It took him six days to make it through the forest: under constant fire, with almost nothing to eat, hardly any water, barely sleeping.
Running for his life amid the chaos caused by an artillery attack, he lost sight of his father and twin brother on the second day. Despite wounds on his feet, he kept on running.
Hiding in the undergrowth, he saw soldiers shooting at fleeing people as if they were hunting animals.
In clearings, fields and open crossings, he crawled through hails of bullets and dodged hand grenades. He saw wounded people, whom he could not help.
Once, exhausted and on the cusp of sleep, he was nudged by a man who said “If you fall asleep now, it’ll be forever.” So, he mustered all his strength and carried on.
On the afternoon of the sixth day, he and hundreds of others reached the area controlled by the Bosnian army.
The people of the village brought them food and drink. They were later all brought to a schoolhouse, where he fell asleep on the floor and woke up the next day.
Death March of Srebrenica
Hasan Hasanovic (49) survived the Srebrenica genocide of July 1995. He was 19 years old at the time.
To this day, he is filled with disbelief when he tells of the Death March of Srebrenica, the attempt made by thousands of men and boys to avoid being massacred.
“The death march was real. But at the same time, it seemed completely surreal to me,” recalls Hasanovic. “I couldn’t believe what was happening. And when it was over, I couldn’t believe that I had survived.”
An unprecedented manhunt
It is July 11, 1995. The troops of the Bosnian Serb army commander Ratko Mladic have captured the enclave and UN Safe Area of Srebrenica.
There are 36,000 people in the town — Muslim Bosniaks, almost all of them civilians — who have been encircled there for several years.
No one doubts that at the very least the men who are of an age for military service will be killed if they are captured, which is why most of them decide to flee.
They resolve to walk through the forests to reach the territory around the town of Tuzla, which is controlled by the Bosnian army and is about 70 kilometers northwest of Srebrenica.
On the evening of July 11, about 12,000 men assembled and set off in a column several kilometers long.
They had to cross enemy territory, some of which was mined, past positions of the Bosnian Serb army, under constant fire for six whole days.
Mladic’s troops conducted an unprecedented manhunt. Only about a third of those who set off on the march reached Bosnian-controlled territory alive, which is why the escape later became known as the Death March of Srebrenica.
One of those who made it to Tuzla was Hasan Hasanovic.
The Srebrenica Memorial
The 49-year-old now works at the Memorial Center Srebrenica in Potocari, several kilometers north of Srebrenica.
The mortal remains of about 7,000 identified victims of the 8,372 people known to have been killed in Srebrenica are buried here.
There is also a large museum in the halls of a former battery factory where UNPROFOR troops were once stationed.
Video archive with witnesses
Hasan Hasanovic used to guide visitors around the museum and tell his story. Today, he works primarily as a curator of exhibitions and an archivist.
His most important project is an archive with video footage of survivors of the Srebrenica genocide telling their stories. It is a unique and the most important record of what happened here 30 years ago.
So far, the archive contains about 700 films and interviews.
Just a normal European boy
When Hasan Hasanovic speaks about his life and his survival, he says that for a long time he felt that someone else had written the script of his life and that he just had to follow it, without having any control over it.
Hasanovic was 16 years of age when war broke out in Bosnia and Herzegovina in the spring of 1992. He says he was just a normal European boy who was more interested in music and soccer than in politics.
The war smashed his world to pieces.
His family fled the ethnic cleansing in eastern Bosnia: first to the forests around Srebrenica, where they lived in holes in the ground and other hiding places, and later to the town of Srebrenica itself, which became an enclave and shelter for Bosniak refugees.
Hasan lived there for three years, experiencing the bombs, brushes with death during searches for food in the forest and improvised school lessons.
‘This pain is almost unbearable’
When Mladic’s troops took Srebrenica on July 11, he, his father and his twin brother decided to join the others fleeing to Bosnian-controlled territory.
The next day was the last time he set eyes on his father and brother. Their remains were found years later in mass graves.
Hasan Hasanovic has written a book about his experience and survival in Srebrenica. He writes: “The worst thing is the pain. When I think about how my brother, Husein, and my father, Aziz, were killed. Were they tortured? How long did it take them to die? This pain is almost unbearable.”
Return to Srebrenica
Hasan Hasanovic later graduated from high school, studied criminology and worked as a translator for the US Army because he spoke good English.
He was finally able to bury the remains of his brother and father at the cemetery and memorial in Potocari in 2003 and 2005 respectively. In 2009, he began to work at the memorial. He says that the process of returning to Srebrenica and coping with being there and working there was long and painful.
“The memories haunt you,” he tells DW. “Everything there reminds you of the genocide, of survival. Initially, we had to have police protection when traveling to funerals. Serbian nationalists would be standing at the side of the road making nationalist victory signs with their fingers.”
“Perpetrators still live in Srebrenica,” he says. “When it comes to people of a certain age, you ask yourself what they were doing at the time, whether they were involved. For many years I thought I would at most be able to return for funerals. But then I had the feeling that my father and my brother were watching me; that they expected me to tell the story because they themselves have no voice any longer. I felt encouraged and empowered to speak.”
Not a victim, a survivor
When Hasan Hasanovic speaks, his voice is neither reproachful nor choked with pain. He does not shed tears; he does not seem overcome with grief; he radiates neither rage, not hate.
But he doesn’t like the word “reconciliation,” which he often hears when he speaks abroad, especially in Germany.
He says that such words as this imply a dispute. “We didn’t have a dispute with anyone, and the war in Bosnia was not a civil war. It was a war in which we were displaced and destroyed. It was a genocide,” he says. “Serbia and the Serbs have to work through this chapter of history, and they have to acknowledge the genocide instead of denying it.”
Hasan Hasanovic radiates dignity when he speaks about the nuanced meaning of words and when he tells the story of his survival. This dignity is his victory over those who carried out the genocide, his victory over evil.
It is very important to him that people do not refer to him as a “victim of the genocide.” He says that the victims of the genocide were those who were killed.
He refers to himself as a survivor. Hasanovic says that this word is like a title for him, one which carries in it both his task and his calling, namely to tell the story of what happened in Srebrenica in July 1995.
“And I will keep on telling that story as long as I have the strength to do so,” he says.
This article was originally published in German.
