Happy Thanksgiving! I hope you had good food and good company yesterday. Among all the things I felt grateful for, near the top of my list was you, my readers! Thank you for subscribing and for supporting The Dove. It means the world to me and the remarkable people I write about.
If you know a friend or family member who might like these narrative stories from across the world, consider sharing The Dove with them. The newsletter is free to everyone, and I intend to keep it that way. The simple act of subscribing helps me report from around the globe to bring you these stories.
Speaking of remarkable people, I am so excited to share today’s story of two extraordinary women, Sally and Selma. Please note that this issue contains some descriptions of war and violence.
—
Selma
For her first eight years, Selma Handzar knew nothing but peace. A shy kid with sea blue eyes and long brown curls, Selma spent her days riding bikes, playing with dolls, and devouring piping hot french fries from the local stand in Mostar, Bosnia, with her little brother Mirza and a flock of neighborhood kids.
So when the first bomb exploded, Selma reeled with shock. That night, she overheard her parents speaking frantically.
“It’s starting,” her father pronounced.
As Yugoslavia disintegrated into independent states in the early 1990s, Serbs vied to control the newly independent Bosnia and Herzegovina, a demographic mosaic of about half Bosnian Muslims, a third Christian Orthodox Serbs, and a sixth Catholic Croats. Armed by the dictator Slobodan Milosevic, Serb forces laid siege from Sarajevo to Srebrenica, killing around 100,000 Bosnian Muslims in the span of three years. They would later be found guilty of war crimes and genocide.
Selma’s childhood of freedom had mutated into a childhood of fear. Daily bombings. Snipers. News of mass executions, of starvation, of concentration camps.
Still, the worst was yet to come.
Sally
Thirty year old Sally Becker was working as an artist – though, she claims, not a very good one – when she turned on the news one evening. Grim footage from besieged Sarajevo beamed into Sally’s home. A Bosnian woman with a small child was attempting to cross a road targeted by snipers when she spotted the TV crew. She rushed over, looked into the camera, and asked, “Why is no one helping us?”
“I just felt like she was talking to me,” Sally said. “I had to try and do something.”
So she traveled to the riverine city of Mostar, where Croats and Muslims were fighting for control of the city. Sally, who is British, arrived intending to work as a volunteer in a refugee camp for two or three weeks. But soon, she found herself ferrying aid and medical supplies to a hospital in Croat controlled west Mostar in a rented white Renault 4.
When a UN official asked if Sally could evacuate an injured child from East Mostar, where 60,000 Bosnian Muslims were trapped, she immediately said yes. She obtained clearance from the Croat military health authorities to rescue all injured children and their families and anxiously waited for some red tape to clear.
The clock ticked, and Sally found herself watching the news again. On the screen, in a hospital bed with shrapnel covering her little face and body, was Selma.
Selma
By August 1993, Selma’s house was bombed to ruins. Living above ground was deadly, so her family moved into the basement. Her father had fortified the back door in case a mortar fell in the yard – that way, shrapnel wouldn’t rain into their subterranean refuge.
As the summer heat blanketed Mostar, Selma’s father went outside one day and returned with a sniper’s bullet in his leg. Selma watched as her mother gingerly changed his bandages. Visitors filled the space.
To nine-year-old Selma, who hadn’t been outside in three months, it felt like an opportunity to seek reprieve.
She nudged her brother, Mirza. “Come on, let’s go! Please.”
“We’re not allowed to go out,” he reminded her.
“Come on, five minutes. Think about it!”
The siblings scampered out into the back yard. For 30 seconds, the sun glowed on their faces, and the fresh air filled their lungs.
Then there was a piercing whistle.
Two mortars slammed into the yard.
Time stopped.
Selma looked to her right. The fortification her father had erected had collapsed onto her side. Her arm was barely attached to her body.
She looked to her left. Her little brother was crawling towards her, his face covered in tar.
A strange calm imbued her. Then, she collapsed.
Selma woke up in a makeshift hospital, her body embedded with shrapnel. Through the pain, she heard the doctors saying both children needed amputations, but there was only enough anesthesia for one.
“I want my brother to have it!” Selma screamed.
As the doctors amputated her arm, she went into shock.
Sally
Sally’s permission to evacuate children from East Mostar had finally come through. She jumped into a borrowed ambulance, filled it with medical aid, and accelerated over the front line.
As she wove through the ruined streets of East Mostar, sniper’s bullets whizzed towards her ambulance. One smashed the blue light on the roof. She had never been under fire before; she didn’t know what to do.
“I swerved the vehicle from side to side because that’s what I’d seen them do in the movies when they’re being shot at,” she remembered.
When she finally made it to the hospital, Selma’s mother was watching over her children, grieving. “My Selma was so beautiful,” her mother mourned. “Why her?”
“The doctors will make her beautiful again,” Sally reassured her. But looking at Selma, she didn’t really believe it herself. It was a shaky promise, meant to offer hope in the darkest of hours.
Sitting on the edge of Selma’s bed, Sally took in the little girl’s injuries. Half her hair was gone and shrapnel wounds mutilated her skin. The horror must have shown on Sally’s face, because 10 year old Selma, in her few words of English, ventured to comfort her.
