Conversation with My Classmates: Displacement, War, and Survival

Abstract

Serbia is a country with a long tradition of emigration. The increase in the number of displaced people sharply rose in 1992 when all the diplomatic options to preserve Yugoslavia had failed. The ensuing ethnic conflict resulted in mass mobilization by young adults who were required to go to war, mainly against their will. The main purpose of the paper is twofold: to draw attention to the key challenges that displacement plays on individuals and to show how traumatic events, such as the war in Ukraine, can mobilize historical traumas. To elicit deeper and new understandings of how displacement impacts people, conversations with my elementary school classmates of Hungarian ethnic origin, including those who were serving the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) between 1991 and 1992, were analysed through the lens of the author’s autoethnographic positioning. It shows how life stories are co-produced through narrative inquiry and, by ‘co-reflecting’ on the past, it shows how they are simultaneously positioned within social categories of intersectionality, such as gender, social inequality, stayed and displaced. These reflections offer a broader understanding of how qualitative research can enrich existing knowledge of the effect of this specific conflict, and ethnic conflict in general.

1. Introduction

The violent disintegration of Yugoslavia into several independent states meant that the country was obliterated from the map. The ethnic conflict resulted in mass mobilization (Uremović and Milas 2013; Mladenov Jovanović 2020) by taking young adults to war, mainly against their will, causing many civilians to face displacement (Predojević-Despić and Penev 2016). According to the UNHCR (1996), the UN Refugee Agency, the definition of displaced is a person who is ‘forcibly displaced as a result of persecution, conflict, violence, human rights violations and events seriously disturbing public order’. The conflict has been well documented from different angles such as the ethnic cleansing of Bosnians or Muslims (Ron 2000; Stefanović and Loizides 2017), sexual maltreatment of women (Lončar et al. 2006), patriotism and Balkan masculinity (Milićević 2006; Messas 1997; Danopoulos and Messas 1997), or how to narrate highly emotional historical events to students (Zembylas 2014; Simon 2011) such as the Yugoslav war. All these studies are highly important to understanding how the subjects of war, displacement, suffering, and trauma construct a body as grievable and give ways to understand that the self is simultaneously transformed. The main purpose of this paper is to draw attention to and elicit deeper and new understandings of how (forced) displacement has impacted individuals and their identity formation and to show how traumatic events, such as the war in Ukraine, can mobilize historical traumas. To demonstrate this, data gathered through conversions with my elementary school classmates were analysed. This study shows how life stories are co-produced through narrative inquiry and, by ‘co-reflecting’ on the past, it demonstrates the ways in which we are simultaneously positioned within social categories of intersectionality, such as gender, social inequalities, stayed and displaced.

2. Context of the Study

The significance of the ‘conversation with my classmates’ is marked by several common grounds of my and my classmates’ childhood and education. In Vojvodina, where the majority of ethnic Hungarians live(d) (Petsinis 2008), ethnic relations were relatively smooth until the rise of Slobodan Milošević, who was the president of Serbia from 1989 to 1997 and president of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia from 1997 until his overthrow in 2000. He pursued Serbian nationalist policies that contributed to the breakup of the socialist Yugoslav federation. Milošević advocated for the federal government to restore ‘home rule’ over the autonomous province of Vojvodina and replaced the party leadership in Vojvodina with his own supporters. In 1990, Milošević pushed through changes to the Serbian constitution that curtailed the province’s autonomy (Mikuska and Raffai 2018). This had a major impact on education for the national minorities, as it was centralised and Vojvodina no longer had a say in its approach to education. Before his regime, generally, the ethnic groups existed together without experiencing ethnic discrimination. This was manifested in the state’s principle of the universal equality of the Yugoslav population, which was expressed in the collectivisation of equal rights for all to access the same and free education (Treadway 1997; Bankovic 2014). The promotion of the popular slogan of a socialist regime, ‘Brotherhood and Unity’, meant permitting individuals the celebration and expression of their own culture, religion, and language (Bogic 2018). This slogan was used as a basis for policymakers in Yugoslavia, and it was part of the federal constitutions of 1963 and 1974 (Mikuska et al. 2022; Štiks 2015), which is highly important for the Hungarian minority population. This policy ensured the use of the Hungarian language in educational institutions, especially when, in 1977, a new education law was passed that encouraged the use of the mother tongue (Tóth 1994; Wright et al. 2000). The state attributed great significance to the education of citizens following a strictly normative and outcome-driven framework and requiring unconditional obedience to ideological expectations (Canning et al. 2022; Bogic 2018). The identity was also shaped by the state’s patriarchal and masculine ideology of family patterns (Milićević 2006).

