Selma Mahmuljin dreamt about being a dentist like her father. She wanted an office next to her house so she could stay close to home, and to her family. She wanted to watch her parents grow old, wanted them to see her graduate from college, have a career and children of her own. It didn’t seem like that much to ask.
Now looking back, Mahmuljin, a 19-year-old University student, realizes how much in life is taken for granted.
In 1992, war erupted between Serbian forces and non-Serbs in Bosnia-Herzegovina, not far from Mahmuljin’s small hometown of Zozarac. Suddenly her dreams of family life began to crumble. By the time the war ended in 1995, Mahmuljin was left with only proud memories of her father, a young girl’s longing for her mother, the love of her brother and the chance for an opportunity in a foreign land.

Torn by war
Serbian forces sought the creation of a “Great Serbia.” In a policy called ethnic cleansing, a polite term for genocide, they terrorized the Bosnian countryside, killing many non-Serbs on site, detaining others in concentration camps and forcing thousands to move from their homes to beyond the Bosnian border.
To keep her safe, Mahmuljin’s parents sent her to Zagreb, Croatia, to live with an aunt and two cousins in a very small apartment. She was eight years old.
“I left everything behind — home, family, school, friends — everything,” Mahmuljin said with the steady voice of someone who has seen too much at too young an age.
Her brother, Vedad, joined her in Zagreb one year later.
While Mahmuljin was staying with her aunt, her parents were taken to Serbian-run concentration camps. Her mother, a schoolteacher, was placed at the largest and most lethal camp, Omarska. Two lines of guards and a minefield encircled the camp at all times. Only one man ever escaped from Omarska, and he was recaptured shortly after. Along with thousands of other Bosnian Muslims, Mahmuljin’s mother was killed during her imprisonment.
Mahmuljin never had a chance to tell her mother goodbye.
“They just came and took her from home,” Mahmuljin said. “They come to the house and either kill you or take you to the camps. The Serbs had an ideology of making a ‘Great Serbia’; they hated everyone who was not Serbian.”
Mahmuljin’s father was separated from his wife and taken to a different camp where he was detained for weeks. Upon his release, he joined Mahmuljin and her brother in Zagreb. Neither Mahmuljin nor the other members of her family know much about her mother’s death, and Mahmuljin said she hopes she never learns the details of what happened at Omarska.
“We don’t know when she was murdered,” Mahmuljin said. “We don’t know where the grave is — nothing about her.”

Changes at home
After her father arrived in Zagreb, he lived with Mahmuljin’s uncle. Mahmuljin and her father remained in Croatia for five years. Her brother left Zagreb in 1993 and traveled to Turkey with a group of Bosnian students. A year later he immigrated to the United States as a refugee; he was only 17.
Mahmuljin and her father moved to Bihac, Bosnia, in the summer of 1995 after the war so she could attend high school and he could resume his dental practice. Mahmuljin would have stayed in Croatia, but she was not a citizen, and therefore could not attend school.
“In Bihac, we didn’t have any relatives,” she said. “We didn’t know anyone. After the war everything was destroyed. It was hard to adjust to the situation.”
Mahmuljin did adjust to life in Bihac. She finished high school while living in a tiny one-bedroom apartment, above her father’s dental office, with her father and her grandmother.
In January 2001, Mahmuljin’s father was diagnosed with lung cancer. Acting on the advice of his son, he sought treatment in the United States.
“He was there for three months to get medical treatment,” Mahmuljin said. “He was doing very good. He came back to Bihac and started working again right away. Everything seemed very good. But then they found the cancer had spread to his brain.”
Mahmuljin’s father returned to the United States for a second round of treatment. Mahmuljin came to America during the summer to visit her brother. Her father’s treatment did not work and his health started failing. She was at his side when cancer took his life in fall 2001.
“My father was a dentist. We had a plan to buy a house and for me to have my own dentist office there,” she said with a voice drawn taught with emotion. “I had already passed the exam for dental school in Sarajevo, but the disease destroyed the whole plan we had for my future.”

Life in the states
After her father died, Mahmuljin had no reason to return to Bosnia. She stayed in Seattle with her brother and his wife. She was determined to continue with her own life and her own education.
Mahmuljin attended community college in Seattle for a year, then applied for and received a scholarship from the International Cultural Service Program to attend the University. In the fall, she began her college career, majoring in computer science.
Mahmuljin said she found a sense of the Bosnian community in Seattle. She made new friends there and met her boyfriend. The move to Eugene resulted in another separation from her loved ones — another readjustment to a new life.
“Here, you walk down the street, and someone you don’t know is walking toward you, and they are basically going to smile or say hello. In Bosnia that would not happen,” Mahmuljin said. “I have a chance to meet different people. In Bosnia, you don’t have that chance.”
Mahmuljin, the girl who watched her dreams fall apart in Bosnia, is now a woman and University student working to create a new life. She tries not to look too far into the future, tries not to worry about what will happen after graduation when her student visa expires. She is not afraid.
“For now, I’m going to concentrate on my studies and do my best,” Mahmuljin said. “School is very important; it’s always in the first place.”
But Mahmuljin is looking ahead to what her life may bring.
“I want to graduate, to have a family — two kids,” she said. “I hope it would be better, my life in the future, than in my childhood.”