The video linked below titled Children in Serbia 1920 is haunting.

A few thoughts about it after watching several times: First, these children were most likely dressed in their traditional Serbian cultural outfits for the camera, which was very likely the first time they were ever pictured. This technology was rare even on American farms, let alone war ravaged Yugoslavia. The more typical dress was as in the picture above.

Second, the notion that children tend livestock at such a young age is odd and foreign and implausible to Westerners. especially in the US and Canada. Please know that it was like this in Serbia until only 30 years ago in the villages. My mother hated cattle in her earlier life because as the younger daughter, she tended the cattle, who would walk directly into brambles and thorny bushes, while the sheep, which her elder sister tended stayed wherever there was grass and avoided brambles.

Third, music is a real emotional driver. Combining a mournful traditional Serbian melody with cheerful faces of children brings to mind the difficulty of these lives and the strength of the people who paved the way for our easier and better lives today.

That lesson applies to all of us. Doesn’t matter where you’re from. If you are a young or rising professional, take some time to reflect on what was necessary for you to arrive at where you are today. Who built the company you’re working for? Who established the leadership track you are in? What sacrifices were made by the founder(s)? What difficulties did they or you have to overcome to get to where you are today?

My mother’s father and one of his brothers were captured during WWII (3 years and hundreds of miles apart) and spent several years in a German POW camp. They couldn’t return to Yugoslavia after the war because government had fallen to communists who named our family enemies of the state. So a 4 year process of internal migration and a voyage across the sea brought my grandfather and his brother to the US in 1949. He never saw the daughter born after he was captured. The daughter that grew up in both abject poverty in a village while her mother was interrogated weekly by the communist government to ensure she was not somehow aiding an enemy of the state (from her village without power or phone or means of any kind). My mother escaped in the middle of the night with her husband and me when I was a child and after our own long voyage, we ended up in California with her father. He continued to work, humbly, as a janitor at a fine men’s clothier while his brother toiled in construction building the freeways and aqueducts that we all take for granted. My mother began work as a messenger in a bank when she could hardly speak English and sacrificed her whole life to give my sister and me something better than she had.

So this video is more than nostalgia. It is a link to those who went before us. To those who, wherever they were in the world and in whatever time, made your lives possible. Reflect on those people. Give thanks for them. Then do your best to leave a marker for your own descendants so they can thank you.

 

 

Keep Thinking…