"I had health problems and had to undergo surgery. But I realised it was not safe to go to hospital. That no one can visit you there and that even if you survive the operation, it doesn't mean you will stay alive because you can die in the shelling. I also realised that - even if everything had gone well - I would have had to return home and recover in the cellar where we had been hiding during the shelling. My husband and I therefore agreed to leave. With my daughter."
"At one point, the most rice, that was around the beginning of November. And then we made all kinds of things out of it. I don't know how all the recipes were found, but rice was used to make cheese or schnitzels, basically anything. They used to sell cabbage leaves in the market. One leaf cost one German mark. You buy five leaves and you make lunch. It's hard to remember all that."
"We organized different games, also something to learn and the children played among themselves. I remember teaching them to sew and embroider. My daughter embroider two toys - a dog and a cat, and she has carried them around with her all her life. When we left, she took them with her as a memory of that time. Later, when she grew up, they reminded her that you can learn something and make something nice for yourself in any circumstance. They became her mascots and today her daughter plays with these toys."
"What makes me sad is the current situation in the Czech Republic with regard to refugees and migrants. When I remember how we were welcomed and how warmly we were welcomed and how people helped us and our children who are educated, independent people and who basically had a beautiful childhood here in the Czech Republic, and that now we are not able to help other children who also need it and who ask us for it. I cannot understand that. And sometimes I think that maybe they didn't welcome us so warmly here, maybe we just thought that because we came from the war and we didn't know the Czech language, maybe nobody wanted us here in the Czech Republic."
"Originally, I didn't think I would go to the Czech Republic at all, not at all. Because I had to leave Sarajevo for health reasons and go to Croatia, to Zagreb, for treatment. And at the border between Bosnia and Croatia, some regulations changed and I missed a stamp and I couldn't enter Croatia. So at that border, because I left Sarajevo with the convoy of the children's embassy, which was taking 360 mothers with children to the Czech Republic at the invitation of the Czech Republic to spend the end of the war here, so they were so willing, and everybody that we had at that border from the Czech government and the European Union, who were at the border and accompanied that convoy, they were willing to take the others who couldn't get to Croatia."
"That we'll have a nice breakfast. And I put it on the stove, and I just went to get something from home from the kitchen. And at that moment, when I entered the hallway, a grenade fell in front of the stove, and at that moment two neighbors died, and I survived by a miracle. If I had gone into the entrance a second later, I would have been dead too."
Nidžar Džana Popović was born on 13 March 1950 in Sarajevo, former Yugoslavia. Her parents, mother Enisa and father Šibahudin Moranjak, fought against the fascists in the ranks of Tito‘s partisans during the Second World War. After the war, her mother worked in the judicial administration and her father as a prosecutor in Sarajevo. Both were members of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia. The witness graduated from a technical high school, and in 1968 was admitted to the Faculty of Electrical Engineering, where she earned her engineering degree in 1975. In 1977, she married Slobodan Popović, a mechanical engineer, and on November 10, 1980, their daughter Sanja was born. She worked for 18 years at Energoinvest, a major Yugoslav company. She started as a process automation engineer and from 1987 to 1992 held the position of head of the project management department. As a member of the Union of Communists of Yugoslavia, she was involved in trade unions. When the war started in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 1992, she and her family lived in a high-rise block house in Sarajevo, where she and her neighbours hid in the basement and dealt with water and food shortages. In November 1992, she fell ill and had to undergo surgery in hospital. For safety reasons, she decided to take up the offer of the Red Cross and go to Zagreb for the operation. She travelled with her daughter and at the border with Croatia they were unable to enter the country due to administrative problems. Therefore, she decided to join the bus of mothers and children who were leaving for Czechoslovakia. First they went to the humanitarian centre in Kupařovice and later in Ivančice near Brno, where Nidžar Popović created a project for the Handicraft Workshops offered to the women by the Organisation for Aid to Refugees (OPU) from Prague. From 1994 onwards, she began to organise similar workshops in other refugee camps and humanitarian centres. She moved to Prague and started working at OPU as a social worker on 1 September 1994. For a number of years she coordinated projects aimed at the integration of migrants. For her work with refugees, she received the UNHCR Geneva Global Award in 2003. Her husband Slobodan came to Prague in 1995. Two years later, the whole family was granted permanent residence in the Czech Republic for humanitarian reasons. Her husband ran a business, and her daughter studied at the Anglo-American University in Prague, graduating in 2003. After the death of her sister in 2007 in Sarajevo, the mother of the witness moved to Prague, where she died on 20 April 2008. Two years later, her husband Slobodan also died. In 2023, the witness was living between Prague and Rotterdam in the Netherlands, where her daughter Sanja and her family had moved for work.
Hrdinové 20. století odcházejí. Nesmíme zapomenout. Dokumentujeme a vyprávíme jejich příběhy. Záleží vám na odkazu minulých generací, na občanských postojích, demokracii a vzdělávání? Pomozte nám!
