Two years ago I visited my birth town, Prijedor in Bosnia. One day, I took my husband to town to show him the building where I grew up. I couldn’t show him our condo, because we were never able to get it back from the Serbs who forced us out of it, back in 1992, stealing our condo and everything in it.
My father’s land, about ten minute drive from town, however, wasn’t so easy to steal. Our ancestors owned that land in Ćela since the beginning of time and have survived all of the Balkan wars; Turkish Empire, Austor-Hungarian Empire, World Wars I and II and now, Serb-Invasion.
On our way home to my parents’ house on my father’s ancestral land, we decided to take a cab, but when we told the cab-driver we wanted to go to Ćela, he told us he didn’t know where that was. I looked at him, puzzled. It’s only a ten-minute ride if that. I figured he probably wasn’t from there if he didn’t know where Ćela was. So I told him I’d give him instructions on how to get there.