As people, we have the potential to share a great deal with one another. We bond and create communities over similarities, yet we will never truly live the exact life of another. This idea makes us entirely unique, yet somehow exactly the same. It feels contradictory, as if both cannot be true at once. But it is. It is a paradox, and perhaps that is what makes us beautiful. We are not one thing or the other; we can be both. 

How, then, do we celebrate individuality while also recognizing the collective story that connects us? 

One experience I have been fortunate never to call my own is living through active war. War, for me, has existed in history books or on screens; but it has never dictated whether I could step outside my door, or whether I lived or died. For others, though, it has been a defining part of their story. 

In the city of Vushtrri, Kosovo, a seven-year-old girl lived through the 1998-99 Kosovo War. “There wasn’t so much media at that time because obviously everything was closed,” she recalls. “Of course families would tell us ‘Oh, now we are going to hide. Now we are going to do this.’ But not necessarily explaining what was really happening.” 

Her family made the impossible decision to remain in their home even after Serbian military police warned that anyone who stayed risked being killed. 

“Yes, so everyone, so the soldiers of the army came and made an announcement that everyone should leave in the next hour, ‘if you don’t leave, we will kill everyone,’ but unfortunately, we didn’t leave, and I think that’s the biggest trauma that I remember. Every single second, every single day, we were just waiting for the soldiers to come and kill us. So we didn’t leave Kosovo and the town; the city was empty. It was only our family, and then when we would go out, it was just like horses, and cows, and sheep, and just animals that people set free.”

What’s unique about this story is why they stayed. 

“I remember because my brother left before the big war started because he was like, ‘I’ll either join the army, the Kosovo army that was kind of forming, or I have to go out of Kosovo.’ So he left Kosovo. He was just 16 years old, and then my mom only had one picture of him, and that picture couldn’t fit in a suitcase, I think it’s so dumb, that's the reason that we are staying, but we didn’t go out.” 

A family photo. Something that could be considered so trivial, yet life-altering. 

What happens to our family photos when we are marked by war? Anthropologist Zanita Halimi, in her article Photographic Practices among Albanian Families in Kosovo, identifies three patterns among families during the 1998-99 conflict: some fled without time to save photos, some carried them despite risks of soldiers destroying them, and some hide their photos before deportation by means such as burying them. My interviewee possibly introduces a fourth: families who stayed behind because of them. 

“My father hid the family photographs, covered them in plastic bads and on the top he put grass, in order that he could recognize the place. I was curious and followed what my father was doing, but I did not ask him anything at the time. When we came back, arrived in our house, everything was destroyed, and I saw my father went to look for photographs. I asked him, ‘Why did you hide photos?’ He said that whatever happened to us, somebody would later find them and know who has been living here, how they looked, and so on.”

Our photos aren’t just keepsakes. They’re remembrance of people’s lives, holding emotions and memories powerful enough to change the trajectory of a life. Our photos are the proof of our existence, our claim to time. 

“I can not say that I feel privileged that I was a ‘Kid of War.’ I feel like I should have more grace for myself because I was a ‘Child of War.’ But I think it affects day-to-day, becuase I still am going back to that question. We appreicated the things we have more than someone who hasn’t been in the war…I am talking for myself. Whenever I think for the future, I don’t have high hopes. You know? Because I am like, what if another war kicks in? What is something else happens? I don’t know…yeah it’s complicated, to be honest. I am happy that my kids were not ‘Children of the War’ and I am excited to see how they are going to be, but for me, I am just like I don’t know what the future hold.”

Her words capture this paradox of progress: the hope of building something new, shadowed by the weight of the past. For those who lived through war, identity is not just shaped by what they endured but also how they have continued to fight forward. We are able to hold both resilience and doubt in the same breath. 

She reflects later:

“I think it’s both because some people I feel like, even me, we have never actually processed what we have gone through so we kind of just walked past it and we don’t need to talk about it…I wish it was heal and move on but it’s more kind of like ignore, distract ourselves, and go on. Yeah which is sad but it is the reality” 

When asked what she believes is needed to build a sustainable future, she responded:

“Deal with the trauma first, because yeah, sometimes people can’t find peace because they don’t have peace in themselves. They can not give peace if they don’t feel peaceful. I think also the trust. They need to trust the government, and they need to trust the people that they are around. There is so much trust issues.”

The paradox is this: identity is both scarred and strengthened by what we live through. Trauma and trust, individuality and community, the past and the future, all coexist in a delicate balance. Progress is never linear, and healing is never simple. Yet in this balance lives the truth of who we are: not defined by one extreme or the other, but by our ability to hold both, to carry the contradictions, and still move forward.