277: What if you survived the Bosnian genocide?
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Today's episode features Mirosad Solakovic, a survivor of the Bosnian genocide. Before we begin this episode, it will help to give some brief background of the Bosnian War, which is incredibly complex and this will be a very, very incomplete portrait. But it will help give some context to Mirosad's experiences, and I encourage you all to research more about it.

The Bosnian War was a three-year armed conflict that took place in what is now Bosnia and Herzegovina between 1992 and 1995. The war was part of the breakup of Yugoslavia, a former communist country that comprised what is today seven different countries, including Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, Macedonia, Slovenia, Montenegro, and Kosovo.

In the 1980s, the rapid decline of the economy of Yugoslavia led to internal strife and independence movements, destabilizing the country. As Yugoslavia was breaking up, the republics within began declaring independence, beginning with Croatia and Slovenia in 1991. Bosnia and Herzegovina declared independence in February 1992.

After declaring independence, a series of violent internal struggles for control ensued, and a brutal Serbian political leader, Radovan Karadžić, supported by the regime of Slobodan Milošević, emerged with the goal of securing Serbian territory and dominance in the region, to create enclaves that were exclusively Serbs. This led Karadžić to architect an ethnic cleansing campaign of Bosnian Muslims and Croats in the region.

Today's storyteller, Mirsad, is part of the Bosnian Muslim population.

Estimates suggest that the war claimed the lives of around 100,000 people and displaced over 2 million through violent conflict including torture, mass murder, rape, and genocide. So be mindful that this episode includes especially brutal material. Again, this is a very broad overview and I encourage you all to look into more specific details of the war and its aftermath. But now we hear from Miroslav Solakovic in today's story, What If You Survived the Bosnian Genocide?

That becomes tragedy beyond people's comprehension. You cannot imagine it. Neighbor turns against neighbor, friend against friend, family against family. For what? As a child, you observe that. And as a child, you remember. And as a child, he affects you more. And he kills you more. From Wondery, I'm Whit Misseldine. You are listening to This Is Actually Happening. Episode 277.

What if you survived the Bosnian genocide? This Is Actually Happening is sponsored by ADT. ADT knows a lot can happen in a second. One second, you're happily single. And the next second, you catch a glimpse of someone and you don't want to be. Maybe one second, you have a business idea that seems like a pipe dream. And the next, you have an LLC and a dream come true. And when it comes to your home, one second, you feel safe.

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When I asked my parents, how did you raise me? They would say, I didn't raise you. The neighbors have raised you. The school teachers have raised you. The village has raised you. We lived in northwest of Bosnia, the little town called Kozorac. And we lived under the Brotherhood of Communism. And everybody were treated the same.

You have Serbian people, Croatian people, Bosnian people. There were no such thing as somebody was labeled as being brown or black or white. We embraced it with our full heart. And the childhood vividly, it's like a fairy tale, living by the lake in the summer, swimming in the lake.

looking after the animals whilst they were being fed by eating grass. We were basically shepherds after school. Everything you eat, you pick from your garden, you share it with your family, friends, neighbours. And the sense of being raised in that kind of community brings people together.

I never realized anything different, that I was different or any other children would be different. Even our names are very universal. So we had Elvis, we had Mirosad, we had Anita. It's very international names. So you wouldn't be able to tell what religion people were. And I think on top of it, religion was never an issue. It was never important.

I have loads of friends and we never distinguished our differences. We always looked at our similarities and how to embrace everything we had. I didn't say much and I was a very, very hardworking kid. If I was to describe my childhood, I worked from the age of 11 on the farm and the rest of the time you'll have homework and the chores.

And my dad was a farmer working on the farm. Say we'd have a hay, wheat, corn, potatoes. He would export it to Italy and he'd come back from Italy with machineries, motorbikes. So he was the farmer that you'd say a trader was.

My mom was a typical housewife, working hard on the farm, looking after the family and looking after the kids. We had family members who were workers. They had to be fed on a daily basis so every worker would have a meal and that would be her main responsibility.

My uncle's house is next door, my granddad's house is two doors away, or cousin's house. So we're all kind of in a row of houses next to each other on the farm. And we were brought up to look out for each other, to help each other, to support each other, to die for each other. And that's how I was raised in my typical household in a village of Khazarats until the war broke out.

It was a sunny afternoon in May 1992 and when I come back from school, I turned up from school with all my grades. We used to have these like a passport and all the grades would be written and I've turned up really proud of that day because my dad said if I get all the A's and overall pass with grade A, my dad would buy me a motorbike.

So I came literally running home. I ran to find my mom and I would always find in a garden. I said, mom, mom, guess what? And he says, what, why are you so happy? I said, I passed all my grades with grades. He says, go and find the dad. So I looked for dad and I found him. And he's literally hidden a motorbike that I always dreamt of. The Thomas made in Slovenia, little automatic scooter bike. It was the happiest day in May.

