And Still We Rise

A Family’s Journey Out of Bosnia

by Jordan Steven Sher

I first met Sabi, her husband Fikret, and daughter, Mirela in Mirela’s home in Utica, New York in June of 2018. I was working on my first book, Our Neighbors, Their Voices: True Stories of Immigrant Exodus. I wanted to understand why immigrants came to America, and I interviewed fourteen people from different countries. My intention was to educate readers about immigrants and the factors that motivate people to leave their homelands. I met folks from Iran, Lebanon, Guatemala, Mexico, Vietnam, the former Czechoslovakia and a number of other countries. I even included my wife’s story of immigration from Italy.

I am no reporter and had little writing experience at the time. I was once a clinical social worker, and that empathy is on high alert. At least I had that to bring to the fore. I was delving into what was occurring in this country as restrictions on immigration mounted, resulting in human suffering for those not allowed in. After all, my own immigrant grandparents paved the way for me and my family to live in America fleeing violence perpetrated against Jews in Eastern Europe in the early 1900s. Why shouldn’t others have that opportunity? Isn’t the welcome emblazoned on the Statue of Liberty: “Give us your tired, your poor...”?

Something happened that day in 2018 when I interviewed Mirela and her parents. A kinship of sorts was beginning to form, although I couldn’t quite put my finger on it at that point. The genocide of Bosniaks in which they they had been swept up was perpetrated mostly by Bosnian Serbs hit a chord deep within me.

The Holocaust was a thread that ran through my childhood going forward. My parents grew up in New York with immigrant parents, hearing President Roosevelt speak on the radio of Hitler’s concentration camps. I later learned of family killed at Auschwitz. The staggering numbers of those murdered by the Nazi’s “Final Solution” played into some decisions, and certainly political leanings that echoed within the home I grew up in on Long Island.

We were members of a “conservative” congregation in our local synagogue. This meant that we were obligated to more strict interpretations of Judaism, and I just took these in stride. Later in my life, I chose to leave that level of adherence, while retaining what felt comfortable to me, my lapsed-Catholic wife, and our children. Still, my upbringing had a decidedly Jewish flavor.

There were incidents in my early years that punctuated what hate looks like when its targeted at one group. In my case, Jews.

I remember as a teenager being awoken at midnight one summer by fire engine sirens. My parents, brothers and I exited to the front of our house, which adjoined our neighbors’. Our eyes were all directed toward the small Orthodox synagogue that had been only recently built, perched beyond a wooden fence in what was once an empty lot separating us from the end of our street. With flames darting upward, we all knew why the synagogue was ablaze. For my mother, who was most visibly shaken, tears rolling down her cheeks as my father cradled her around her shoulders, this was no accident.

Just one incident. Yet, it defined, and still does, the antisemitism that continues to foul our country, and the world.

There were other incidents that could be told here, but there is no need. Our lives have criss-crossed, Mirela’s and mine. When, for my first book, she and her parents recounted what had happened to them, I learned firsthand about the destructive nature of genocide and its targeted people. This was not solely about lives lost in a most brutal way, but about the aftermath for its survivors.

As I learned what Mirela and her family went through, the shivers running down my spine had roots that connected us more than we could have imagined. Their story deserves to be told in more than the twenty or so pages that I chronicled in Our Neighbors... For what you are about to read, Fikret could not participate. Telling their story in more depth was too difficult, too painful for him. It is up to mother and daughter to shed light on the unthinkable.

My interviews took place mostly by phone. It seemed more comfortable for Mirela and Sabi. I offered Skype, but it felt better for them this way. One time I was in Utica. It was early November, 2019. Mirela and Sabi agreed to have us meet in Sabi’s house for this particular conversation.

The house had the distinctive odor of a smoker. Smoking was an addiction that Fikret could not beat. For what it’s worth, it settled him when anxious, I learned. And, because Utica is so cold, he smoked in one corner of the house, but that didn’t stop it from permeating throughout.

I sat on a couch with their dog occasionally nudging up against my leg as a request for my attention, which I gladly gave.

Sabi and Mirela sat closely next to each other. What they told me is encapsulated in what you will read inside. It was more about the rare time for me to feel the human connection that the bulk of my interviews could not capture. And yet, that feeling of connection, of sadness and a desire to have them triumph, remained no matter how I learned of their journey.

I was privileged to witness this mother-daughter bond. They leaned into each other emphasizing the closeness that they felt. As they shared more about the horrors that they experienced at the hands of the Serbs, I don’t recall being aware of the cigarette smoke any longer. I was lost in their story.

Mirela walked me outside after the interview as I was to be picked up by my brother-in-law. She knew Bob, too, and wanted to say hello. As we hugged goodbye, she told me that she understood what the Jews had gone through during the Holocaust. She acknowledged that the degrees of violence and death were different, but the feeling of being at the receiving end just because of one’s religion is too difficult to explain.

“I am not even that observant to my faith,” she said, “but the fact that being Muslim or Jewish could cause such an evil response is beyond me.”

I got into the car feeling a bit overwhelmed. All I could do was to say to Bob that this family’s story has to be told. It must be told. I sat silently looking out into the darkness as we made our way back to his house. I was ready more than ever to do just that.

To be continued...