The bookshop owner’s personal memorial on this corner of Dubrovnik that I blogged about in my previous post is one of the only testaments to the conflict in ex-Yugoslavia 1991-1992 that I could find in the city. I found it poignant, and alarming – there is no other official history or public reflection on the events, but this man’s personal effort to remember and document.
Our city was savagely attacked early in the morning by the Serbian and Montenegrian army on St Nicholas Day, 6th December 1991. It was the saddest Friday in the history of Dubrovnik! At 7 o’clock that morning, the cross on the mount of Srd was destroyed. Already at 7.10 am a shell, one of the first to hit the city, hit our house, at 7.20 the third fateful one set our house on fire! I tried to extinguish it in the attic with a few buckets of water, but I failed. Shells kept falling and we had to abandon the burning house! I carried my old mother (aged 88) to the groundfloor and then to the neighbourhood. I ran twice to the second floor to take the most important documents, butane gas canister, the lamp, and my sister’s shoes. My sister Merica managed to run to the neighbour’s house with blankets over her head. Somehow, I too managed to run across a little later with a pot on my head. We threw pots, pans and bottles filled with water into the burning flames in a delusive hope. By the nightfall, 7 mortar shells fell on the house, three of them incendiary bombs.
Thank God we were not hurt!
A reminder that whether museums are wary or scared of reflecting on events, public history is always very personal. So the choices for institutions of public memory are either to face the interpretative challenge, or, by avoiding it, censor it.
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