I didn't get a chance even to ride it when the sirens went off. My mum was in the garden and she said, the war is on. The war has reached our part of Bosnia, so we have to go in a shelter. We have to hide. All of a sudden, from a complete peace, a peaceful day, a sunny afternoon, coming back from school early, to a war zone. And that's when...

Everything started changing. At this point, the first time in my life I experienced my neighbours being very anxious, upset, angry, scared. They were completely dissolving and a shelling started and people were confused.

I was 12 years of age and it's May. We usually finish school in July. This is why we're finishing early. And the teacher said, the war is around the corner. It's not safe. And this is, you know, aren't you going to protect us? He says, do you know who I am? I said, what do you mean who are you? He said, you know, we're different now. I said, what do you mean we're different? He says, I'm part of the Serbian paramilitary troops.

So he said, so you're here to protect us? He said, but I'm not because we're different. In Bosnia, it's the most mixed out of all Yugoslavia, so you have the Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia. We didn't have one ethnicity. It was mixed. And we all lived together as one.

equal rights, equal opportunity through communism. So if you look at the Croat, the Serbian or the Bosnian Muslim, those little differences didn't make any difference. We did not see the little differences until the war kicked off. And over the night, the chaos starts.

There's a Serbian trying to fight Croatian who are Catholics and Bosnians who are Muslims and then you have different little sects like Ukrainian, Polish settlers there after Second World War and because I've had Muslim heritage attached to me through my roots, you become an enemy

everything overnight. All your neighbors turn into your worst enemies that you can imagine because the neighbors know everything about you and they turn against you and they want to kill you. We're running around like headless chickens turning to our neighbors' doors and they're saying, well, it's not safe for you.

The Serbs paramilitary troops are coming and looking out for people that had different ethnicity, people that had different religious beliefs. You're just literally becoming a victim of the vicious game or system of execution. So you're constantly hiding, you're constantly fighting for survival.

And as long as you have a Muslim name attached to it, you become victim of that vicious game, whether you were religious or not. So we run to our Serbian neighbors and there was a woman called Dusanka. She said, you can stay with us. You are safe. You are our neighbors. We look out for each other. We help each other out. So we stayed a night with this lady called Dusanka.

All of a sudden, she starts panicking and saying, well, I don't think it's safe for you to stay here. The Serbian army is overtaking the town. So go to your homes, return to your homes and continue normal life. She did try to assist us in helping us, but I think she was scared for her own family and well-being because we didn't know at the time how nasty the war will work out.

So we returned home and the shelling would stop during the daytime and start again during the night. They kind of took us by surprise the way they've attacked the town with artillery on top of the mountain. You have your own Yugoslavian army shelling from the top of the mountain the whole town, cosserads and surrounding towns and stuff.

Every household dug out the ditches or trenches, and we covered them with something on top so we'd enter when the shelling starts. And it's the safest from when grenades fall and stuff. You are under the ground. You are safe. And all of a sudden, you have people dying.

the movement became very restricted so you wouldn't literally move from your house because as soon as the shelling starts, people start missing and even the people that have tried to leave the town, they've just disappeared overnight and have never been seen again. And I remember people complaining about the smell

And it's this kind of rigorous smell that, here's his way to describe it, it's like something is rotting and the human flesh, when it rots in a sunny day, it's something that you cannot explain how horrible it is. Literally the whole village started smelling of the human flesh decaying.

And then we've been instructed by our granddad to release all our animals.

Because we had cows and everybody in a village, they had to release the animals because when the shelling starts, the barn where the animals are kept, if it shatters, it'll kill the animals. And then the dogs, the cats, all of our animals were released in the open fields in a village. You'll see like a safari of animals themselves running up and down the street, not knowing where to go, where to hide when the shelling starts.

So we as kids, we observed the dogs and the dogs became wild. And I've asked my granddad, "What's going on? The dogs, you can't get near them. Are they scared or something?" And then my granddad realized that the dogs were eating human flesh. So those animals would be prepared to attack humans. They became wild. We discovered our uncle, Hashim, that's been killed, one of the first victims in the village has been killed and hidden in the bushes.

I remember tractor turning up at our house and all of a sudden everybody's panicking and crying and stuff is he alive is he alive when I've reached the trail of the tractor as a child you jump to see what's in it and all I could see uncle hashing's face but his stomach was blown up but I was 13 years old that's the first time I've seen a dead person

And then I've heard my mom shouting, Merced, Merced, what you doing? Get back inside the house. You're not allowed to see that. And it just took me back thinking, has his stomach died? How did that happen? All sorts of things running through my head. And I remember granddad, one day he crawled down in a village and he went to some shrubs where there were two young men, their heads were cut off.

Me and my friends, we couldn't help it, but we had to run to see. One day, me and my friend Mirza, we crawled down to see. When we seen the heads cut off, we were so confused as kids, and we looked and there was blood everywhere and stuff. And we run home shouting to Grandad. Grandad, we seen those two young men, their heads cut off. And they shouted at us again, "You shouldn't have been there. You could have got yourself killed." Grandad couldn't help it, and he went to bury those two young boys.