My (and my classmates’) primary school education, including years nine and ten, was bounded by these policies and, as a result, most ethnic Hungarians in Yugoslavia took the opportunity to be educated in the Hungarian language. When the Yugoslav War started, most Hungarians from Vojvodina chose to leave the country for neighbouring Hungary. It was ‘convenient’ for the reason of speaking Hungarian and, at the time, Hungary was welcoming transborder Hungarians. At the time of the war, Hungary itself was going through a political change with its government considering whether to integrate non-resident Hungarian nationals into the citizenry or not (Waterbury 2009). By doing so, it would have fulfilled its obligation to migrants and transborder kin-population and would not only have strengthened the Hungarian identity of transborder kin-minorities but would have solved the issue of visa-free travel to Hungary1. Since the Hungarian diaspora in Serbia has been constantly connected to their homeland, Pogonyi (2017) explained, continuous transnational activities between the two states (Hungary and Yugoslavia) have impacted how an individual and minority groups identified themselves, and how the ‘dual and in-between status’ helped the Hungarians from Vojvodina to escape to/settle in Hungary. As a result, the situation for Hungarians from Vojvodina was different to those who escaped from Bosnia, for example, despite both being to some extent forcibly displaced.

3. Autoethnography as a Methodological Approach and the ‘Self’

Autoethnography is a retrospective account of the author’s own experiences, to draw attention to the social world around the author’s positioning of cultural and personal connection to a certain situation (Mascia-Lees 2011). Simultaneously integrating the past and the present, autoethnography, like other types of accounts, is never static. Jackson and Mazzei (2009, p. 20) claimed that ‘confessional tales authorial self-revelation, multivoicedness and personal narrative’ are all contemporary practices in qualitative inquiry and, therefore, the questions of authenticity, that are at the heart of claims of reality, can be justified. Bochner (2007) stated that the act of remembering while writing an autoethnographic account is continuously under the influence of the present, while Ngunjiri et al. (2010) emphasised that autoethnography is about understanding the relationship between the self (I) and others that utilize data about the self. Hermans and Hermans-Jansen (1995) said that to understand the self, individuals operate through multiple I positions. The I moves from various spaces and, as such, results in an identity that is continuously (re)constructed and (re)negotiated. Of particular interest in this theory is the recognition that the various positions can struggle and conflict with others. Hermans and Hermans-Jansen (1995, p. 249) further stated that ‘the I in the one position, moreover, can agree, disagree, understand, misunderstand, oppose, contradict, question, challenge and even ridicule the I in another position’. As part of my data analysis process, to decide how to report and how to make meaning of the stories tell, I ‘travel’ to the past but with knowing what happened after the war. Within this, I am also a woman, friend, co/ethnic, and co/patriot from the same country who also experienced loss, pain, and trauma.

Understandings of the I positions and the self are strongly linked to the concept of intersectionality, which was originally used by Crenshaw (1989) as a way of exploring the multidimensional discrimination experienced by black women in the workplace in the U.S.A. Building on the work of Crenshaw (1989), Phoenix (2004, p. 76) conceptualized intersectionality as the

…complex, irreducible, varied, and variable effects which ensue the multiple axes of differentiation—economic, political, cultural, psychic, subjective and experiential—intersect in historically specific contexts.

Her definition suggests that intersectionality can be used to explore how any group of people operate dynamically with each other within a specific sphere. Therefore, using discussions as a tool to investigate human experiences, such as migration, displacement, gender, and social inequalities, can open up an interdisciplinary space for narrative analysis where the contradictions within the narratives are co-constructed (Mikuska and Lyndon 2021).

