The brown wall to the left of the fence is pockmarked with shell holes from the 1990s war and splattered with graffiti.
This is where Elisabeth Hrgić and Inas Dagoja, both 25, went to school—Elisabeth to the wellmaintained right of the fence, Inas to the crumbling left. She is a Bosnian Croat and a Catholic, he a Bosnian Muslim (Bosniak). They never met while they studied here; the school bells rang different break times on either side, and they used separate entrances. It wasn’t until they were 20, in 2014, that they met in a local night club and fell in love.
They took a photo here on their wedding day in June 2019, separated by the fence—Elisabeth in a white dress, pressing her hands against Inas through the gaps between the wires. She posted it on Facebook alongside a caption urging friends to
“teach your children that they are all the same”. It went viral. Thousands of Bosnians shared it, and newspapers across the Balkans printed it.
“The fence was a mental border— they didn’t tell us, ‘don’t go over there’, but in our heads we didn’t want to,” Elisabeth tells Reader’s Digest in the schoolyard a few days after the wedding.
This story is from the August 2020 edition of Reader's Digest UK.
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This story is from the August 2020 edition of Reader's Digest UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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