I grew up in Bosnia, amid fear and hatred of Muslims. Now I see Germany’s mistakes over Gaza | Lana Bastašić

As a child, I saw what follows ethnic cleansing. That's why I am speaking out about my new home's silence over Palestinian deaths

When I moved to Berlin, I developed a habit of stopping by the Stolpersteine (stumbling stones" memorials) and reading about Jewish people who were taken from their homes and transported to the concentration camps. There is one building on my way to the U-Bahn from which 16 people were taken. But it was Lucie's stone that chilled me to the core. Hers is a single memorial stone in front of a large building. One little Stolperstein. All that is known of Lucie is that she was taken away at the age of 61. It made me think about all the other people who lived in the building and may have watched it happen. What were they doing? Did they just look the other way?

My family comes from Croatia, and as non-Croats we left the country during the nationalist frenzy of the early 1990s, which the late Dubravka Ugrei described in her work as the fight for pure Croatian air". Having been persecuted in Croatia since the early 1940s - my grandpa managed to leave the Jasenovac concentration camp alive at the age of 11 - we found ourselves in the north of Bosnia and Herzegovina. There the victim was different. Our Bosniak neighbours, whose only difference from us was their Muslim names, were now publicly vilified by almost every Serbian media outlet. People who lived by our side, sent their children to the same schools, spoke the same language, were now portrayed as non-human, as jihadists who would kill us while we slept, as animals that would pull our teeth out and rape our women. All of these stories I heard at the age of six. I knew the word mujahideen before having learned the alphabet.

Lana Bastai is the author of the novel Catch the Rabbit

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