The representation of trauma that is felt, understood, and interpreted by all actors in this paper is deeply subjective. This is due to the selection of details and particular stories that are intended to contribute to a general understanding of how my life and the lives of others unfolded through a specific time in the past and present. Simon (2011, p. 434) stated that ‘difficulty happens when one’s conceptual frameworks, emotional attachments, and conscious and unconscious desires delimit one’s ability to settle the meaning of past events.’ For instance, traumatic memories are situated within the person. More specifically, the anticipation is that through autoethnographic and other accounts of life experiences, there is a prospect to illustrate the extent to which historical traumas can be materialised with contemporary traumatic events. Therefore, it is important to acknowledge how I listen, understand, and relate traumatic experiences and how this process contributes to the knowledge about this specific conflict and ethnic conflict in general. This is in the context in which this paper is written: it is bound within the understanding of the connectivity between the self (I) and others (within the same or similar context).

In this autoethnographic account of my and my classmate’s experiences, I explore several stories from our background. As a direct impact of the Yugoslav war, most of us fled the country and lost contact with each other. Several years after the conflict, the first reunion was organised, and, despite us living across the world, the majority came. It became evident that only a few of us stayed in Serbia, others settled in Hungary, Austria, Germany, France, Australia, and the United Kingdom. At this reunion, the decision was made that when someone who lives ‘far away’ is at ‘home’ in Serbia, we will try to meet. The conversation with my classmates upon which this paper was written was unplanned and it happened in 2022 during my visit to Serbia to see my mother. It was just after the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Therefore, ethical considerations were addressed prospectively, before I embarked on writing up the (co)reflections. To ensure transparency and accuracy, I also shared my Hungarian notes/reflections with everyone involved, which were later translated into English by me. Their real names were changed; instead, pseudonyms were used. The small reunions, as we call these meetings, were generally filled with humour, retelling past stories from our childhood, schooling in socialist Yugoslavia, and our life in general. This time the effect of the war in Ukraine was very much felt as our frame of mind was filled in with worry, concerns, and anxiety. The war guided our conversation, which ended up with us talking about and discussing our war experiences that were traumatic, as it was very bloody and vicious and inflicted pain, loss, and suffering for many of all ethnic backgrounds (Milićević 2006; Štiks 2015). It was revealed that this was the first time they spoke about their experience of Vukovar and the war in general. When I asked why, they just replied ‘for what?’. This was also the first time that my interest in this question emerged.

4. Emotional Reflexivity and Data Analysis

Emotional reflexivity has been given little attention in research. It has been argued that emotional reflexivity is ‘reflecting and acting in response to one’s own and other people’s feelings’ where the process of emotional reflexivity ‘is a capacity not just of researchers, but of participants’ (Holmes 2015, p. 64). Directed by this definition, methodologically, remembering my time was guided by the conversation with my schoolmates. Since we spent ten years together in primary and later in secondary school, our friendship was strong, and it strengthened with the disintegration of Yugoslavia as we felt the breakup as a termination of our homeland. What was destroyed was the framework within which our life trajectory had been self-legitimising, where we never had to explain ourselves to anybody. My identity (or identity formation) is a result of this complex interaction between the multicultural environments and the political sphere I have grown up in, the educational institutions I have attended (both in Serbia and in England), and my ethnic Hungarian identity. The gravity of these events necessarily cuts my narration into ‘before’ and ‘after’ my displacement. Additionally, well into the process of writing the paper, I realised that my choice of stories (mine and others) was deeply influenced by my emotional attachment to the stories heard. I also visualised how these individuals exercised care for the feelings of others in embodied ways, offering tactile reassurance as they communicated their emotional and traumatic stories. Gently tapping each other’s shoulder, or touching the arm, hand, or leg symbolized understanding and shared experiences. My part of the stories reconstructed events and recomposed images from the past that were not random but were made to stand out by my affective investment in them. Although in retrospect I spent only ten months in Yugoslavia after the conflict broke out in 1991, it still had a profound effect on my life. Therefore, this paper is written within the context of the Yugoslav war stories, which rarely addressed the issue of ethnic minorities living in Vojvodina, or the heroic men story who felt it is their ‘duty’ to fight, kill, or be killed or maimed for the ‘freedom’ of their country (Milićević 2006).

