Virtual Macedonia Bookstore - Sunflowers in the Sand: Stories from Children of War

"War is nothing like I thought it would be...Tell the children of America that I hope for them, they never learn what war is. It is to be so afraid that you cannot sleep even when there are no bombs. It is to see everything, everything destroyed. I cannot speak of those who are dead ...my heart is still in bandages."

Ms. Curtin - with the help of Patricija Padelin, child psychologist at the hospital in Zadar - chronicles the almost unspeakable violence the children suffered during the course of the war, along with their fears, hopes, dreams and enormous capacity for survival.

In the face of complicated mourning - in one of the stories a boy recounts how he had to choose between betraying his father or grandfather - the children are encouraged to speak about their experiences and to draw and paint images based on how they feel. Some of the illustrations were drawn in refugee camps during and after the war; others during interviews with the children to help them express their experiences.

The result is a moving and illuminating chronicle of the inner lives of children who have been victims of war.

Just as war is the enemy of art, so art is the antidote for war. As the poet Jane Kenyon has said, "We cannot afford to ignore our inner lives, our imaginations, for when we do, we become capable of extreme cruelty and destruction. Tenderness toward existence is what we lose when we lose art."

Ms. Curtin, with the assistance of Ms. Padelin, has taken us into the inferno of war and found, miraculously, war's primary victims taking off the bandages and making narrative and visual art. Ms. Curtin's narrative is interwoven with the children's voices and with their remarkable drawings. Upon being asked to tell his story, a boy named Davor declares "I am as normal as anyone else. It's the world that's crazy, not me." What artist has not felt a similar need to declare him or herself sane!

The most haunting images are perhaps the ones of hearts. In one heart colored orange, there are teeth within the heart and a world outside it where a child is raising her arms to a sky without bombs. In another picture, there is a mouth with a twisted smile that appears to have stitches for lips. Under two dancing hearts the caption reads: "Usually when a child draws hearts, the larger the heart, the more he is in need of love."

My favorite painting is reproduced on the cover of the book: a beautiful blue dove, its wings outstretched, an olive branch in its beak. The bird is flying through the war torn countryside where there are still sunflowers lifting their yellow heads to the sky. But if the viewer looks closely, there is a skull with an open mouth, and just above that image of death there are the instruments of war. This painting was a large mural made collaboratively by fifteen Croatian children who wrote peace messages on the back.

I thought of Picasso's GUERNICA, of course, and along with it the temptation to despair, which any honest depiction of the madness of modern war brings us.

The final and most important achievement of SUNFLOWERS IN THE SAND is Leah Curtin's refusal to embrace hopelessness. By letting the children speak, by empowering them to show through art their own inner lives and resilient spirits, she has in her own unforgettable words instructed us to follow them "and there will be hope for the world."

"War is nothing like I thought it would be...Tell the children of America that I hope for them, they never learn what war is. It is to be so afraid that you cannot sleep even when there are no bombs. It is to see everything, everything destroyed. I cannot speak of those who are dead...my heart is still in bandages."

Ms. Curtin - with the help of Patricija Padelin, child psychologist at the hospital in Zadar - chronicles the almost unspeakable violence the children suffered during the course of the war, along with their fears, hopes, dreams and enormous capacity for survival.

In the face of complicated mourning - in one of the stories a boy recounts how he had to choose between betraying his father or grandfather - the children are encouraged to speak about their experiences and to draw and paint images based on how they feel. Some of the illustrations were drawn in refugee camps during and after the war; others during interviews with the children to help them express their experiences.

The result is a moving and illuminating chronicle of the inner lives of children who have been victims of war.

The atrocities inflicted upon civilians - the most vulnerable targets of modern warfare - are nearly unspeakable. The rape of women in Croatia during the course of the conflict has been extensively documented and made public.

Less well known is the sexual savagery directed toward infants, and the brutal torture to which the old were subjected. I hesitate to repeat one child's account of what he witnessed in a church: elderly people tied to pews, begging to be killed, while soldiers cut out their eyes and forced these innocent people to swallow them.

How does one ever forgive such atrocities? Ms. Curtin - a nurse and widely published health ethicist - offers no simple, unrealistic answer. It may not be possible, at least not in these children's lifetimes.

How do children heal then? How do they overcome the impulse to hate not only the soldiers who did these things, but their own neighbors who may carry the burden of the enemy's ethnic identity?

One of the many virtues of Ms. Curtin's book is her insistent answer: the inner, creative life of the children and the need for adults to honor it, to learn from it, to be changed by it.

Just as war is the enemy of art, so art is the antidote for war. As the poet Jane Kenyon has said, "We cannot afford to ignore our inner lives, our imaginations, for when we do, we become capable of extreme cruelty and destruction. Tenderness toward existence is what we lose when we lose art."

Ms. Curtin, with the assistance of Ms. Padelin, has taken us into the inferno of war and found, miraculously, war's primary victims taking off the bandages and making narrative and visual art. Ms. Curtin's narrative is interwoven with the children's voices and with their remarkable drawings. Upon being asked to tell his story, a boy named Davor declares "I am as normal as anyone else. It's the world that's crazy, not me." What artist has not felt a similar need to declare him or herself sane!

In one revealing example painted by a child refugee from Zagreb, a boy's face is surrounded by an exploding city. Drawn in the form of a pastiche, it is impossible to separate the head in the drawing from the bombed landscape surrounding it. The boy's eyes are not the eyes of a child, but of one who has been forced to grow up too fast.

A boy named Hrovje, whose skull had been badly damaged by a grenade while he was rocked to sleep by his grandmother, has had his story juxtaposed with another child's portrait of a woman holding an infant. The anguished face of the woman is reminiscent of the haunted faces painted by the Norwegian expressionist Edvard Munch.

Some of the stories and illustrations leave a lighter, almost whimsical impression. Kristina dreams of being a dancer in Hawaii and hopes that one day she will appear on the American TV program Hawaii Five O. She seems to be perfectly represented in a drawing made by another child recuperating in intensive care at the hospital in Zadar. A hula dancer with a bright red dress and bouffant hairdo seems a long way from these children's scarred childhoods.

The most haunting images are perhaps the ones of hearts. In one heart colored orange, there are teeth within the heart and a world outside it where a child is raising her arms to a sky without bombs. In another picture, there is a mouth with a twisted smile that appears to have stitches for lips. Under two dancing hearts the caption reads: "Usually when a child draws hearts, the larger the heart, the more he is in need of love."

My favorite painting is reproduced on the cover of the book: a beautiful blue dove, its wings outstretched, an olive branch in its beak. The bird is flying through the war torn countryside where there are still sunflowers lifting their yellow heads to the sky. But if the viewer looks closely, there is a skull with an open mouth, and just above that image of death there are the instruments of war. This painting was a large mural made collaboratively by fifteen Croatian children who wrote peace messages on the back.

I thought of Picasso's GUERNICA, of course, and along with it the temptation to despair, which any honest depiction of the madness of modern war brings us.

The final and most important achievement of SUNFLOWERS IN THE SAND is Leah Curtin's refusal to embrace hopelessness. By letting the children speak, by empowering them to show through art their own inner lives and resilient spirits, she has in her own unforgettable words instructed us to follow them "and there will be hope for the world."