"Jasmina Joldic was nine when she found out she was born into a religion. Her mother, Selma, was trying to explain to little Jasmina and her older sister, Amela, why their father had been taken away by armed men. I didn't know who I was, or what I was, until the war started, Joldic says of the labels that would she realised in an instant on that day her Tata was taken away put a violent end to an idyllic childhood. Until that moment, Enver and Selma Joldic had been shielding their two young daughters from a state and society that was collapsing around them."
"And where he was. Imagine, Joldic says, being nine and hearing that they have taken your father away. They are your neighbours, she says. They have come in with guns to take him away. And you don't know where he is. And you don't know when he will be back. Then, for the first time in your life, the conversation goes deeper. You start to talk about religion, she says. You're trying to grapple with big terms, she says. And big ideas."
At age nine, Jasmina Joldic learned she had been born into a religion when her father was seized by armed men and taken to a concentration camp. Her parents had previously shielded her and her sister from the disintegrating state and rising communal violence. The family lived through the July 1992 collapse of Yugoslavia and the ensuing three-way conflict in Bosnia among Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats. The traumatic removal of the father ruptured an idyllic childhood and prompted conversations about faith and identity. The family ultimately fled their homeland and eventually put down roots in Brisbane's southern area.
Read at www.theguardian.com
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