5. Displacement and Identity

In this next section, examples are given from the conversations that are combined with my reflection on how autoethnography and I positions can be used to analyse the stories. These particular examples were chosen as there were commonalities in terms of their intersectionality—the reflections were from the same period, and they show how our experiences are similar. The first two examples are from two of my classmates’ reflections about the moment they decided to leave the country. The analysis builds on Hermans and Hermans-Jansen’s (1995) theorisation of I positions, and on Ellis and Berger’s (2003) idea of co-construction and how analysis of the researcher’s self in qualitative research deepens and enriches understanding through attention to the co-reflection of meanings and emotional responses. This reflects how the participants shift between and sometimes contradict I positions about being an escapee, son, soldier, teacher, and Hungarian from Vojvodina. My classmate, Atti2, said the following on the matter:

The soldiers were mostly Serbian, but there were some other Hungarian and Bunjevac youngsters too. They were like me, about 25 years old, I was for example mobilized straight away, got a letter, the police came and that was it. Others were telling me that they were forced to join the army, some from the dinner table, or from the pub directly. The police would block both ends of the roads and would enter every house, every pub and if you happened to be there you were ‘gone’ without saying goodbye to your family. When I was rescued from Vukovar, and taken back to Subotica (a northern town in Serbia) my parents were very worried, we all knew it was just a matter of time before they will take me back to fight, possibly to Bosnia. What I realised is that this was not my war, I don’t have anything against these people, I love my country … I decided to escape with my friend through the ‘green path’, we all know where these areas are, right? [a cheeky smile on his face]. I knew, if I was caught, I would be imprisoned but I took the risk…. At first, we were in Szeged [a southern city in Hungary], and then I found a rescue in Kecskemet [a town in Hungary]. It was my friend’s house who already left… it was full of refugees mainly from around Subotica, full of us Hungarians from Vojvodina.

Escaping to Hungary from Serbia was not uncommon mainly due to the closeness of the border and due to the common Hungarian language and culture. The extract shows that he was ‘expected’ to join the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA), which he had done by going to fight in Vukovar. He was someone who was seen to put the ideology of state politics first by making personal sacrifices for the sake of ‘Unity and Brotherhood’, and by being a real patriot. He emphasises how his decision to leave the country was a ‘choice’ and he was careful not to judge or give any opinion about those who decided to stay. However, performing the role of the soldier, as a patriot who experienced loss, pain, and trauma (Milićević 2006) and someone who possibly had to kill to survive, was not mentioned in his narrative. Potentially, this could be due to the ‘assumption’ that we all knew why he joined the war and what he may had experienced in Vukovar. In the extract, it was also notable how he identifies himself as a Hungarian from Vojvodina. Since the conversation was in the present, it is not known how he may have identified himself 31 years ago (as Yugoslavian for example), but the clear distinction of where he was from was evident (Pogonyi 2017). This identity reflects the current Hungarian transborder politics (Pogonyi 2011, 2017; Mikuska et al. 2022) and it shows how the political engagement of non-resident Hungarian identity was redefining ethnic belonging and the self-perception of Hungarians living outside the Hungarian country.

My other classmate’s decision to leave the country was also informed by wanting to be safe and secure as well as his parents’ strong recommendation to leave, as they saw no point in being killed, or killing, in the battle. This opinion resonates not only with my parents’ view, who at the time supported my decision to leave the country, but the views of others who were taking part in the conversation. Our parents’ life experiences during and after World War 2 perhaps brought back their memory of living in poverty and needing to work hard to be able to survive. Our parents were against the war and encouraged us to leave as soon as possible. I remember my father giving me one thousand Deutsche Marks (DEM) before I left as a symbol of financial security.

While I had the luxury of my parents’ financial safety net, Margo3 and Sándor4 reflected on their childhood and told us that they were very poor. They described their life on the farm, saying that they had no hot water in the house for example, and they had to help their parents with the housework; despite this, they described their childhood as happy and worry-free. I was aware of the poverty in which they lived as a child, yet their stories and openness touched me deeply. They talked about their decision to stay during the war, which was generally due to the lack of connection in Hungary that they felt, but also their commitment to help their parents on the farm. Their story highlights the intersection between social inequalities that became visible despite social differentiation in Yugoslav society being positively and openly discouraged. Although class as such is not something that was discussed in a communist regime, inequalities within the working population were evident.