He dug out the hole. But when the sniper started shooting him, he came home crawling. So when he buried them, he didn't bury them enough. So you have these dogs like vultures and they've started eating that flesh of those two young boys. That was atrocious. And that stuck with me for a very, very long time. Those kind of experiences, thinking now about it, what is sanity, you know, what's insane and what is sane.

That becomes tragedy beyond people's comprehension. You cannot imagine it. Neighbour turns against neighbour, friend against friend, family against family. For what? As a child you observe that and as a child you remember. And as a child he affects you more and he kills you more. So we were literally divided into small groups and the small groups became smaller groups.

It's like Hitler's army, they've had a plan how to ethnically cleanse Bosnian Muslims, how to execute diplomats, business people, intelligent people, pious academics, people that would pass on the history. I and my family belonged to that strand of people that were very successful. And if you were successful, the war eats you pretty quickly.

predominantly the village where we lived were occupied by Bosnians and the Serbians were on the other side of the village across the river. So the Serbian snipers were watching the movement of the villages and they've seen us hunting animals basically just trying to catch them ourselves and bring them back and feed the families.

So on that day, we went to get some animals and stuff, and we were distracted because the sniper person started giving us warning shots. They were firing above our heads, just in the sky, just to warn us, get away, this is not safe zone anymore. So we run to our village as very upset, as angry, because we lost our freedom as kids. There was no more freedom in a village, like to experience our wilderness, to play with our mates,

That day we realized we cannot be mobile anymore. My dad came to me in just that moment. He said, he says, if somebody come and questions you, don't say anything. Any kind of information would be suicidal for everybody in the village. So the more you say, the more people in the village will be in danger. So this is the safest thing for you is to keep quiet.

When the army became stronger and the Serbs took control of the city, we're looking for that person, we're looking for this person, we're looking for that person. Now the best source of information would come from the kids. It's like gangsters comes in and says, I want that, that, that, that. You've got 24 hours. If not, I'll execute all of your family. So what do you do? I asked my dad, what if they have to kill me? What if they say, if you give us no information, you'll kill us? And my dad says, well, it's better if they kill you than the whole village.

That sentence stuck with me for the rest of my life, thinking that is a big thing to say. And it's probably a very brave thing to say for my dad, but I was too young to digest it. I was too young to understand it. And that's where I said to myself, I am not going to say anything

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Hire high-quality, certified pros at Angie.com. Before you know it, there is like a police army squad, full uniform, turning up. But we've been already informed by the other villages. The police army are coming around, questioning people, asking if they had any weapons, if they had any involvement with territorial army, if they were on checkpoints in entrances to the villages.

And everybody were involved in checkpoints, all the villagers, all the farmers. And what you'll also find, the most educated, the most prosperous, the richest were first taken away, questioned and murdered, killed, disappeared overnight.

The police squad, when they turned up, they were marching outside and saying to everybody, stop where you are, don't move, hands in the air. And as a kid, I had no top on that day. It was a warm day. I've had little shorts. And I would always crouch in position and put my hands on my mouth.

My family were outside and one of the soldiers says I need all the gold, I need all the flour, corn, anything you got get it out of the house. You've got my mom panicking taking all the rings, necklaces from her hands, from her neck and passing it on to soldiers. He says that's not enough, he says get inside the house. And he says if I find any gold that you're not taking out of the house, all of you are going to be murdered. And I've seen the panic in my mom's face, my grandmother.

There's about 27 family members there because they were family members from surrounded villages. And out of all of them, they've asked them a few questions. And as I was crouching, looking, observing, they said, you young man, follow me. As soon as they said that, my mom started crying, very overpowering, the howling noise of panicking, almost saying they're going to kill my son. Just fear that they're going to kill a child.

The first thing they did is take your clothes off. And I'm taking my clothes off. He said, we're going to ask you some questions. If you don't answer the questions, you're going to get a bullet in your head. At first, I didn't take it seriously. But when they asked me to step on thorns and bushes in a shrub with no shoes on, I knew these guys are going to torture me. They're going to beat the crap out of me. They're probably going to kill me.

And then they start beating me up with this buckle of a belt, which was very painful on my back. And I still suffer with my back when the weather changes. I'd remember this pain like yesterday. I was young and when you receive the pain, being beaten up by the buckle of a belt, it's very, very, very painful. All the houses across the fields, they could hear echoing sounds of my painful screaming. And I started bleeding everywhere and

They said, okay, now we're going to bring your dad. Maybe your dad can help you. So they start torturing my dad. One of the soldiers had a knife and he's drawn a cross on my chest and cross on my left arm. And I just realized that I've got very warm. My heart was pacing and then the pain disappeared. But then the fear takes over and all I can see is like I'm in a little black hole.

