Adopted in a WAR ZONE

I can still remember so clearly my first glimpse of Lejla. She was tiny, just two days old, wrapped in blankets, with a pink, milky face. She had just been fed and was in a plastic cot alongside other babies in the hospital basement in Sarajevo. They had one big blanket over them to keep them warm.

It was late December 1992, bitterly cold. The Balkan conflict was raging and I had just interviewed Lejla’s mother, Mia*, a 30-year-old Muslim who had given birth to her after being imprisoned in a Serbian rape camp and only released when she was six months pregnant. She’d managed to escape across the mountains to the relative safety of Sarajevo and the hospital where we were now sitting. Shut away in a quiet side room, wrapped in a dark velour dressing gown, she was angry and