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Jasmin Elezović was six years old when his home became a war zone.
It was 1993 and the historic city of Mostar, straddling the Neretva River in southern Bosnia and Herzegovina, had become the centre of some of the most vicious fighting of the Bosnian war, which had begun over a year earlier.
Elezović and his mother were living with two other families in a small apartment in the east of the city, the frontline barely 200 metres from their front door. For nine months that year Mostar was under siege, split in two by brutal fighting a 60,000 people in the eastern part of the city came under relentless bombardment by fighting forces identifying as Croats in the west.
His recollections of that time are scattered and bleak. His father, Emin, was a soldier away for weeks at a time. His dayto-day life was the constant thud and screech of artillery attacks, trips down to the river to try to find water during breaks in the fighting, and playing with lumps of red-hot shrapnel with his friends when he could escape the house.
“I have very few memories of before the war, even now, at 35, I see myself as a survivor of conflict because if you live through war, your life is shaped by it for ever,” he says.
Out of that bitter conflict would come the War Child charity and a bakery project that at its height would feed a starving city, and transform the lives of Elezović and his family. War Child, supporting children caught up in conflicts across the globe, is one of this year’s Guardian and Observer charity appeal partners, along with Médecins Sans Frontières and Parallel Histories.
Before the war, Elezović and his parents, Ermin and Alma, lived a normal life. They were hardworking and enterprising. Ermin was an engineerand the family had opened a coffee shop. “We had plans, we had dreams just like everyone else,” says Ermin. “Then hell came to our lives.”
When the siege of Mostar ended with the Washington agreement, a ceasefire deal that temporarily halted the fighting in the city in March 1994, the family were in a desperate situation.
“It had been the most terrible year,” says Alma. “We were so tired, we had lost so many friends, so many family, we had struggled with hunger, we had no electricity, no water. We didn’t recognise ourselves.”
Alma worried constantly about Ermin, who was struggling with depression from his time on the frontlines. Then she heard about some people from England who had come into Mostar after the ceasefire to try to help those made destitute by the fighting. “Finally! It was a light in the dark, I instinctively knew that this could save Ermin,” she says.
She encouraged Ermin to go to see what they were doing. He found a few foreigners struggling with the practicalities of setting up an industrial bread oven in a war zone. This was the beginnings of War Child, the organisation established by the film-makers Bill Leeson and David Wilson, and the social entrepreneur Willemijn Verloop to try to help children affected by the violence and ethnic cleansing they had witnessed in war-torn former Yugoslavia since the fighting began.
“They had just arrived with the kit to set up a mobile bakery and I could see immediately that I could help,” says Ermin. His experience as a machine technician, his grasp of English and the fact he knew exactly where and how people needed immediate help in his city proved invaluable.
“They didn’t see me as a victim or want me to tell them how bad things had been,” he says. “They just needed help and ideas and I could do that. They were practical, passionate people who wanted to get things done.”
Within weeks, Ermin was integral to the running of the bakery, spending hours with the project when he could find time away from the frontline, helping get bread and other essentials such as medication to thousands of refugees who had flooded into the eastern part of the city after the ceasefire as well as local people.
By November 1994, when a photo was taken of a seven-year old Elezović in a War Child T-shirt standing on a temporary bridge built by the Bosnian army to replace the city’s Ottoman bridge, felled by Croat guns the year before, the bakery was at its peak, making up to 5,000 loaves a day. “We helped feed a starving city,” says Ermin. “We showed people that life could begin again.”
War Child had also become interwoven in his family’s life.
“The family were War Child in Mostar,” says Lynne Kuschel, who worked for the charity during this period and was in close contact with the family. “None of what we did in Mostar would have happened without them. We became a family.”
For Elezović, the arrival of War Child in his life was “like the Renaissance after the dark ages”.
“I was literally a war child,” he says. “My whole world had just been the war but their arrival changed my life. It had been grey and now it was Technicolor. They brought all these wonderful things in the world into this horror we had been living. As well as all the hard work I remember evenings in our apartment by candlelight with everyone talking about art and culture and above all music.”
It was the success of the bakery in Mostar that helped get the support of the musicians and artists who would make War Child’s Help charity album of 1995 and led to the inception of music therapy projects to help heal Mostar’s traumatised children. In 1997, the Elezović family were involved in the charity’s last big project in Mostar, the Pavarotti music centre, which still provides music lessons and therapy to children in the city.
Now 35, Elezović is an accomplished musician, with skills learned in the early days of the music centre, and has spent his life working on social justice projects.
“I would not be the person I am today without War Child,” he says. “I have an intolerance of injustice and this sense of never being a bystander but someone who will not just talk about but do things to make a difference and this is the legacy War Child has had on my life. They showed us that you just need to show up and get things done and try and leave things better than how you found them.”