I feel left in a black hole. I can't get out. So they put me on execution spot. And he says, well, we're going to shoot you now if they don't give us information. Did anyone in this village have any weapons or anything? And I just kept quiet. They were all drunk soldiers. They were young. They were full of, I don't know, anger. Full of anger. So there's one person standing right next to me and hitting me with a rifle butt on the back of my head. And he says again, he says, ask your dad. Dad can help you.

I says, dad, can you help me? He says, I can't help you. I says, dad, please can you help me? He said, I can't help you. At that point, I just wanted peace. And when you think about the peace, you don't think about the death. You just want to be at peace because you're in such a discomfort of fear that you can't explain it. You've got your own father standing in front of you. He can't help you. You're completely confused because you're completely innocent as a child being caught up in a war.

And then my cousin, a lady, she's 15, older than me, and I was very close to her. She would help me, uncle's daughter. She stepped on front of her house, front side of the house. And she's looking at me saying to the soldier, she said, what are you doing to the kid? What has he done to you? He's only a kid. He's an innocent child. And one soldier went very close to her and he says, do you want to be raped? How dare you say things like that?

And all I've seen, my auntie grabbing her by her hand and shouting at me, what are you doing here? It's nothing to do with you. And she pulls her away. And at that minute, I've discovered how much danger I am. They take my dad away, and then they shoot the gun above my head, and then they shoot to the right side and the left side. And I just kept quiet. They were standing in front of me. They said, we'll give you another chance.

and there's one soldier that activated the hand grenade and he says, "Hold that tight. "It's like your life depends on it. "If you let it go, you'll blow yourself." And then another soldier came and says, "One's not enough. "Put another one in." He put two active hand grenades, I was squeezing them so hard, at this point I started sweating and crying, literally crying my eyes out because thinking if I let this go, I'd just blow myself. At that point, I realized

He's drunk if I fall down and if I blow myself I can blow this person as well, but I felt it so tight I didn't say a word one of the soldiers came probably the oldest soldier at the time there were five of them and He took the grenade and when I realized he's holding the grain or had his hand was shaking and there was opinion It was pulling the pin back. That's where I realized shit. This was actually activated. I could have blown myself and

And when he's taken him, he laughed. He said, you could have killed yourself, made it easier for yourself. You could have thrown that, killed us all because we're all drunk. And they don't realize what a horrible thing the war is. What horrible things the war wakes. It wakes horrible things up from the people.

The war, it kind of discovers who is the baddest person on the planet and who is the kindest person on the planet. As soon as the pins fell on the floor, I was almost like waking up from the dream. I could see the blood splattered all over my eyelashes, opening my eyes and discovering that Dad waking me up saying he's alive.

There's a blood gushing from my ears, coming from my nose, my mouth. I'm alive. That's probably the happiest moment. I'll never forget that day, and that day will live with me for the rest of my life. And I always think, the oldest soldier that saved my life, I always wondered who that person is and why he's done it.

After that couple of weeks, there was a man that came running through the fields. That's best friend. And he said to my dad, he says, pack all your stuff in a minute. And you got to go because they're ethnically cleansing the whole coseret.

This is when the Serbian army, the foot soldiers, were overtaking the town. And they kept shouting, firing, burning houses, soldiers just shooting people. People have panic attacks and people run, you know, just looking for freedom. But there's no freedom. We're all captured. There was no social media. We were blocked off from civilization. We were blocked off from the world. We were like in a little black hole.

So the soldiers came and they said, everybody from surrounded villages, you have to go to a collection center at the time. It's called collection center. My school became a concentration camp. My teachers became camp guards. And people from surrounding villages, they were all moved and ethnically cleansed towards my school.

And that was my school that was turned into a concentration camp. So in the school where I played, where we had a theatre and stuff, it turned into a concentration camp. And that's where things got really, really complicated. The streets were full of people and the soldiers guarded them to move towards the concentration camp. So we walked about four kilometres to reach the concentration camp. And every time, we were like checkpoints by the soldiers, taking the rings off, necklaces of asking for money, constantly asking for money.

I've seen a two young man running through the inside of cornfields and I've seen the soldier shouting stop stop stop come back they didn't come back and they shot through the cornfields and they killed two young men and it just left them there on the entrance on a concentration camp the woman couldn't take a ring off he says don't worry about this I'm going to cut it with an axe

So the soldier took her outside from us, and apparently I've heard they cut her finger just to get the ring off. That's how desperate they were for the jewelry or anything they could get off people. It's almost like that's how soldiers would get paid by killing people. Like any concentration camp, they were processing people in the same way they've questioned me, they questioned everybody. The men were separated from women. We were in the part of the school where they call it Dome.

Every school had a dome. It's like a social dance club. We stayed above the hall, so there was little rooms. There was about 150 crammed people all sitting on top of each other, and we stayed there, women and children. Because my dad was classed as disabled, he had a heart operation. He never served in the army. They allowed him to stay with us.

