‘A true hell’: How three Srebrenica survivors defied death 30 years ago

Amid a genocide, they crawled through slush, trekked through forests, and dodged bullets and bombs, losing loved ones.

Before the war scattered his family, Nedzad Avdic loved geography.

He had just entered his teens. Growing up in the village of Sebiocina in Srebrenica municipality, close to the border with Serbia, Avdic could explain the difference between clustered and dispersed settlements. He learned how one could tell north from south by noticing which side of a tree the moss grew on, and discovered how to find constellations and navigate by the North Star.

“I didn’t study it for survival,” Avdic, now 47, would later write in his memoir. “I studied it because I loved it.”

But in the spring of 1995, three years into a conflict that still scars the Balkans, he would come to live in the geography of eastern Bosnia, trudging through forests alongside 8,000 other Bosniak men and boys, trying to survive.

Avdic was 17 by then and living in a United Nations-run refugee camp in the valley of Slapovici, just south of Srebrenica, a small town in eastern Bosnia nestled in a deep valley near the Drina River, which has historically served as a natural border with Serbia. At the time, Srebrenica had a population of just 6,000 and was locally known for its ancient silver deposits, from which it took its name – the Bosnian word for silver is srebro.