The next two examples are from the point of view of women, and the axes/intersections of differentiation between men and women can be traced. For example, women have no obligation to join the army, and had the freedom to cross the border, but also felt the scale and impact of mobilization. Ildiko5 said

I remember working in a primary school at the time of the mobilization. I lived and worked in Subotica, a small town where people are tightly interconnected with shared experiences of life in general. I witnessed how my male friends and colleagues are slowly disappearing from the workplace and from the town which is only 9 km far from the Hungarian border. Stories started circulating in the town about individuals who managed to escape, or who became a deserter, but also who was unfortunate and ended up in Vukovar.

This is the time when many realised how deeply affected they were by the war, and that despite fighting on the side of the ‘aggressor’ (as the world was seeing the Serbians at the time) there were soldiers who were also victims of the conflict as they were innocent civilians who were taken to fight and who have to deal with their trauma privately. It was also apparent that there was a mobilization ‘crisis’, where men did not want to fight a pointless war; the extremely low response rate of 15% (Mladenov Jovanović 2020) demonstrated the mood in the city. Jovanović Mladenov argued that for men it was not unusual to be stopped by officers and to be forced in their van to be driven directly somewhere to the army base. Milićević (2006) also reported on forced mobilization and talked about how people had been culled in locations such as restaurants, also without being given the chance to inform their families. Therefore, here, the traumatic event of forced mobilization extends to their parents/relatives, who have to deal with the unknown of where their loved one may be.

During the conversation, another of my female classmates explained the moment she decided to leave the country. Anna6 talked about her experience:

At first, when I was watching the TV, I felt sick, and when the TV showed dead bodies, including children, my heart sunk into my stomach. But months were passing and I watched less and less TV, stopped listening to the state narratives of how the Serbian population is mistreated, and that they cannot tolerate terror on Serbian people. I started to drink with my friends and often got drunk mainly to numb any emotional feelings. One day, with no particular reason, I asked myself, ‘Whom I became?’ ‘What do I want?’ ‘How long I can continue like this?’. The decision was born—I have to leave the country. It was in June 1992.

These two accounts reverberate with my decision to leave, my emotional state and the feelings I had and still have. My autoethnography in this context refers to the ‘intersubjective interpretation’ (Holmes 2015, p. 61) of my own and others’ emotional, often traumatic, experiences and how they are enacted with each other. Since intersubjectivity is the relation between my and others’ perspectives of the event and the place and sphere in which we grew up, I not only understand the reason and the decision-making process but they are embodied and emotionally reflexive (Holmes 2015). I joined the conversation by telling my story:

When I arrived in London with my best friend Maria7, we ended up in Leicester Square. We didn’t know where to go, what to do, who to call or where to sleep. We thought the worst-case scenario would be sleeping on the bench. Suddenly we heard somebody saying ‘Hello pretty girls’ in Serbian. When I looked up, it turned out it was Gordan8, who was my neighbor in Novi Sad, the town we both went to university. He just arrived from Dublin—he said it was the best route for men to arrive in the UK. He agreed to meet his brother who has arrived a week earlier at Leicester Square. When Ivan9 arrived, and when he heard our story, he offered us to squat at the place he is staying. The place was in Peckham, a rather large flat in one of the council-owned buildings which was destined to be demolished. Ivan said—we are ‘squatting’ here (the meaning of the word I learn much later). When I entered, there were already about 20 other refugees there, from all over Yugoslavia. I’ve got approximately 2 square meters where I could put my sleeping bag … We were sleeping scattered all over the floor. I had to step through the bodies on the way to the bathroom. This is how I started my life in London.

In all these accounts, it is possible to discern the intersection between men and women, and the need to leave the country. Lawler (2008) clarified this point by stating that multiple identities coexist and that through the I position of a man or a woman, migrant identities are marked out as doing ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. Here, the ‘displaced’ are seen as doing the right things, and this becomes the hegemonic norm. Starting a new life in an unknown country where we could barely speak English was not an easy task. Our initial thought was to stay for 6 months (this was the visa I obtained at the border in Dover), but the war continued, so we continued our stay. Living in the UK added to my already multi-layered identity another dimension; I became a migrant academic ‘who lost the country of origin’ and as Pogonyi (2017, p. 149) stated, I became ‘neither here nor there’.