Every night, the soldiers, the guards were taking different women and they were raping them and taking them back. And I've heard how distressed and tearful the women were after coming back. And you've actually heard a woman being raped and you hear her screaming her head off. And then just, they were shouting and stuff. Most of the guards were drunk most of the time.

We stayed probably not more than two weeks at the camp. We were already starving. We had diarrhea. They've had no sanitation. They've had no toilets. You had to urinate. You have to go to the toilet outside. People were already getting bugs. People were getting infections and so on. One day, I've had a diarrhea run down. Outside, you just crouch down and do your thing. And somebody's shouting at me.

And the soldier came down and said, you need to follow me to be interviewed. So I've gone to the room where I've seen Matij, who is now a guard, Kalashnikov on the table. He says, we'll meet again. I said, you didn't answer none of our questions. Now it's your opportunity. So the same routine started. They've had a truncheon and they start beating me up. In Bosnia, the truncheons are the rubber ones. And when they hit you, it really hurts.

It hit me across my face, across my neck, across my back and everywhere. The full room was full of smoke and there was blood spattered everywhere. And this is the blood from different people, from people like you that didn't give us no answers. Was your dad involved in the total army? Was your dad everywhere? Was your dad there or anywhere? And I just kept quiet.

My parents at this time were thinking I'm just going to the toilet and I'll be coming back. But again I've been tortured. All of a sudden, after they questioned me and didn't say anything, I've heard him say now go and bring his dad. And as I walked outside my dad is selling cigarettes. I've looked at him and when they've told me to leave I left and went upstairs.

And when I met with dad later, I've asked him, what was that about the cigarettes? He said, I've been questioned as well. They've told me if I don't sell them cigarettes, my life depends on selling them cigarettes. If I don't sell them, they'll kill me. So he sold the cigarettes and he survived. So then one morning, it was like another police unit came and I thought, the way they were coming, they will kill us all.

They surrounded the whole camp and they moved all of the women and children from the camp. And I remember my dad was with us and there was a soldier that stopped him in Serbia and said, "Where are you going? Where do you think you're going?" And he opened his shirt and he says, "I've had an operation. He's got a massive scar in the middle of his chest." He said he had a heart surgery, never been to army, never been involved in anything. And he says, "Motherfucker, you ain't going nowhere. Go back."

As he was going back to concentration camp, I think 99.9% of them would have got killed. And there's another Serbian guy saying, "Just leave the guy alone. He's an old man. He's done nothing wrong. He's disabled. He has an operation." So we were put in an animal carriages train and we were taken to the Bosnian part of Bosnia called Gracinica. And in Gracinica is territory controlled by the Bosnian Muslims.

And we stayed there for about six weeks. We became refugees. Everybody's taking a family each to take and feed them and look after them.

But soon they've run out of food and they've asked us to leave. So my dad organized a commercial lorry to take us all across dangerous zones. And some points were very close to the Serbian military points that were controlled by the Serbs. It was a very risky game to cross from Gratianica to get to the Croatia.

My dad collected money from the people, from the Bosnian people. And people were hiding the money usually in the underwear. They've stitched it up like back in the days Jewish people did to hide the money from the Germans.

And the money was always handy because with money, once you get out of to the safe zone, as the money becomes very, very handy because you can pay someone to smuggle you through the borders, to take you from one part of Bosnia where it's dangerous to another and so on. So with that money, dad paid for our family and anybody that had money, they've heard that my dad is organizing a lorry, they'll take him across Bosnia.

The lorry was, it's like a trailer of covered. So he was covered and we all crammed up there like potato and set off probably five o'clock in the morning. And most of the time they would drive during the night because it's safer. Even though they were shelling during the night, it was so dangerous. And it was kind of improvised roads through the forest. We reached the town called Konjic. I'll never forget.

They were shelling and the shell just missed my legs. The shell just literally missed my legs and my mum thought, oh my God, they've just taken his legs off. I was lucky I put my legs inside. That day it's like waking up from a dream and just thinking, what is happening? And you haven't got time to digest it or process none of that experience until you reach the safe zone.

We haven't reached Croatia yet. We're in Porzulje, it's a part of South Bosnia which is closer to Croatia now and it's very safe where we stayed about a couple of weeks. So there was a coach organised from Porzulje to Croatia where my auntie lives.

But there was one checkpoint, it was a horrible checkpoint by Croats, where they've taken a 16-year-old boy. It said any man from 16 to 60 need to come out because we need him to fight a war. My dad was panicking. He says, I'm disabled. He had this ID card, he's disabled, had an operation, never been to the army, never been to the service. He was okay. But there was a woman with two sons, there were 16 very tall lads,

They looked 18 and they've taken him away. And I remember my mom squeezed me underneath her dress. She could not see me at all. The soldiers came in the Croatian border. This is all the men. And I remember those kids been literally taken out from that woman and her harrowing scream at the soldiers and crying. I'd never forget. Never, never, never, never forget.

