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Then They Started Shooting: Growing Up in Wartime Bosnia
You are nine years old. Your best friend's father is arrested, half your classmates disappear from school, and someone burns down the house across the road. You think your neighbors were planning to kill your family. You are eight years old and imprisoned in your home by your father's old friends. You are ten years old and must climb a mountain at night to escape the soldiers trying to shoot you. What happens to children who grow up with war? How do they live with the daily reality of danger, hunger, and loss--and how does it shape the adults they become? In Then They Started Shooting , child psychiatrist Lynne Jones draws the reader into the compelling stories of Serbian and Muslim children who came of age during the Bosnian wars of the 1990s. These children endured hardship, loss, family disruption, and constant uncertainty, and yet in a blow to psychiatric orthodoxy, few showed lasting signs of trauma. Thoughts of their personal futures filled their minds, not memories of war. And yet, Jones suggests in a chilling conclusion, the war affected them deeply. Officially citizens of the same country, the two communities live separate, wary lives. The Muslims hope for reconciliation but cannot believe in it while so many cannot go home and war criminals are still at large. The Serbs resent the outside world, NATO, and fear the return of their Muslim neighbors. Cynical about politics, all of them mistrust their elected leaders. War may end, but the persistence of corruption and injustice keep wounds from healing.
352 pages, Hardcover
First published January 30, 2005
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 18, 2018
A must read for anyone interested in child psychiatry in disaster, war and post-conflict zones, as well as in history and humanitarian work.
December 30, 2019
Bosna savaşı sırasında, sonrasında ve yaklaşık 10 yıl sonrasında hem Müslüman hem de Sırp çocuklarla görüşen psikoloğun savaşın çocuklar üzerindeki etkisini araştırmasıyla ortaya çıkan gerçeklere dayalı bir kitap.
“Savaş. Neden savaş? Bunu hep merak ederdim ama cevabını hiç bulamadım. Belki de henüz çocuk olduğum için böylesine korkunç bir şeyin neden yaşandığını hiç anlamadım ama bende bir çeşit iz bıraktığını biliyorum. Korkuyla, acıyla, yitirdiklerimizin ve hiç yaşayamadığım o güzel çocukluğun yasıyla geçen dört berbat sene... Tanrım, dünya neden bu kadar zalim, neden kaderimizi karanlık güçler yazdı ve hiçbir suçu olmayan çocuklara en büyük talihsizlikleri yaşattı merak ediyorum.”
“Savaş. Neden savaş? Bunu hep merak ederdim ama cevabını hiç bulamadım. Belki de henüz çocuk olduğum için böylesine korkunç bir şeyin neden yaşandığını hiç anlamadım ama bende bir çeşit iz bıraktığını biliyorum. Korkuyla, acıyla, yitirdiklerimizin ve hiç yaşayamadığım o güzel çocukluğun yasıyla geçen dört berbat sene... Tanrım, dünya neden bu kadar zalim, neden kaderimizi karanlık güçler yazdı ve hiçbir suçu olmayan çocuklara en büyük talihsizlikleri yaşattı merak ediyorum.”
April 25, 2016
I liked the book. It's an interesting approach to the subjects and the prolonged timeline of the study brings extra flavor to the narrative. It was a great comparative investigation in two vectors: comparative in time evolution and comparative between the "nationalities" of the involved individuals.
August 28, 2018
Reading Then They Started Shooting made me realize how little I actually know about the Balkan wars. Part way through the first part I found myself perusing maps and Wiki pages to give myself a better understanding of the entire scope of the wars. I actually thought I had a good grasp on what happened at the time, although I was only in my early teens: I watched the news, read books like Zlata’s Diary and even participated in meetings on how to help refugees at the time, but obviously I didn’t gain enough knowledge about the conflicts at all. I suppose this is a good example of how we tend to focus on areas that the media focuses on. In terms of being an educational source, Then They Started Shooting is exactly that in more ways than one.
Lynne Jones was stationed in Gorazde in 1996 by an aid agency to work as a child psychiatrist. She made it her mission to gather narratives from children who had found themselves on different sides of the war in Bosnia. She divided her time between Gorazde (predominantly Muslim) and Foca (predominantly Serb) in order to gather narratives from about 40 children. She then followed up with some of them years later, using the voices of about 8 of the children for this book. Then They Started Shooting ends up being an account of how war effects children in the long term, of how children tend to process trauma in different ways, and also in how we are generally not looking at how we can help children who have been traumatized by war in the right way.
The book is divided into several sections, with a lot of background information on the wars, politics of the time, ethnical divides, and atrocities committed. It’s not an easy book to read, obviously because we are discussing war and children, but also because the children’s narratives can be quite dry and detached. There is no way you can read the book in one sitting, compelled to keep turning page after page. I found it easier to read a chapter, do my own research, and then come back to the book a little later.