Returning Home

Atti and many of his friends returned after the fighting stopped. Atti explained it was mainly due to economic reasons in addition to needing to help his parents on the farm. He felt he was returning ‘home’ and this feeling made him happy. This was the case with Imre and many others who failed or did not want to make Hungary their new home. During the conversion, it was also discussed how Hungarians from Hungary, the ‘real’ Hungarians, made them feel often uncomfortable by differentiating and calling them Serbs, or ‘Yugo men’. Imre explained further that ‘…this would not be an issue, but what I could not stand was the constant monitoring of what I do and with whom I am talking to or making businesses’. However, those classmates who currently live in Hungary said that they have experienced similar comments, but they added this was the case at the beginning of their stay; now, they feel that they are fully accepted in their neighbourhood.

The intersection between their story and my experience about being displaced and being accepted in the UK was similar. I have reported elsewhere about my experiences, on how I felt and how I was (mis)treated, especially after Brexit (Mikuska and Lyndon 2019), as a teacher. The way in which I am positioning myself by reflecting on my experience means that the ‘choices’ that I make to deal with any given situation are based on my rational decision-making ability. My subject positions (where the subject is me as a migrant professional, HE teacher), which I take up are made available through a variety of discourses. For example, my initial reaction to any event was based on the migrant rather than domestic perspective. This means that I embodied the migrant positioning, which is perceived as more vulnerable. My positioning is not planned or rationally inspired, but deeply embodied in my migrant subject positioning that is culturally and socially constructed. Yet, I chose to stay in England, despite my nostalgic feelings and strong bond towards my friends, and, of course, to my mother who is still living in Serbia. I regularly return to ‘heal’ to the ‘region’ I was born in and continue to invest in the friendships I left behind despite the fact that I do like the place I currently live.

6. How Traumatic Events, Such as the War in Ukraine, Can Mobilize Historical Traumas

The invasion of Ukraine activated and brought back painful memories for many people who experienced the Yugoslav war. Lack of sleep, anxiety, and sadness but also disbelief that a lesson has not been learnt were the most common comments, but also it was not uncommon to stock up on food. Comments were made, such as Robert’s10, who said that it is pointless to fill up the freezer as there will be a shortage of electricity and it would be a shame to waste the food. Others were describing their empathy towards the Ukrainians by remembering their own sufferings:

Please, not again. We know how they feel, we feel for them. Right now, the war is especially traumatic for us because the situation is so similar to our war. I can empathize with how reluctant Ukrainians were to accept that the war was coming until the Russians started the bombardment on their homes. I felt the same up until I was the one who was mobilized. It feels so real, so scary. I don’t want it to happen again … I started to have nightmares again.

(Robert)

Nightmares, yes, about the war, about having to kill in a battle which I thought I would never be able to do. I did the unthinkable. The whole situation in Vukovar was surreal. The question was not about whether I would pull the trigger, but about who will pull the trigger first.

(Atti)

It all came back, yes, all came back. The smell of the gun, the smell of the fear, the smell of the dust. We were surrounded by the Croat army despite that at first, we (members of the Yugoslav National Army (JNA)) were successful and much better equipped, especially at the beginning we were well armed, we got mines and other ammunition. And when we entered Vukovar … oh God… a dark place … I never felt so close to death. Only a handful of us remained in the house, waiting for our faith… God help us. And then the Croatian army offered to save our lives if we surrender. We were tired, hungry, with no hope, bravery long gone. I remember seven of my comrades decided to surrender, but as soon as they left the house they were all killed. Yes, all died … I’ve been fine for years, but I have nightmares nearly every night. I cannot wait to get to work, I need distraction, I need to engage myself. But then the nights are coming … I am just afraid to go to bed am tired of not being able to sleep.

