Tag Archives: memorial

Bosnia Remembers

September 8, 2025 djarmul 2 Comments

Decades before Russia invaded Ukraine, and before the latest conflicts in Gaza and Sudan, Bosnia commanded the world’s attention for the suffering it was enduring.

In the early 1990s, Serbian forces shot civilians, including women and children, in the streets of Sarajevo. They massacred thousands of Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenica. They killed and terrorized Bosnia until NATO finally bombed Serbia and brought the fighting to an end. Serbian leader Slobodan Milošević was later indicted for war crimes.

Bosnia, which is now part of the nation Bosnia Herzegovina, has largely recovered in the years since then. Its economy is growing. Foreign tourists are visiting, as we just did in Sarajevo and Mostar, home to the famous novi Stari Most bridge, above.

But Bosnia Herzegovina has not forgotten.

Many buildings in both Mostar and Sarajevo remain pockmarked with bullet holes.

Both cities have museums displaying the atrocities that occurred. Their street memorials honor the victims. Special exhibits document what happened. When you talk with people, almost everyone has a story to share.

Yet they have tried to move on, like people we met in Cambodia or those I remember from my youth who escaped the Holocaust. Just like a child growing up amid war crimes today, they will never forget what they saw and endured yet they still have the rest of their lives ahead of them.

I was moved by these powerful reminders of Bosnia’s ordeal but was also struck by something else we saw in the city.

Sarajevo is also where a Bosnian Serb shot Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in 1914, beside the Latin Bridge shown below. That’s the car the royal couple was riding. The assassination led to World War One and millions of senseless deaths, which in turn led to World War Two — all sparked on this street corner in Sarajevo.

Today the site is a tourist attraction, a curiosity rather than a raw wound. Visitors take selfies there. Nobody weeps. A century from now, maybe the same will be true at the memorials commemorating Bosnia’s conflict with Serbia, and perhaps for future generations in today’s war zones.

Or maybe not. Visiting Bosnia reminded me how war and genocide take a toll long after bodies are buried. Their pain endures for generations. Their grip is relentless.

Other nations and other conflicts have replaced Bosnia in our headlines today. But having just visited Bosnia, I know these new memories will persist long after the headlines fade.

Stones of Remembrance

March 5, 2024 djarmul Leave a comment

I used to work near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, D.C. I could leave my office at the National Academy of Sciences and walk across Constitution Avenue to the stark black granite wall where millions of visitors come each year to honor American servicemen and women who died in the war.

A few blocks away, the AIDS memorial quilt was spread across the Mall, each of its panels remembering someone who died.

After I left Washington in 2001, new museums opened to remind visitors of the injustices endured by Blacks and Native Americans in our country. The Holocaust Museum commemorates the millions of murdered Jews.

So how about COVID?

More than one million Americans died during the recent pandemic, the deadliest in our nation’s history. One million. It’s understandable that we don’t yet have a national memorial to honor them and to acknowledge that many of their deaths could have been prevented. But given how politicized the pandemic became, and remains today, I wonder if we will ever do right by them.

All of this occurred to me when I visited Buenos Aires recently and was startled to see a COVID memorial directly in front of the Casa Rosada, Argentina’s White House. It’s a collection of stones, each painted with the name of someone who died. The stones surround a statue of General Manuel Belgrano, a military leader in Argentina’s war for independence.

Argentina lost more than 100,000 people to COVID. In August 2021, hundreds of their family members and friends marched to protest the government’s handling of the pandemic. They placed the stones around the statue, creating a new memorial that’s now protected by a fence. It’s just across the Plaza de Mayo from another recent memorial, to the mothers who led a peaceful resistance movement against the military dictatorship that “disappeared” their children. Both memorials speak truth to power, side by side.

Other countries have also commemorated COVID’s victims, such as with a memorial wall in London and a forest grove in Italy. In our country, there have been memorial flags in Texas, a “drive around” in Detroit and, in 2021, a memorable display that covered the National Mall with small white flags.

I admire these and other initiatives but wish more attention was being paid to the nascent efforts in our country to produce more official remembrances of the pandemic that affected us so profoundly.

I’m not holding my breath to see a permanent memorial in Washington, especially if the upcoming election restores to power the person responsible for so many of the pandemic’s deaths. Right now, with Argentina fresh in my mind, I’d settle for a million stones across from the White House.

I didn’t go to Argentina expecting to think about COVID but I can’t get their memorial out of my mind. If Argentina, with its own deep political divisions, can do this, why can’t we?

Memorial Day

May 26, 2017 djarmul Leave a comment

Memorial Day is on Monday back home. Champa and I got a head start earlier this month when we visited the big victory memorial here in Moldova.

Located in the heart of Chișinău, the memorial complex is built around a circle of five dramatic red pillars surrounding an eternal flame. Nearby are sculpted murals depicting the bloody struggle to defeat Nazi Germany. Smaller monuments honor fallen heroes and show the names of Soviet soldiers who gave their lives to liberate Moldova in August 1944. Rows of white grave markers in the adjacent cemetery are reminiscent of Arlington Cemetery, albeit with Russian inscriptions.

We visited the park with two Peace Corps friends, Beth and Andrea, shortly before Moldova’s Victory Day on May 9. Soldiers were mowing the grass, pulling weeds and sprucing up.

Moldova was part of the Soviet Union, which was America’s most important ally on the eastern European front of World War II. Yet we inevitably view our joint victory through the lens of the subsequent Cold War. For Moldovans, the legacy is even more complicated since the German occupation was followed by decades of Russian rule.

I found it fascinating how the Soviet gravestones lack any religious markings while those erected since Moldovan independence, just a few yards away, are adorned with crosses. One gravestone has an inscription saying (in Romanian), “Born speaking Romanian; died speaking Romanian,” a clear rejection of the Russian language. The cemetery also honors Moldovans who died shortly after independence in the war in Transnistria, the pro-Russian region that broke away and remains largely autonomous.

Yet many Moldovans have close personal ties to Russia, want closer relations with it and cherish its glorious triumph. Just outside the park we saw this billboard promoting Victory Day. It displays a Soviet hammer and sickle and the signature of Moldova’s current president, who sat beside Vladimir Putin at Moscow’s victory parade on May 9. Many thousands of Moldovans marched or gathered in Chișinău the same day, as they did around the country, especially in Russian-speaking areas. In places where Romanian is commonly spoken, the emphasis tended to be more on European unity, especially with the West.

Even the date of Moldova’s Memorial Day is complicated. Germany’s unconditional surrender to the Allies occurred on May 7, 1945, which Americans remember as V-E Day (Victory in Europe Day). People in this part of Europe, however, commemorate a ceremony that took place late the following day in which Germany formally surrendered to the Soviet forces. Since it was already May 9 by then in Moscow, that became the official date for Russia and other Soviet states, including Moldova.

More than 70 years after the war ended, its impact on the history and psyche of this region remains profound. As I have written previously, almost every Moldovan village has a memorial, usually accompanied by the names of local men who died. In the village where I lived during training, the list exceeded 100 names, an astonishing toll. Many Moldovans also have painful memories of family members and friends who were deported by the Soviets after the war.

As a Peace Corps volunteer, I avoid politics. Yet our visit to the memorial park was a reminder that history is never far away in this small but complex country. Like the flame inside Chișinău’s monument, memories here smolder, flicker and burn. Every day is Memorial Day.