When we reached Croatia, our auntie who lives in Croatia came and picked us up. There was a camp in Croatia. We were safe. It was a massive mosque in a city called Zagreb. And they made it like a camp for refugees. In Croatia, we were safe. We stayed with our auntie, with our other family members. Probably beginning of my PTSD when I've just had the nightmares about my

dreaming about him with a blown stomach and my cousin Osman the way he was murdered in concentration camp but nothing major

Until one day dad kept going to the refugee camp in Zagreb in the mosque and he met his Arab friend called Sam. And Sam said, "I've heard you've got a boy that's been tortured and injured." He says, "The human appeal organization from UK are organizing refugees with injured children or people that they've been entitled to go and reach UK."

My dad doesn't want to leave Croatia. He was thinking the war will stop in the next six months and we'll return happily to live in Bosnia, but that was far from it. The reality is the war stretched for another three years, from 1992 to 1995. And the auntie, Dina, persuaded my dad that the safest thing is to take the kids, to take us to the UK.

We've lived there ever since, you know, 29 years in UK. So we came thrown away from everything we had, everything that we were used to, from our language, family. We're literally planted like a seed in a new country facing new language, new culture, new way of living, everything. UK is completely different.

So when I have a bad dream, and those were reoccurring, the soldiers in my dream, they kept coming back and saying, we'll come back for you. And I said, how can you come back to UK? I mean, UK now, is that where we are here? And anything negative that happens in my life, they conquer you very quickly, those dreams. Whether it's an illness, whether it's something happens negative in your family, it's like bullets are coming from everywhere.

And for me to defend myself, I'd attack anybody. I would smash all the windows in the street. I would roll myself in a carpet and I would stay in a carpet for two days hiding from the soldiers. The two families living in a house, to hide me from how severe the PTSD, they would chain me to the bed. There were neighbours next door that would pick on me.

He one day gave me a piece of chocolate and when I started eating the chocolate he started beating me up. And then at one point he started strangling me and then I hit him and I run down and I kept away from that neighbour. It was time to enrol me in school and I was always very hesitant going to school. I suffered heavily where I just went quiet.

I was completely muted from the age of 13 to 16. And anything they would say to me, I would just smile. At one point, there's a kid saying, well, try to urinate at him. I bet he won't say anything. So the kids start urinating at me. And I've just looked at them and smiled, thinking in my head, well, you're urinating at me. You think you're going to hurt me? You did. So I've had two activated grenades in my hand. And I kept quiet.

There was a boy called Nathan and he was the baddest boy on the planet. We called him Tyson. And one day he says, I'll knock him out, I'll knock him out. But the other kids were saying he's fearless. He's got no fear in him. See, there's nothing you can do to put fear in him because he's just always blank. So he went running to me and he just punched me and knocked me out. And when I put myself together,

The other kids were doing it more, it was more of an attraction to bully me. There was a guy called Shafik, he constantly would ask for money and never had any money because refugees, no money. There's a particular situation where the kids were playing basketball and one of the boys decided to beat the crap out of me in front of the whole school yard.

When they've taken my trousers off, they were like pink shorts and they were my sisters. And the whole school laughed at me. And then one of the teachers spotted me and took me to the classroom and said, you've just been experiencing bullying and I've seen it. We didn't know what was going on. You never spoke. And

He says, you can be released from school for a couple of days of the traumas we've been bullying. And I'm thinking in my head, mate, you don't know what I've been through. This is not trauma. This is nothing what the soldiers have done to me in Bosnia. But obviously that teacher didn't know.

And the following day, walking to the school, all the girls were laughing at me. He says, oh, he's a little boy that's got his sisters on the way and stuff. This is a little girl. So everywhere I walked, the kids were spitting at me. They beat me up randomly. They treated me like dirt. But I was good at receiving pain. I could take immense amounts of pain. I could take anything, any kind of beating. And I always smiled back.

One of the teachers called me to isolation center where I have to go and try to learn English and stuff, but communication was next to zero. That teacher says, I think it'd be good for you to stand in front of the assembly and speak with the kids. Tell them what you've experienced.

And he said, "If you can write a few sentences, I think that bullying will stop. They'll understand you. They'll understand why you don't speak and all of that." And he said, "It's a massive thing to ask a boy that hasn't spoke for a couple of years to stand in front of assembly and speak in front of all the teachers and in front of the whole year about his war experiences, has been tortured."

But I made myself strong because I realized the teachers on my side, they've realized what's been happening to me. They want to help me. I owe them a lot because the bullying has stopped. I went home and I put myself together and I wrote probably half a page of what has happened to me. It was becoming very close to that Monday when I said I will speak. So that day I got up, stood up in front of the school assembly and I said to the kids, I'm from...

