home nightmare is not an isolated one. U.N. officials say disasters of this type are happening throughout Bosnia-Herzegovina, where many towns are unreachable because they are under siege by powerful Serb nationalist forces. Even in Sarajevo, where the United Nations is conducting a huge aid effort, officials say they lack the manpower and equipment to do the job.
Many of the U.N. relief workers here have adopted a matter-of-fact attitude toward their assignment, a realism that while some in the outside world are trying to blame them for the human fallout of the war, the ills here could never be cured, or even treated, by a relief agency’s best efforts.
At the nursing home, happiness mixed with sadness. The ill residents, many shod only in bedroom slippers, said they were glad to be spared more misery, but they were crying and shaking and clutching their few pitiful belongings. One woman, wrapped in blankets on a stretcher, held a battered black handbag by her side.
Young refugees can live out the war and, perhaps, start their lives again. It is possible to believe that, with a little luck, they will see better times. But these old people cannot hope for that. They were leaving their only home, now shattered and perilous, and being sent away from their only friends.
Until Bosnia’s three-sided territorial war broke out in April, these people were growing old in a pleasant nursing home with clean floors and a big recreation room in a tree-lined neighborhood. But the past months have been a passage into hell. And today’s evacuation, their scared faces seemed to say, was just a sidestep in a horrible journey toward death among strangers and poverty.
One old woman, a dirty brown kerchief covering her head, could do nothing but cry. A nurse embraced her, and the old woman’s head fell onto the nurse’s shoulder, then slipped down toward her breast, like a child seeking nourishment. “Don’t cry, don’t cry,” the nurse whispered.
Mileva Suka, 85, was perched like a dying bird on an outdoor stairway, watching her friends leave. She leaned on her wood cane, and the slight wind played a bit with the untamed whiskers on her chin.
“I don’t feel well,” she said, when asked if she wanted to leave the home. After a few seconds, she added, “My luggage isn’t packed.” Then she broke down and said: “I expect to die any night.”
As he watched residents being brought out on stretchers like soldiers wounded in combat, Larry Hollingworth, an official with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, said it had taken him three days to arrange the evacuation amid the chaos of war.
And he has learned not to be surprised by such tragedies of Sarajevo. “It’s not a shock to my system,” he said. “This is only one of many places that needs more attention, more heating, more food. . . . It is late, and there will never be enough.”
