Knowledge@Wharton

Four years ago, Wharton freshman Dario Kosarac had no idea how his life would evolve. Fifteen and scared for his future, he was living in his hometown of Sarajevo, which had been virtually destroyed by three years of war between Croats, Serbs and Bosnian Muslims.

“I was in high school and faced being drafted into the army, which I definitely didn’t want to happen,” says Kosarac, who lived at home with his mother and older sister, a teacher.

Kosarac and his friends would seek out English-speaking people in the main squares of Sarajevo, hoping that the more English they knew, the better chance they would have of getting out of Bosnia.

And one day in the spring of 1995, Kosarac and his friends met some people from England and the U.S. who claimed they were relief workers who might be able to get Kosarac and his friends to America as students. They exchanged addresses and, with that, raised Kosarac’s hopes that he could leave his war-ravaged home. “I wrote a lot of letters that summer to them, but I never heard back. I went back to school without much hope,” he says.

But one Wednesday he returned to school – the date, Oct. 25, 1995, is firmly etched in his mind – and there was a letter from one of the people he met. It said that if he could be in Zagreb, the capital of neighboring Croatia, by Friday, he could come to America, be placed with a family, and complete high school there.

“This would be a difficult thing even if you were living in Philadelphia and going to New York, to complete such arrangements,” says Kosarac. “But this was Bosnia. Crossing borders was seemingly impossible. I had no passport, no Croatian visa.

“But when you are faced with something like that, I don’t know, you just forget the odds and figure out a way to do it,” says Kosarac.

Though he was able to obtain a passport in a day, Kosarac couldn’t get a visa to enter Croatia. But even that seemed a moot point, because nearly no one could get across the Sarajevo Airport to the road to Croatia. The airport had effectively been closed, a no man’s land surrounded by snipers, most from the invading Serbian army. Kosarac, a Catholic of Croatian ancestry, may not have been an official enemy of that army, but he would still have to prove to border guards that he deserved to cross disputed territory.

Fortunately, his priest had a plan. He lent Kosarac his collared vestment shirt so he could pose as a seminary student in a humanitarian caravan of food and supplies crossing the airport and into the safer territory by Mount Igman on the other side.

Miraculously, the plan worked, but he was still many miles away from Zagreb on a war-torn road, with little money and no Croatian visa. The driver of the truck he was on noticed that a bus ahead of them was going direct to Zagreb. Kosarac flagged it down and convinced the bus driver to let him on. He did more convincing of border guards and soldiers at checkpoints along the way and arrived in Zagreb on Friday morning.

Even that wasn’t enough. He would still need to get a visa to travel to America by that afternoon or would lose his chance to be placed with a family. After hours of talking, negotiating, and faxing documents, Kosarac was finally given the go ahead.

He slept for a couple of hours, then was on a plane to Germany. By Sunday, he was in Virginia Beach, Virginia – and two military pilots had volunteered to be his host family. “By Wednesday, I was attending my first day in an American high school. From Wednesday with virtually no hope to the next Wednesday with a future – what a week,” he says.

Four years later, Kosarac is ready to face a different kind of future in Bosnia. “They need a good economic structure and hopefully I can influence that,” he says. “But I’m not on a mission to save Bosnia at all costs. I hope I can at least make things good for my family.”