Imagine seeing someone shot and killed from a sniper’s nest simply for daring to cross the street.
Or picture a row of tanks lined up outside your home, barrels pointed at the windows, bombs exploding in the distance as the ground shakes like an unnatural earthquake.
Now you see what Selma Kurtagic has seen.
And you know why she just wants to close her eyes and forget it.
“I don’t like to talk about it,” she says, her head dropping shyly. “It’s sad enough.”
Kurtagic, a senior at Hersey, may be the best high school badminton player in the state, but her story is compelling not because of her athletic achievements. It’s because of where she has come from, and where she’s going.
Where she came from was the middle of hell–Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia-Herzegovina and once the epicenter of that country’s now-settled civil war.
In a more peaceful time, in Kurtagic’s youth, Sarajevo was the picture of Eastern bloc serenity, with snow-covered mountains rising over a world-renowned city of commerce, industry and the Olympics. In fact, Kurtagic attended the opening and closing ceremonies and the ski-jumping competition at the 1984 Winter Games, some of her fondest memories of home.
But in 1992, just eight years after those Olympics, it became a place of unspeakable horrors. War broke out between Bosnians and Serb factions and Muslims. Kurtagic’s family–loyal Bosnians–found themselves thrust into a war they did not want to fight but couldn’t help be a part of.
“When they started shooting, we were scared, but we got used to it after a while,” said Kurtagic, who was 13 when the fighting began. “When they started shooting with bombs, it was different. We would start shaking. The whole earth would start shaking.
“It was like the whole building was going to fall.”
They got used to that, too, Kurtagic said. But she never got used to the fear that pervaded every walk of life.
“It was just such a weird feeling, and there was so much pressure on us,” she said. “There was a feeling that you were in danger of being killed anytime you went out. We were afraid to cross the street.”
Snipers, she said, would sit atop buildings waiting for a victim to cross the street. But the gunmen would shoot only to injure, using the victim as bait. When more people rushed out to help, the gunmen would ambush them.
“You had to be very careful about it,” Kurtagic said. “I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to help them, but I was scared.”
After almost a year of bloodshed, Kurtagic’s family had had enough. She escaped to Germany with her mother, Edina, and younger sister, Ira, but their father stayed behind to take care of his mother.
“We thought it would be over soon, within a few months,” Selma said.
But Mirsad Kurtagic didn’t join the family for a year and a half, when they moved from Hamburg, Germany, to Chicago, which had become a haven for Bosnian refugees. In December 1994, they settled in Mt. Prospect, and Selma started attending Hersey.
Kurtagic learned to play tennis when she was 6 but gave it up when the war started.
At Hersey, badminton coach Jeanine Konkolewski noticed she had great tennis moves and instincts, so she persuaded Kurtagic to come out for badminton. A year later, Kurtagic finished fourth at the state meet, and she is undefeated this year. She also qualified for the state tennis meet last year.
While some people need to tell their stories as a catharsis, Kurtagic just wants to forget. But she did give a gripping account–in the form of an essay–of seeing firsthand the horrors of war.
Konkolewski said the essay is a fascinating window into Kurtagic’s soul.
“It’s been very awakening for me to know her,” Konkolewski said. “It’s amazing that somebody can go through that type of experience and be as great a kid as she is. She loves everybody and she never wants to get on anybody’s case. You grow to appreciate her a lot more.”
And there is a lot to appreciate about Kurtagic. She is gifted both on and off the court.
Academically, she is a language whiz, speaking Bosnian, German and English fluently and able to understand most Slavic languages. Even with a limited American high school background, she is close to the ACT qualifying score to earn a college tennis scholarship.
Kurtagic said the best thing about American high schools is the athletic opportunities she has been given. Tennis and badminton, it seems, help give her a normal American teenage life.
But there’s something a little different about Kurtagic, and you know why when you hear her story.
She carries most of her possessions with her like a closet in a backpack, as if she’s afraid they’ll be taken away.
The biggest difference, Konkolewski said, is maturity.
“She’s so responsible,” Konkolewski said. “You ask yourself where she learned it, but then you know. Her whole life was just uprooted. I can only imagine what that would be like for someone her age to experience that.”
Someday, Kurtagic says, she will go back, probably for good. For now, she’ll concentrate on trying to get that college scholarship, hoping to study sports medicine.
And though America is not truly home, it’s beginning to feel like it.
“We’re treated normally here,” she said. “We have our freedom.”
The Hersey community has embraced her with open and loving arms.
“The coaches, all the people here, they’ve all been so nice and so helpful,” she said.
“That means a lot. In my country, people aren’t so nice.”
