“I am a rape baby. That’s what I am,” says Lejla Damon.
“It’s a horrible term because those are two words that you would never want to put together. But realistically…”
Damon, now 25, is relaxed as she speaks to BIRN at London’s Frontline Club after an event to mark the anniversary of the Srebrenica massacres last week – but she has been grappling with this definition for seven years.
She grew up in Britain, where her adoptive parents told her aged seven that she was adopted from the war zone in Bosnia. Then, at 18 years old, she learned more.
She was born in Sarajevo on Christmas Day, 1992. Her mother had been raped in a detention camp in Foca by Serb soldiers before somehow making her way to the capital, where she gave birth at Kosevo Hospital.
Two British journalists, Sian and Dan Damon, who were both based out of the hospital that year, happened to interview her mother. The deeply traumatised Bosniak woman said in the footage that they filmed that she feared that she might “strangle” the days-old child, or that the baby might grow up to be like the men who raped her.
“We were in Sarajevo, filming horrific scenes in orphanages and the suffering that was going on – and then this babe appeared. What could we do?” explained Sian Damon, speaking at the Frontline Club event.
“We could not leave this tiny, nine-day-old child,” she told the audience.
With the blessing of Bosnian officials, the two British citizens procured emergency evacuation papers and fled with young Lejla to Slovenia on January 3, 1993, and then to Hungary.
They returned with her to the UK, where the little girl led a comfortable childhood in the Manor House area of north-east London, far from the war that ended in 1995, its tortuous aftermath, and the ongoing emotional suffering of the child’s birth mother.
But by the time Damon hit her teenage years, the spark of curiosity was burning.
“I began to read literature on the things that happened in Bosnia – the women that were raped, the camps,” she says.
She could see it with the benefit of distance. “When my parents did sit me down and said, ‘Your birth mum was raped in a concentration camp’, it didn’t come as a massive shock. I wasn’t sat there in floods of tears, but that’s probably because I’m not living in Bosnia.”
For more read The Balkaninsight
