"You are happy with your daughter. I am happy just looking at a picture of my daughter."

Fadil Mucolli, whose three children, mother, father and wife were killed by a Serb policeman in 1999, talking with Leman, my translator, and in central Kosovo. Photo by Bonaventura Keresztény.

In Part 1 of this post I tell how I returned to a massacre site more than two decades after discovering it. In this part I learn that the Serb policeman who murdered 24 children and 30 adults has never been brought to justice and I sit down to talk to a man who lost everything in the massacre. I find warmth, generosity, dignity and an unexpected bond.

PART 2/2

When the victims’ relatives found the massacre site in Poklek, they knew that if they wanted the killers to face justice they would need to save the evidence.

Even as war raged and Serb patrols scoured the area, they sneaked into the village at night and, using torches, collected the bones of their dead kin. They bundled them up, took them away and hid them in the hills.

“We will show them to the war crimes investigators when they come,” one of the relatives told me at the time.

But 23 years after the massacre neither the Serb policeman who opened fire nor any of his accomplices have been punished.

They have almost certainly fled to Serbia, a country that has shown scant interest in prosecuting its wartime killers.

*

Fadil told me that he found it hard to speak of his loss to those who had not been through war.

I knew exactly what he meant. During my own period of loss it had often been my old war comrades I had leaned on the heaviest.

Somehow I found their intimacy with suffering and death reassuring. It gave us a common language and understanding.

I apologised to Fadil for not looking at the photographs of the dead children at the shrine he had made for them in the old burned house.

"It was too much for me," I said.

Fadil said he understood.

*

"I don't find the words but I want you to know how good I feel," Fadil said to me at one point. "The fact that you came back is very important for me."

I wanted to say something too, to express some of the emotion roiling inside me, but I also found it difficult to find the words.

For a while we sipped our coffees - and he smoked.

Then I told him how, although my tragedy did not compare in either magnitude or nature, I had lost my wife Kristin two years ago, to cancer. He offered his condolences.

He told me how after the massacre he had eventually made the decision to remarry.

"I felt like I was betraying my wife," he said. "It was the hardest thing I ever did."

He told me that he is happy with his new family - he now has two teenaged boys - but sometimes, when the pain is too great to bear, he leaves his family and drives back to the site of the massacre.

There, alone, he howls out his grief.

"I have never cried in front of my new family," he said. "I do not want them to feel my pain.”

As we talked I became aware of an unexpected but visceral bond between us and at one point my eyes grey moist.

“Ah Merde,” my translator Leman, whose French is better than her English, said in exasperation seeing my emotion.

She had always maintained that it was not right to cry in front of victims of the war as it only made it harder for them. I knew that she was right.

Then, after a short while, Fadil added: "You made me feel good today. There are very few occasions when I feel good."

I looked at my daughter Emma, sitting next to me. She had been watching and listening carefully.

Emma had been seven years old when the children of Poklek were massacred, living with her mother in Hungary, and had grown up without war.

Somehow I was grateful that she was here now to meet Fadil and to feel his warmth, generosity and dignity in the wake of such overwhelming tragedy.

Fadil saw my gaze.

"You are happy with your daughter," he said.

It was a statement that didn't need acknowledgement, but I nodded.

Then he paused.

"For me I am happy just looking at a picture of my daughter," he said finally.

I knew he was thinking about the little girl in front of the white Lada.

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UPCOMING

+ Emma and I finished filming our Kosovo documentary a week ago. It turned out to be more intense, draining and meaningful than either of us could have imagined. We sometimes found ourselves at the limits of our emotional endurance. The film material we shot - more than 30 hours of it - will now need editing, a process that will likely take several months. We are currently looking for an editor. I will keep you updated with the progress of this project.

+ I have now finished teaching university students in Budapest for this semester. I will soon be returning to Canada to reopen the lodge. Spring is underway in the valley and the bears are emerging. Our first guests in nearly three years will arrive in September. To read about our wilderness adventures click here.

+ My intention had been to make a short visit to Ukraine before I head back to the New World, but it is now looking less likely as other commitments crowd in.