Srebrenica.

July 10, 2010:

An excerpt from my journal:

We’re currently on the bus, driving to Srebrenica from Sarajevo through the most beautiful countryside.  In my mind, it’s a mix of Custer State Park and Yellowstone and the Sound of Music.  Thatched roofs sit on houses scattered through warm, soft, sunny meadows filled with yellow and purple flowers.  Hills rise steadily in the distance.  The sky stretches long above us, perfectly blue and jumbled with brilliantly white, cotton candy clouds.  The road enters a stretch of woods and winds through trees, vibrant green and towering overhead, rooted far below where I can see, as the ground plummets downward from the edge of the road, suddenly surprisingly steep.  A gap in the trees changes the flickers of sunlight that have been tickling my arm to a wash, warming my chest, arm, hand, fingers, as we move out of the forest and into the sunlight that envelops these mountains.  “It’s absolutely beautiful,” Heidi says, and I nod, trying to take a picture to bring back home and share, to capture the vast enormity of grandeur surrounding our bus.  But I cannot, of course—and there is something right about the fact that the little metal box in my hands cannot capture or contain the patchwork greens and yellows of fields along the mountainside, like a huge familiar quilt, or the reddish-brown tiles of rooftops that sit warming in the sun as we approach a town, nor the hulking mass of forested mountains far off in the distance.  My pen cannot capture it either, but at least in writing I feel able to worship.

(Hours later)

Srebrenica’s memorial to the massacre of fifteen years ago stretches so far that it becomes unreal.  At first, the endless rows of white tombstones reminded me of pictures I’ve seen of Arlington National Cemetery.  But then we got closer and saw the coffins—775 of them, green plastic-covered caskets, carried in on men’s shoulders and lined up neatly in long lines.  We were there for the last 300 coffins or so (oh dear God, 300 coffins), just watching.  People stretch out their hands to touch them as they pass, but the men in green shirts handle them deftly, smoothly and quickly setting them in order.  There was one young boy carrying coffins who looked about 16.  (What sort of world is this, where a 16-year-old carries hundreds of coffins?)  There’s only bones in them, so they must be light.

To be so close to so much grief is troubling.  (That word is so callously inadequate.)  This is not about me at all; I simply found myself swept away in the grief all around me.  This is the world’s sorrow.

Our talk of how we looked in headscarves (oh, Allie…) was quickly silenced when we approached the caskets.  There we saw people grieving: women weeping silently, stroking the green plastic cover gently, caressing with worn fingers the face, hair, hands they still see in their minds’ eye.  Families gathered to approach a specific casket, each of them apprehensive, faces crumpling one by one as they remembered and relived their last memories with their brother, son, father, husband.  Men crouching and weeping, some openly and some with faces hidden, all unabashedly grieving.  One woman saw the name on a casket and went into shock, convulsing.  Others began to wail, their cries hauntingly penetrating the air.  Death is terrible.  May Your kingdom come quickly, God!  Tomorrow the grief will be amplified a thousandfold, and still not everyone who died is represented.  It’s supposed to rain tomorrow.  Heaven should weep for Srebrenica.