Bosnia, no speak English, I no like war, no guns, no fighting, I want peace. And I'm so stuck with reading it and looking at this note, piece of paper that I've written it, that I've looked around and all the teachers were crying, all these bullies were crying and everyone. And when I've stopped and finished assembly, I felt like all the kids

wanted to run to me, to hug me. And the same happened to the teachers. He says, you're so brave, you've done so well, we're all proud of you. And then every day, a different child would turn up to me and would apologize and say, I'm sorry what I've done to you. And I would say with a very shaky, poor English, I'd say, it's okay, fine, no problem. From that, I've become probably the most popular boy in school.

The famous boy in school, the boy who said nothing.

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One of my favorite PE teachers called Mr. Hebden, he said weight training would be good for you because I think you'd be good at sports, you're very disciplined, you work hard. They discovered I was good at weight training, sports.

At the age of 16, I've had mini-arny physique, they used to say, or Bruce Lee quite often, because I was very shredded, cut up. And I was in a gym every day. The school had its own gym. So all these bullies turned into my best friends.

Quite often I see them and speak to them and stuff. He says, I bet you would beat us up now, you know, how strong you are and you've got big muscles and all that. I said, no, no, no. I would never want to bully anyone what I've been through in life. 15, 16, when I started lifting weights, doing boxing, doing kickboxing, I discovered I can handle things. I can fight back. And then it becomes quite complex because then you have a demon in yourself

And you've got to be careful how you control it. If it gets out of control, I could be self-destructive or I could be a very dangerous man. The power that humans can produce out of the negative energy, it scares me. That's what it means being a child from the war.

It's all about controlling your fear. Because the fear comes in with the soldiers coming back, killing me. And I'm still that child. I'm still that child in Bosnia. Then I'm a grown-up man living in the UK. And the soldiers are still after me. That fear is still controlling everything I do. But you fight. You fight the fear. Because of what I've experienced, when my fear hits me, I go insane.

And something inside you tells you, you know, you can do anything. And it becomes dangerous how you control it. It becomes very dangerous. I never, never, never held a gun in my hands because if I get angry, that's all over. My sister was attacked in the bus by a knife and jumped in, took the knife off the person, buried him on the floor, threw him down the stairs just to protect my sister.

I don't fear no one. Like, I worked in a nightclub for 16 years, and there was a very, very dangerous man. We had a scuffle. We had a fight in a nightclub, and he said, do you know who my uncle is? I said, you know, mate, I don't care. He says, you sure you don't care? I said, I don't care. And I confronted him, and there's nobody that I know would confront him. And he couldn't believe it.

And he says, I loved you to bits because you stood your ground. You could have been taken out. You could have been, no, you were completely blank. And that's my protection. I had no one to protect me. I always remember the woman saying to my mother, your child is ill, he cannot speak. I was only about 14 and they were drinking coffee in our first house.

She said, "Your child will never be able to have a normal life, have a degree, be married and have kids." And I've heard that and I still hear that voice of that woman and that inspired me to say, "No, I'm not ill. I can do things."

She gave me a mighty task by saying that basically I'm stupid, I can't speak, I won't be able to get education, I won't be able to get married, to have kids. I said, oh, I want to earn lots of money, I want stability for my family, I want to educate myself, I want to make myself physically strong, and I want to help the kids. So there's five things. It's kind of my etiquette in life, the way I follow it.

So I gave myself a mammoth task to try to save the world from bad people, save the world from wars, save the world from hatred and discrimination.

I felt there's something I could do to my country and despite all the experiences I need to take something positive out of UK and kind of plant it like a seed. Bosnia, and I always thought the weight training has helped me to deal with my problems and PTSD. So building a gym and uniting everybody together would be kind of hitting two birds with one bullet.

There were different organizations, different charities trying to be set up to Bosnia to bring youth together, but nothing works because I felt that people were forcing themselves to unite people. It doesn't work like that. But I always felt through the sport, you naturally talk about healthy living, healthy eating, things that every human being needs, things about loving and caring people.

and getting kids to respect, care and love for each other the way we lived in our village growing up. I always thought about keeping healthy and healthy minds. So in 2005, my dad, we bought in a shopping center a small room, I would say, and we decided that we're going to set up a gym

Because we had a famous bodybuilder that has a family member, Fikret Adjic. I always watched him pulling the trailers and hooking him onto the cars, full of muscle. And I always looked up to him as a child. I always went to his gym and I always went to train as a very, very young boy. So when he was killed during the war and his son was killed, there was no gym and there was always gym in the cossar at.

So we set up a gym and they were all together, Bosnian Muslims, Serbs, Croatian, Roma people, Ukrainian, Polish, all of them together. And we started from that little room and we blossomed into the whole floor of a fitness center in Kozarec called Solak Gym.

From 2005, I used to take all the equipment from UK from the gym that I worked for. They've donated gym equipment because our building was getting destroyed in UK. They were building a brand new state-of-the-art building and a fitness center in Birmingham where I worked since 16. Even now, I still work there.

