Learning by travelling

Before I came to the city of Osijek, I had never heard of the siege of Vukovar - an educational gap, some readers might say, other might not even know that places like Osijek and Vukovar exit - honestly, I didn't know about those places before I had been invited by some Croatian friends to come and visit their country.

Of course, I had known about the Balkan Wars before, I remember seeing thing about them on the news when I was a child. Back then, the Croatian- Serbian boarder seemed very far away...and 15 years later budget airlines make me reach that place within one hour.

We had been in Osijek for a week - already there, the fact that you could still see bullet holes in buildings impressed me, even though you can see those in some buildings in Berlin as well. But, of course I know that was from WWII, which is quite far away, and the Balkan Wars took place when I was a child and when our Croatian hosts were children.

In Osijek, we saw a movie about the siege of Vukovar, about how the Serbian army had conquered that city, killed the patients of the hospital, and forced the civilians to walk about 50 miles on foot to Osijek. The movie was quite disturbing, especially knowing that this had happened close to us, to some of our friends.

The next day, we actually went to Vukovar. We rode those 50 miles in a bus and the weather was pretty bad that day, we were told that it had been the same when the civilians where forced to go. Just looking out of the window, one could image the hardship they must have suffered.
In Vukovar, you could see the ruins from one Habsburg castle, which had survived until 1992. There were still burnt down trees standing on the Danue river, looking very sad.

Across the river, there was the border to Serbia. What struck me, was that there was no bridge connecting those two countries which had once been one and then became enemies. Our Croatian travel guides told me that there had been a bridge but that it was bombed in 1999 - a time when I had been 15, thinking about horses and boyfriends.

I think that, on that trip, I had learned more about the hardship of war and forced migration, than history books or documentary movies can ever teach me. Standing on the fields that had actually been battle grounds and talking to people who had witnessed that war erased all the distance that newpaper articles, books and movies had not managed to close.