A day in my life

It became twilight. Dark was laying its claws down on us. It was an
unilluminated dark. Suffocating somehow. The sky was sealed with
permanent thick greyish black smoke because houses has been burning for months all over Kosova.

We learnt that we didn’t have rights to live in our houses anymore. Now, thousands of us have been walking for more than twelve hours already. It was warm and sticky. We were surrounded by mountains and fields. No wind nor other sound. No sound of shoes. Everybody seemed to be walking on their tiptoes. Almost as if they didn’t want to pester mother nature. Nobody was talking either. Some children were crying because they were getting hungry and thirsty but nobody was answering because we didn’t have any food. Muted silence. Still, you could smell blood on the air.

“Oh no, they are there, they are there”, a woman screamed as if she saw demons.
Whole the queue of thousands of people suddenly found their last source of energy left in their souls and began pushing and running each other over, although there was nowhere to go.
A mans voice shouted in Serbian so loud that I thought his veins on his neck were going to burst. “What the f*** are you people doing? Walk damn it, walk. You look like f****** ghosts”, he said angrily but with a patronizing laughter on his voice.

Everybody began to move quickly in a straight line and suddenly another voice shouted in Serbian.
“Woman are allowed to walk, so we can rape you later, while all men come in this side so we can kill you easier.”
I couldn’t see where, I was far behind.

A huge wave of crying and screaming by women and children hit the fields and mountains. Sobbing was bouncing back from the rocks and it became deafening.
I wasn’t crying. There was no time for tears. I held tight my two little sisters and a brother. They looked at me terrified with tears in their eyes.
“Shshshsh”, I told them. “Don’t be afraid, you’ve got me”, I held them tight while walking but not knowing what next second was going to throw at us.

The dark, the dust and the screams were mixing up and I lost the rest of my family. I couldn’t see anything clearly. On my right, I finally saw hell on earth. Albanian male were being picked out of this sea of people and waiting on the line to be persecuted. One of them was my dad.

We carried on walking…