(Imre11)

Developing post-traumatic depression is common as a response after a similar or other traumatic event, anxiety flashbacks, and nightmares (Ackerman and Puglisi 2017). Sharing war stories was not something they had previously done, but it was apparent that these individuals have not been offered counselling or any other opportunities to deal with their traumatic lived experiences. Even when offered, taking up on these opportunities to heal may be seen as a sign of weakness in the society they have been brought up in (Milićević 2006). As Hermans and Hermans-Jansen (1995) said, to understand the self, individuals operate through multiple I positions. In the stories, the I moves from various spaces and, as such, results in an identity that is continuously (re)constructed and (re)negotiated by traumatic events such the war in Ukraine. The self moves between different longitudinal and three-dimensional positions in time, space, and situation. Application of the I position in different times/spaces allows us to see how Atti and Imre adopted an I position of a soldier, where they developed strong empathy towards the innocent people in Ukraine as they experienced the death of a friend, the smell of a fear. Through their account, it becomes clear that they were forced to kill, which relieves the vulnerability and trauma they once lived.

This was not only true for my classmates, but it was a new experience being involved in such conversations for me too. I have not had to deal with the direct consequence of the war because I left. I felt grief and guilt for leaving and not being able to read, listen to, talk about, or watch anything about the war. I blocked every possible channel that reminded me of the war, and up until now I was not aware of how deeply painful my displacement was. It is not only about ‘being in between’ or not having the country I had fond memories of, but also about the recognition of the differences between those who stayed, fought, and left. All of the binaries around men/women, poor/well off, and stayed/returned remained collapsed and what happened is that the strong bond between us became even stronger. Is it because ‘secrets’ were shared? Or because we understood each other well?

7. Discussion and Conclusions

In this paper, I argue that reflections from our past and the richness of qualitative data offer a broader understanding of how qualitative research can enrich existing knowledge of the effect of this specific conflict on individuals. The conversation with my classmates shows how important it is to pay attention to details and to document how the disintegration of Yugoslavia played a profound effect on the transborder ethnic minorities and their identity formation. While the effect of the war on individuals is subjective, there is a common thread that emerged from the analysis. For example, being Hungarian from Vojvodina ‘before’ and ‘after’ the war was different. Attention turned to our ethnic origin after the war not only from the Hungarian state but in Serbia too. Pogonyi (2017) reported that many transborder Hungarians living in Hungary felt discrimination and injustice from Hungarians in Hungary (‘proper’ Hungarians), and Hungarians from Vojvodina have not always been accepted as ‘proper’ Hungarians, despite being naturalized (Pogonyi 2017, 2019). They have been called ‘Yugo man’, or Serb, or Hungarian from the south. This explains why many of my classmates came back, or after a short stay in Hungary settled elsewhere. Of course, this is not the case for everyone. When the Hungarian government (Orbán cabinet) introduced non-resident citizenship in 2010 as part of its symbolic transborder nation-building project, and ‘identity management’ (Pogonyi 2019), Hungarians in the transborder region were privileged. This meant that Hungarians living in Serbia have been given a grant for unrestricted access to EU countries and the EU labour market while Serbians required visas to leave the country. Rightly, this has been seen as a benefit against other nationals living in Serbia. Emphasizing cultural and ethnic differences results in strengthening the feeling of otherness in a multiethnic environment, which could be seen as a current worry and trend in the region.

Furthermore, in contrast to my parents’ generation, our youth and innocence helped protect us from the harsh impacts of changes and unrelenting instability. Perhaps this is partly why, in the beginning, joining the JNA was not considered to be bad, as both within Yugoslavia and outside the country the JNA was seen as the preserver of the Yugoslav vision; when opinions turned against the army (Horncastle 2019), many chose to leave the country, which was evident from the conversations. Although we simply could not grasp the full implications and consequences of the war and Yugoslavia’s violent disintegration, it did split our life into the ‘pre and after’, idealising the pre-war period to an extent. A sense of loss of stability and the increasing politicization of our everyday life on ethnic grounds, both in and outside the country, left the impression that our old life ended, and, with it, a new beginning emerged as we engaged more deeply with the politics of ethnicity and war.

This study demonstrates that the traumatic experiences that people carry can be awakened, and, without professional help, they are very difficult to deal with. It is not common to seek help, which is still seen as a sign of ‘weakness’ in the country.

In summary, in the case of Yugoslavia, the transition from socialism to post-socialism was inextricably linked to the disintegration of the country. By exploring my memories together with my classmates, I hope to have contributed to documenting some insight into how being Hungarians from Vojvodina left an indelible mark on our sense of identity.