There are quite a few disturbing parts in the book, apart from the obvious depictions of loss and death, and the ethnic cleansing that was perpetrated during the war. What also disturbed me was the lack of understanding of the war, and the common theme of detachment and ease of blaming “the other”. Obviously this is not the children’s fault at all, but I think proves a very important point on how we shape the minds of our next generations literally by claiming a truth and then proving a point by going to war (obviously I am oversimplifying here, but you catch my drift). I did find that there was more optimism towards the end of the book when Lynne Jones revisits the children as adults, but I can’t help wonder how they have talked about the war with their children, if they even have. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia only closed last year too, so many years after the wars ended.
Reading this book left me feeling even more worried about the future than I did before. From a child psychology point of view the studies are a really important read, and it made me happy to see how the children were able to move on in their lives and leave the trauma behind for the most part. But I was left with a really large feeling of discomfort at how easy it is to hate “the other”.
Lynne Jones was stationed in Gorazde in 1996 by an aid agency to work as a child psychiatrist. She made it her mission to gather narratives from children who had found themselves on different sides of the war in Bosnia. She divided her time between Gorazde (predominantly Muslim) and Foca (predominantly Serb) in order to gather narratives from about 40 children. She then followed up with some of them years later, using the voices of about 8 of the children for this book. Then They Started Shooting ends up being an account of how war effects children in the long term, of how children tend to process trauma in different ways, and also in how we are generally not looking at how we can help children who have been traumatized by war in the right way.
The book is divided into several sections, with a lot of background information on the wars, politics of the time, ethnical divides, and atrocities committed. It’s not an easy book to read, obviously because we are discussing war and children, but also because the children’s narratives can be quite dry and detached. There is no way you can read the book in one sitting, compelled to keep turning page after page. I found it easier to read a chapter, do my own research, and then come back to the book a little later.
There are quite a few disturbing parts in the book, apart from the obvious depictions of loss and death, and the ethnic cleansing that was perpetrated during the war. What also disturbed me was the lack of understanding of the war, and the common theme of detachment and ease of blaming “the other”. Obviously this is not the children’s fault at all, but I think proves a very important point on how we shape the minds of our next generations literally by claiming a truth and then proving a point by going to war (obviously I am oversimplifying here, but you catch my drift). I did find that there was more optimism towards the end of the book when Lynne Jones revisits the children as adults, but I can’t help wonder how they have talked about the war with their children, if they even have. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia only closed last year too, so many years after the wars ended.
Reading this book left me feeling even more worried about the future than I did before. From a child psychology point of view the studies are a really important read, and it made me happy to see how the children were able to move on in their lives and leave the trauma behind for the most part. But I was left with a really large feeling of discomfort at how easy it is to hate “the other”.
May 14, 2024
I live in the Bosnia and Herzegovina and appreciated the focus on two cities of Goražde and Foča. Not only did I learn about those two contexts, it helped deepen my understanding of the war through hearing their stories.
I read it more for the history than I did the emotional trauma understanding, but I will add I also appreciated the clinical way in which the author went about documenting their emotional experiences. The vast majority of this book is repeating findings instead of sharing interpretation, and finding a book that does that can be difficult to find when reading about the Balkans.
I’ll leave it with the clinical psychologists to recommend or not for learning about emotional health, but I would recommend it for those who want a deeper understanding of the conflict in the early 90’s.
I read it more for the history than I did the emotional trauma understanding, but I will add I also appreciated the clinical way in which the author went about documenting their emotional experiences. The vast majority of this book is repeating findings instead of sharing interpretation, and finding a book that does that can be difficult to find when reading about the Balkans.
I’ll leave it with the clinical psychologists to recommend or not for learning about emotional health, but I would recommend it for those who want a deeper understanding of the conflict in the early 90’s.
January 7, 2024
I was 14 and living in Sarajevo, Bosnia, during the war. This book is an incredible insight into what happened in my country during the war and in its aftermath. What children say is often an unvarnished reflection of adults that surround them. “Then They Started Shooting” captures this in a heartbreaking way.
June 19, 2019
Bosna-Hersek iç savaşı hakkında muhteşem bir saha çalışması. Konu ile ilgisi olan herkesin kitaplığında bulunması gerekiyor diye düşünüyorum. İçinde bulunduğumuz çağın savaşlar ve mülteciler çağı olduğunu düşünürsek geleceğe yönelik de çok şey söylüyor aslında.
July 25, 2015
The fall of Yugoslavia is incredibly complicated, I liked how we saw it through the eyes of children struggling to understand it. The way she managed to keep track of quite a few of the same people throughout the years was really great too. It gave the kids lives much more depth and allowed the reader to understand how their relationship to their country and the war and memory worked.
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August 30, 2017Good book, really liked it. It also made me a little sad and yet appreciate the fact that I didn't had to go thru anything like that. Worth the read!
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews