Make a film of the pain

The Boston Herald

BEVERLY BECKHAM

Someday, when it's a movie of the week or a feature film, the world will finally shed tears for the children of Sarajevo. If the movie were showing now, it might make a difference. The war might stop. Thousands of children might get a chance to grow up without missing limbs. Thousands more might simply get a chance to grow up.

Close-ups and narratives by actors recreating lives seem to move us in a way that real people dying on real streets do not. We seem to require more than a glimpse of people. We need their histories; we need to see their tears and feel their fears before we can empathize, before we react and reach out.

In Sunday's New York Times is a photo of six dead children. The children were sledding just a stone's throw from the headquarters of the United Nations military force in Sarajevo's "safe zone" Saturday. Serbian gunners didn't honor the zone. They strafed the children with artillery fire, killing six and maiming three.

"We were sliding when all of a sudden one shell hit," a 10-year-old survivor said. "When we started running away, another shell landed between us. Danijel was killed on the spot, and I was wounded in four different places."

On five cots six dead children lie, two so small they share a single space. Which one is Danijel? The caption doesn't say.

"Six children riding sleds near their apartment in a suburb of Sarajevo were killed yesterday in an artillery attack. The father of two of them, girls who were 4 and 11 years old, watched over their bodies."

That's all we'll ever know about these children, not their names, not their ages, not what they liked and didn't like, not what they wanted to be when they grew up. Their short lives and their violent deaths are so tragically common.

"The sun comes out, the kids go out to play, the Serb gunners target playgrounds," writes Newsweek reporter. "Their intentions are clear, their marksmanship honed by 21 months of practice - more than half the children shot by snipers are wounded in the head."

In "Schindler's List," Steven Spielberg's epic film about the Holocaust, the most loathsome German is Amon Goeth, an evil and deranged captain in charge of a forced labor camp. Goeth shoots people for sport. He stands on the balcony of his castle-like headquarters and picks off human beings at random - old people, children, men and women. They are ducks in an arcade. One falls and others appear. The game never ends until the war ends and Goeth is hanged. The public never even sees this until 50 years later when the movie is made.

There are thousands of Amon Goeths shooting for sport at this moment from the hills of Sarajevo. One of them killed a child named Danijel just three days ago. Is this a boy's name or a girl's? Let's suppose Danijel was a boy. Let's look at him. He was 10. About 47 inches and 70 pounds. He must have been tired of being trapped in a house, tired of being a kid in a war zone, tired of being hungry and cold and old before his time.

The snow was fresh. The day was clear. There was no sound of gunfire. The sun was shining. The outside must have sparkled and beckoned.

Outside or inside, what difference does it make. That's what his parents must have thought, if he still had two parents. He's safer in the "safe zone" than here. Earlier this month an entire family was blown away while sitting in their Sarajevo apartment. And so they let him go with dozens of other children but only to the "safe zone," and only for a little while.

Now he's one of the figures on a cot, a body tag attached to his small foot.

Sunday was a day of world prayer to stop the fighting in Bosnia. Maybe we prayed for the wrong thing. Maybe we should have prayed for a movie to be made, so the world could see the savagery of this war and feel the pain of a single child's death. Maybe then the fighting would be stopped.