“Don’t worry,” she told Sally. “It’s okay.”
At that moment, Sally decided she would spend the rest of her life helping kids like Selma.
Selma
The road was egregiously bumpy. Bouncing along in Sally’s ambulance, Selma’s pain seared her nerves as they navigated border checkpoints to a UN base. From there, they were flown to an American hospital in Croatia, where Selma and her brother, whose foot was partially amputated, received treatment.
Eventually, they moved to San Francisco as refugees. They longed for their father, who had to stay behind. Their mother spoke little English, and Selma was in and out of surgery.
Her mother never babied her. When Selma wanted to wear nail polish, her mom didn’t do it for her; rather, she helped her figure out how to paint her five fingernails with a single arm.
One day, as Selma sat outside a Ronald McDonald House in a wheelchair, her mother decided she needed to re-learn how to write with her left hand. “Write,” she urged Selma, giving her a paper and pencil.
“I can’t do it,” Selma whimpered, starting to cry.
But her mother insisted, and Selma sat there in her wheelchair, tears running down her cheeks, forming letters and then words with her shaky left hand.
Afterwards, Selma’s mother went into the bathroom and screamed into a towel.
Once quiet and reserved, Selma eventually blossomed into a confident, outspoken teenager. When her classmates made fun of her amputation, she would hold her head high, thinking, These kids live in la la land. My brother and I survived a genocide.
Sally
Selma had changed Sally’s life. But when Sally dropped the injured girl off at the UN base outside Mostar, she didn’t expect to ever see her again.
And there was little time to be sentimental; more children needed help.
More bombs exploded in east Mostar. Sally returned several times. A few months later, she convinced a helicopter pilot to fly to a besieged monastery serving as a hospital for wounded Croats in central Bosnia. Sally landed in a snow-filled quarry and, hours later, lifted off again with 55 people, including 28 severely injured children.
She continued to evacuate hundreds of children until the war ended the following year. British media dubbed her “The Angel of Mostar.”
But the end of the war didn’t mean the end of her work. She continued helping sick and injured children in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Afghanistan, and Ukraine. During these missions she realized that many children were dying due to a lack of pediatric expertise. Through her non-profit, Save a Child, she launched a mobile telemedicine program, connecting local doctors in war torn areas with a global network of 300 pediatric specialists, helping save the lives of thousands of sick and injured children remotely.
During those years, Sally became a mother herself. “As a single mum, it was important that I was around,” she said. “When I did go away, I was torn between my duty as a mum but also my duty to the children who needed me. It was a matter of life and death for them.”
Amidst the bombs and conflicts and evacuations, Sally was delighted to receive an invitation.
Selma would be getting married in New York City on November 6th, 2009, and she wanted the woman who saved her life to be there.
Selma
It was the night before Selma’s wedding when Sally appeared with her ten year old daughter – the same age as Selma when they first met in the hospital in Mostar.
“It was so surreal,” said Selma. “It was like we’ve known each other our whole lives.”
Sally
The next day, as Selma walked down the aisle in a strapless ivory satin gown, Sally stared at her in awe.
Selma looked absolutely beautiful.
“I looked across at her mom,” said Sally. “And I wondered if she remembered that promise I made, the promise I thought I’d never be able to keep.”
Selma
These days, Selma jokes, she is basically an Uber driver for her 14 and 8 year old kids as they shuttle between school and activities in San Jose. Her parents help her raise her kids and speak Bosnian to their grandchildren. Selma watches her mom spoil her son, feeding him apples as he sits on Selma’s dad’s lap, remembering when her mother forced her to sit outside a Ronald McDonald House for hours to learn to write.
Her brother lives five minutes away with his wife and teenage son. “Our experience has created a bond that nothing will ever be able to break – ever,” she says of Mirza.
Sally
Last year, Sally focused her attention on Gaza. She had raised enough to charter a private jet to evacuate nine injured children and their families to Italy. One of the mothers was pregnant; her water broke on the flight, and upon landing, she gave birth to her baby. “So we actually brought 10 children!” Sally exclaimed.
“A lot of what I’ve done over the years is because, instead of assuming there was nothing I could do,” she said, “I decided to try.”
Selma
When Selma’s daughter was six, some of her classmates asked why her mom was missing an arm.
Her explanation – the war, the grenade, the amputation – deeply upset her children. “Why would somebody do that to kids?” they asked. “Why would somebody do that to my mom?”
She hopes no child ever experiences what she did.
“If our world continues to ignore what’s going on, the same way they ignored it when it was happening to us, this will continue,” she told me.
“And then there will be another story – another Selma, another Sally.”
--
If you’d like to support Sally’s work this Thanksgiving, consider donating to her non-profit, Save A Child. Your contribution gives children like Selma the precious gift of life.
You can also learn more about Sally’s life in her book, Where Angels Fear To Tread.
wow. incredible resilience. thank you for sharing this story, trisha
Beautiful story telling, really felt a connection to these amazing resilient people ❤️