He says, you can take that equipment to your gym in Bosnia. So we've taken all of the equipment to Bosnia and we extended it. So we got a full floor. So we got typical weight training. We got martial art room. We got absolutely everything and we cater for everyone. And our mission statement is that we want everybody included, young, old, different race, different religion, everybody coming together.

It's a charitable organization and my family and myself, we donate money to keep it running. We have different friends and family that support our charity. Now I work part-time as an actor. I make myself available if there's some parts that audition for the films and I end up being a villain, typical middle European villain.

I used to do a lot of theatre work and I enjoy drama, I enjoy theatre. It was from Dramaturg, a person called Dave Hanson, my teacher from Sixth Form College that helped me

to overcome my mental problems and my PTSD and my nightmares and flashbacks. But doing workshops, following dramatic strategies to erase the past and kind of bring a bright future, and that was my legacy, to turn the negative energy into positive and to kind of inject it into the future generation children, to give them a bright future, to give them hope and peace.

So I've decided that I wanted to become a teacher after my experiences in the war and what has happened to me with my own school teacher. And I wanted to challenge myself to say that teachers don't do that.

So I've decided to go back to the same school, Mosley School, where I was a student, where I was bullied, and I've joined a team of the teachers that used to teach me. And I always had this connection with the kids. I could always go on their level. And that makes me very proud. And that's my legacy. At least we're giving a chance to our children to have a better future than mine.

I'm a successful man with a wonderful wife and two children. I've got a boy and a girl. I have real estate. I have a few properties that I rent out. And I'm happy with the life and what I've achieved, even though quite often I always get tested because I live with PTSD. If I could get all of these traumas out, if I could take all of the bad energy out and make a fresh start,

But guess what? It doesn't work like that. All that bad energy, all that life experience, there's a massive bag in it and it's still there. I can't be suicidal. I can't be suicidal. When I see police in uniform in Bosnia, I just shake and I get panic attacks. And I feel very vulnerable because they're very instructive, they use harsh words and language.

So we, I was in a gas station with my dad and they were drinking with my uncle and the police officers were my dad's friends but they were saying something to a lad who works behind the bars and I know him, he's a boy who trains at my gym and I know anybody who tries to hurt the boys have become very sensitive to leave the boy alone and they wouldn't. So I had a panic attack where I literally, I just smashed all the drinks

And my uncle grabbed me by the hand. He says, you've an idiot. What you're doing? You get us all locked up and stuff. It's the first time publicly I've had a panic, really bad panic attack where I turned into a beast. And it took everybody by surprise, but usually I'm peaceful. So when my dad explained to the police officers what I went through and my uncle, they were fine by it. From that day on, they've taken me following day because I literally went mad. And they said I've got bipolar.

So when I'm completely low, my wife, she's the one who can control me, who can give me hope, who can heal me. And she's so good at it. Since I've been married now for the last eight years, I've been stable because the wife controls a lot of things. It's absolutely amazing. And I've discovered myself.

We lost our country, we lost our people, we lost humanity and we're left with war criminals walking freely and left with no justice. And my country has suffered a loss. One third of the people have been killed, one third have been ethnically cleansed and one third have been left in Bosnia of our people. Now, we know that Bosnian Muslims are the ones that got the worst beating. Why? There was no reason.

to torture little boy. There was no reason to take him out and put him on execution spot. And I guess all of my life I'm looking for the answers, but I don't think I will ever get them. And I always have to find different ways to heal myself, to make myself better. But there's so many different ways of dealing with it and we have managed this so well.

You get that reassuring voices from the community how ill I was and how I was written off to what I have become and that makes me very proud. And that's my main motto in life, to help more disadvantaged people, to help small communities. And the kids are my heroes, the kids are my future, the kids are beginning of everything. It's like the spring flowers.

The way you water the flower, that's how they're going to grow and blossom. Still got big aspirations, still got big goals. Yes, there is still chance for good people to run the world. There are still good people in the world that want a brighter future. And I don't want to sound cynical or negative. I want the world to change. And we can make those changes.

Today's episode featured Mirosad Solakovich. If you'd like to contribute to help the Solak Gym that Mirosad helped create and speaks about in the episode, you can donate through PayPal at solakgym at hotmail.com. That's S-O-L-A-K-G-Y-M at hotmail.com.

You can also see the gym and find out more about it on Instagram at Solak Gym. That's S-O-L-A-K-G-Y-M. You can also find out more about Mirsad on Instagram at Mickey underscore Solak and on Twitter at Mirsad Solakovich. There you can find links to his memoir, The Boy Who Said Nothing. From Wondery, you're listening to This Is Actually Happening.

If you love what we do, please rate and review the show. You can subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, or on the Wondery app to listen ad-free and get access to the entire back catalog. In the episode notes, you'll find some links and offers from our sponsors. By supporting them, you help us bring you our show for free. I'm your host, Witt Misseldein. Today's episode was co-produced by me, with special thanks to the This Is Actually Happening team, including Ellen Westberg. The intro music features the song Illabi by Tipper.

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