Where in the World Have We Gone?

 

QUO VADIS, AIDA? (A) - In 1998, in the raw days following the rough truce that ended the war in the former Yugoslavia, I visited Croatia, the land of my maternal ancestors. I found the hillside town overlooking the Adriatic, Hreljin, where my grandfather John (nee Ivan) grew up, and I found relatives there who spoke English and had a direct connection to the kin who had once visited the Chicago area of my family after World War II. I would return in 2000 with my mother in tow to visit those same relatives.  I took her inside her father's boyhood home, where she claimed some artwork left behind from an aunt who had died many years earlier around age 21. I grabbed a crystal shot glass.

In 1998, taking a detour on our way to see the World Cup tournament in France, my ex and I traveled the Dalmatian coast. She had always wanted to see Dubrovnik, and she was relieved to find that it had survived the Serbian siege, albeit with a marble plaza of the old city pockmarked from shelling. Fledgling restaurateurs lured us into side alleys to sample their fare. It was an entrepreneurship we had noticed on the drive down, including the determined rebuilding of the ivory-colored homes with their refurbished terra-cotta roofs -- those earth-tone hues framed by the backdrop of the marble-blue Adriatic.  

This was a mere three years after the massacre of Bosnian Muslims in the neighboring republic to the east, perhaps the darkest, most chilling moment of the horrific war that marked the breakup of Yugoslavia. We were modestly surprised to run across few hallmarks of that genocidal bloodbath across the region. If there was enmity being harbored, we didn't detect it.

During the war, in the early '90s, I had taken a marked interest in the day-to-day dispatches from the homeland's front lines, from my safe perch at a privileged remove on the wire desk of the Chicago Sun-Times. Now, breathing in the warm seaside air of mid-June 1998, I was on a mission connecting with both branches of my family tree. Having spent a week in Italy, we had ferried from Ancona to Split and now were traveling down Croatia's version of Highway 1, soaking up the history, both recent and ancient. 

The Croatians seemed like a practical and resilient people. Life was going on. 

"Quo Vadis, Aida?" is a harsh reminder of the centuries-long ethnic hostilities that had reignited violently and the evil that descended on Srebrenica in July 1995. It chronicles the terrifying hours that led to the massacre of about 8,000 men and boys at the hands of the Bosnian Serbs under the banner of Republika Srpska

Aida (Jasna Djuricic) is a local translator at a United Nations base. On this day, the UN camp is overwhelmed by Srebrenican refugees fleeing after the takeover of the city by the Bosnian Serb army. Most of the residents, with only the clothes on their backs, are trapped both inside and just outside the compound, which is staffed by a skeleton crew of blue helmets who have no rational hope of evacuating everyone safely or repelling the Serbs or defusing the volatile situation.

Aida's husband and two young-adult sons are among the mass of people, and her maternal instincts compel her to try to pull strings to get her family out safely. Her husband participates in some sham negotiations in which the Serbs vow the safe transfer of the thousands of residents to a nearby haven. It is obvious that the Serbs are lying. And it only makes her husband more of a target. As the drama builds the tension never relents.

When some Bosnian Serb soldiers arrive at the camp and start separating out the boys and men, Aida's sense of urgency multiplies. The UN military personnel are essentially useless or clueless or both. The swagger of the Bosnian Serbs is terrifying (especially the quiet menace of a commander named Joka, played by Emir Hadzihafizbegovic, from "Fuse"). The film, written and directed by Jasmila Zbanic ("Grbavica: The Land of My Dreams"), is 100 minutes of nonstop suspense masquerading under the banality of evil. The ending and coda are alternatively shocking and bittersweet. 

The final scene is a reminder that life went on, and factions melted back together side by side. 

The seeds of Yugoslavia's collapse into battle and genocide were planted in a divisive speech by Serbian nationalist Slobodan Milosevic in June 1989 intended to mark the 600th anniversary of the Battle of Kosovo, which gives you an idea of how long the people of the region have been feuding and have been susceptible to nationalist imprecations. One point of "Quo Vadis" is that it is virtually impossible to casually distinguish between Serbs and Croatians, or Orthodox and Muslims. The people of Srebrenica went to school together, lived among each other, looked alike.

I glimpsed a lot of familiar faces among the strangers during our trip up and down the Dalmatian coast. They were the faces I saw as a kid at cousins' birthday parties and as an adult at family reunions or at the funerals for great-aunts and -uncles. They had bright blue eyes and tender smiles. So do the characters, on both sides, in "Quo Vadis." When I went to the cemetery in Hreljin, half the names on the tombstones were the same as my mother's maiden name. They were the Kucans and Blazinas that would intermarry and settle in the Chicago suburb of Lyons in the 20th century, far away from the troubled homeland, that coiled mousetrap of a country.

A few years after our trip to Croatia, my ex and I broke up, and I would move away from the Chicago suburbs and my family. Before I left, I saw an entry in my ex's diary from that trip to Dubrovnik. She had been heartened to see me connect with my roots. It provided her an insight into a dimension of me that perhaps even I was still in the process of realizing. She ended the entry with this observation: "Now I know where those blue eyes of his come from. That is the color I see when I gaze out into the Adriatic."