Jelena explained to me her experience of growing up in Belgrade during the 90s. With Yugoslav troops in Kosovo, NATO responded by bombing Serbia and their capital, Belgrade. They bombed military buildings, a television broadcasting station and police buildings. The citizens made demonstrations on bridges because they thought they would also be destroyed.
She remembers playing in the street, seeing a large grey object in the sky and then smoke as it exploded over the city. Her family took her inside and the news stations began broadcasting an alert that bombing had started. There were sounds of sirens warning people to flee the streets and seek shelter. Jelena's mother put a pillow around her head protecting her from hearing the bombardment. They boarded up the windows and spent many days in one room together not knowing if their home would be hit. They would breath through towels soaked with soda and water as they feared gas had been deployed. People still suffer health problems from this and they were just ordinary citizens.
Jelena wrote this to me: "And the only thing we still have are bombed buildings and people don't talk about that too much and with sadness like you saw me."