Ukraine evokes some personal memories.....

 Watching CNN this morning and the Russian bombing of Ukrainian cities brought to mind some old memories of the only other hot war in Europe since 1945...the wars in the breakup of the old Yugoslavia precipitated by Serbia, one of the provinces of the country attempting to take over the entire country. These are just personal stories but the surviving people of Ukraine will have them by the millions and my empathy is overwhelming. I met my husband from Yugoslavia as an exchange student in the ruins of Berlin before the wall in 1958, He immigrated to the US in 1961, and restarted his career as an OBGYN in Denver and Grand County. He passed away in 2015. During those years of marriage, his family residing in various parts of the area experienced war, shelling of their home towns. Once I recall as the Serbis bombed communication towers on the outskirts of Zagreb, (now Croatia) the equivalent of Lakewood, Colorado's Lookout Mountain. Dr. Mike's sister, living a couple of miles from the mountain, heard the air raid civil defense sirens as we were on the phone with her, and the sounds of bombs were clearly heard. She refused to go down to her apartment building's underground parking garage saying she wanted to die in her apartment in spite of our pleas. The Serbs finished their destruction of the communication towers and left. A remarkable woman I got to know well years later in Bosnia spent over a year in her basement as the city of Mostar was under siege and buildings on both sides of their apartment building were reduced to the rubble just as we are now seeing in Ukraine. She was a just-married twenty-year-old during the 1991-1995 conflict and served as a translator for UN forces. I met her 10 years later and she was a volunteer with a nonprofit human trafficking prevention organization. Mostar then reminded me of the same damage still visible in my post-war days in Berlin. She rarely spoke about those years of horror only to tell me that they nearly starved and to this day she always feels hungry.

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• A comment from my friend Frank Z and my reply
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    Felicia Muftic

     So true...and so real then and now. I was in Slovenia 6 months before Serbia invaded them and their famed Lippizaner white horses were moved to Italy again just as Patton did in World War II. Lipic Slovenia was the original stud farm for the famed Austrian White Stallions and the ancient bloodlines were preserved. there. They also performed much as the Spanish Riding School in Vienna...which I  saw several years ago. (The Serbs in another province in Croatia killed another entire herd of Lippizaners and bloodlines out of pure spite.) All the Slovenians wanted to do when we saw them in 1990 was to join the west and the EU . They were the first to break away from Yugoslavia...and the Serbs marched their troops right through Croatia to attack the Slovenians. Croatia then broke away, too, and the rest is the bloody history of 1991-1995 and 300,000 victims in Bosnia. The world twiddled their thumbs until they could not stand the killing fields any longer.