Port Elizabeth inspires Bosnian survivor to write novel
By Cindy Fisher
July 9, 2008
Port Elizabeth Express (South Africa)
South Africa and more specifically Port Elizabeth (PE), was the inspiration for author Savo Heleta to pen his painful childhood memories of the war in Bosnia.
During a semester spent at Nelson Mandela Metropolitan University (NMMU) in 2005, Savo became inspired to write Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia, a novel which was launched recently at the Cape Town Book Fair.
The novel was released in the United States in April this year and it will be distributed in South Africa by McGraw-Hill at the end of June.
Savo, who is currently back in PE studying towards a Masters Degree in conflict transformation and management at NMMU, said he had never told anyone about his experiences in Bosnia as a child but during the semester that he spent in PE, he opened up towards fellow American students who were doing an exchange-student course with him at NMMU.
Savo received a scholarship from The Whalen Family Foundation to study in the United States in 2002. At that time, he hardly spoke any English, but he graduated from Saint John's University in Minnesota in 2006, majoring in history and business management.
"We came to visit NMMU as part of our Sub-Saharan History Course. We learnt about the TRC and when we got the choice to visit any country we wanted to, I knew I just had to come to South Africa to see how people were able to deal with what had happened to them in the past," Savo said.
PE's very own Kings Beach was the setting where Savo opened his heart towards one of his American friends about his Bosnian war-torn childhood memories and this friend encouraged him to write about his experiences.
During his time in South Africa in 2005, Savo also went to Robben Island in Cape Town and met two men who had been prisoners on the island for 14 years. They too inspired him with the manner in which they had dealt with their past, and he realized that he wanted to achieve the same thing by writing his book.
It took Savo a year and a half to complete the novel once he had returned to America. Writing the book was a great healing process for him and Savo said it helped him "put those memories to rest and carry on with my life."
He recently received an email from a US soldier who had read his book and told Savo that it had touched him so much that he had cried and finished the novel within just 24 hours.
"When people ask me what I want to get out of the book now that it has been launched, I say that I have already got everything I wanted out of the novel. Whatever else I get will just be a bonus."
The novel tells the story of Savo and his family after the war broke out in 1992. Savo was just 13 years old at the time and lived with his family in Gorazde, a city in Eastern Bosnia. His journalist-father, mother, 11-year-old sister and Savo remained in their home "because we had nowhere else to go and Gorazde was our home."
As a Serbian family, the majority of Muslims who lived in Gorazde came to see Savo and his family as the enemy and they subsequently experienced attacks on their home, arrests, spy allegations and threats on their lives. They had to endure hunger as food supplies dried up in the city and the ostracized family had to hide in the homes of their Muslim friends from time to time.
"We had to spend three weeks on end in a room with no sunlight when we went into hiding. We even had to eat grass, wild mushrooms and apples to survive. Once, a Muslim man who knew my grandfather gave us his last loaf of bread. We also experienced true humanity during the war," Savo recalls.
In April 1994 the family escaped by swimming more than 3km in the freezing cold river Drina.
The focus of Savo's Masters Degree at NMMU is ethnic conflict, conflict between states and interstate conflict in South Africa, Rwanda and Sudan.
But why return specifically to PE for his Masters degree? Besides getting to know the lecturers at NMMU in 2005, Savo admits that it also had something to do with a girl he met here in 2005.
Who knows, maybe PE will inspire this remarkable author once again to write.
