Italy Honours Heroic Compassion of Bosnian Widow

The selflessness of a poor mother who took in an abandoned child 17 years ago, at the height of the Bosnian war, is recognized in Padua’s Garden of the Righteous.

On October 18, Ivanka Sucur will be honoured at a ceremony organized under the auspices of the President of Italy in Padua.

Trees will be planted in the Garden of the Righteous bearing her name and those of two other Bosnian citizens, while a memorial will also be unveiled.

The three individuals are being awarded for their selfless acts of compassion during the 1992-5 war.
Two days prior to the ceremony, on October 16, Sucur will mark the 17th anniversary of the arrival in her home of Elvis Salkanovic, who now calls her his mother.

Sucur found the abandoned 18-month-old toddler near the building where she lived in Hrasnica, near Sarajevo, on October 16, 1992. At the time, she had three children of her own to look after.
Food was short but Sucur decided to keep the child and share with him whatever she could offer her own children.

“I have always believed in God,” Sucur says. “My husband was killed on [the frontline on] Mount Igman in August 1992 so I lost him but two months after later I got Elvis.”

Sucur well remembers the day she found the toddler. It was the first day that rockets had begun to pound the town. Up until then it had been quiet.

“The women all ran away and I also went home but I couldn’t rest so I took some canisters and went out to fetch water. People told me I was crazy because more and more projectiles were being fired,” she says.

“I passed the building of the old travel agent. Right then I didn’t see him. It was only after I had filled the water cans and after a rocket hit the ground that I heard a child crying.

“He popped his head up and came running towards me and grabbed me by my neck. I took him up and he held me so tightly I could hardly breathe. He just sobbed and cried. He was so scared he didn’t say a word for the next four years.

Sucur remembers initially thinking the child must have strayed. “There was nobody around, so I had to take him home,” she says. “I left him with my daughter, while I and my son went out to try to find his parents.”

Sucur asked the refugees who lived nearby about the baby but they said it was not their child. She then went to the police station and gave them her address, in case his mother came looking for him. But, when she returned home, she was in for a surprise.

“My daughter showed me a piece of paper the child had with him,” she recalls. The anonymous note said his mother had died and his father had disappeared.

It asked anyone who found the child to take him to the police and it gave his name as Elvis Salkanovic, born in Capljina, south-west Bosnia, on January 9, 1991.

“I went back to the police station and gave them the note,” she recalls. “The following morning a social worker came and said the child should stay with me. He is still with me.”

Confusingly, Sucur would later discover that Elvis’s birth mother was, in fact, alive. But he had his new family by then. “He calls me his mother, my daughters Zvjezdana and Sretenka his sisters and my son, Goran, his brother,” Sucur says.

Ivanka says her own children grew to love the latest addition to their family. They all struggled to make ends meet by taking odd jobs and joining the search for food.

“I donated blood each week so we could get small food parcels from the Red Cross and in spite of the shelling we used to visit a woman in Butmir who had a cow, so we could get milk,” Sucur says. “Some neighbors helped, donating flour and clothes… All in all, the child has grown up. He is alive and healthy.”

She doesn’t deny there were problems as the boy grew into a young man. “But my own children aren’t perfect either,” she notes.

“It was hard for him, especially at school and in the neighborhood, when he was among the other kids. Cruel people used to say all kinds of things. I don’t know how I’d feel if I’d been him.

“After we found out his mother was alive it was difficult for him too. I never said bad words about her to him. I told him she might have left him because she did not have any food to give him. I guess he has accepted it.”

Elvis is 18 now and attending secondary school. Ivanka’s two daughters have grown up and married, while son Goran works and will probably marry soon. Ivanka wants to see Elvis complete his schooling, get a job and start his own family.

“I’ll take care of him for as long as I live. This is his destiny. God brought him to me,” she says.
Elvis is not the only victim of Bosnia’s cruel war that Ivanka Sucur took into her home. She has also opened her door to an old woman who lost her only son, has no welfare benefits and is now 88.

“She’ll have all she needs as long as I live,” Ivanka says. “It was difficult for me, but I can’t behave any differently.”

In February 2009, Sucur received another award for her work. The Dusko Kondor award, set up in 2008, is presented each year by Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide, Gariwo, an NGO with a base in Sarajevo, to civilians who demonstrate special courage.

It especially honours people who helped neighbours from other ethnic communities in the war. Sucur is a Bosnian Croat, who was married with Bosnian Serb, while Elvis came from a Bosniak (Muslim) family.

Last year, the award went to Lazar Manojlovic, a Bosnian Serb from Bijeljina, northeast Bosnia. As director of the Radojka Lakic primary school in 1992, after Bosnian Serb paramilitaries took over the town Manojlovic refused their demand to expel non-Serbs from the school or hand over lists of children’s names.

One of this year’s other two Bosnians commemorated in the Garden of the Righteous is Dragan Andric from Konjic. A Bosnian Serb, he helped evacuate dozens of Muslims civilians from eastern Herzegovina in the spring of 1992 and so probably saved their lives.

The other is Djuro Ivkovic, from Nevesinje, eastern Herzegovina. The Bosnian Serb and his family saved the lives of at least five Bosniak children, three women and other unarmed civilians who were being held in the police station in Nevesinje and in camps in eastern Herzegovina in 1992.

Jasmina Djikoli is a BIRN – Justice Report journalist. [email protected]. Justice Report is an online BIRN weekly publication.