Schindlers Lift

When they were built in 1975, the two high-rises in the Bosnian small town of Prijedor appeared like “vertical villages”. Before they became the skyscrapers of death, their residents celebrated the collective achievements and successes of the working class and practiced solidarity. Teachers and doctors lived there next to miners, Bosniaks next to Serbs, Croats... – a phantasmatically condensed image of Yugoslavia and multicultural Bosnia. For the inhabitants, the elevators were a sign of urbanization and city life.
Fifteen years later, the elevators accompanied unwanted residents to execution or even became a guillotine themselves. Together with the chimneys of the abandoned factories surrounding them, those houses today form the backdrop of the Bosnian town of Prijedor and remind us like tombstones of how a unique world was defeated by nationalist terror.
Thirty-two narrative fragments reflect the still untold Bosnian tragedy and the disappearance of an era.

Schindler’s Lift (2018) is the first prose work by theater maker and poet Darko Cvijetić, who lives in Prijedor, Bosnia and Herzegovina. The text was translated from Bosnian into German by artist Adnan Softić.