War Survivor and Amputee Shares Story of Survival With Students

Imagine living without a regular supply of food or water, cut off from communication with the outside world in a place that only offered a makeshift basement hospital with no doctors or anesthesia. Its hallways are so regularly packed with the injured that you have to prove you’ll be able to survive to earn a room.

Every day, bombs explode and snipers shoot at you when you fetch water from a nearby river. At night, you hide in a cramped locked basement because it is the only place that's safe.

It's a life that could either break someone or make them strong. Bosnia war survivor Maja Kazazic chose the latter.

On Friday morning, Kazazic offered two softened versions of her life in war-torn Bosnia to the early childhood students, middle school students, parents and teachers at Lee Academy for Gifted Education.  

Kazazic explained how she and Clearwater Marine Aquarium’s Winter the dolphin, currently making his theatrical debut in Winter’s Tail, shared the same prosthetic technology. She let the younger children see Winter’s first prosthetic tail and examine the soft sticky ‘Winter gel’ that helped her prosthetic limb adhere.

Two hours later, the Lee Academy high school students, many who were the same age she was at the time of her injury, were a captive audience. When she told her story, it was matter of fact, and evident that she had survived a grim reality.

A PowerPoint presentation offered imagery of a beautiful Mostar, Bosnia before the war and the contrast of bodies on stretchers and a stark crumbling landscape after.  At this point, Kazazic looked around the room, slowly paced the floor and unflinchingly spoke.

“My friends were downstairs and calling for me. I didn’t ask my mother (to leave) because I knew she would say no,” Kazazic began. “I ran down three flights of stairs, taking two steps at a time to my friends. I didn’t know that it was the last time I would run for the next 15 years.”

Kazazic described how she went outside to her six friends and sat on small concrete wall that stood in front of the building’s entrance.

“Suddenly, I was choking on thick, black smoke,” she said. “My mother felt the shock of the mortar on the third story and went to my room to tell me, 'That’s why I tell you to stay inside.’”

Kazazic was severely injured by a shell that had dropped directly on top of her and her friends. Her left arm and face were full of tiny pieces of shrapnel, and her legs were torn apart and bleeding.

“When the smoke cleared, I looked around to see if my friends were OK," she said. "All I could see were bits and pieces of bodies scattered on the ground around me. That’s when I realized that all six of my friends were dead.”

Kazazic was taken to the makeshift hospital, and nurses removed as much shrapnel as possible and bandaged her up. Because there was no medicine, infection set in almost immediately.  

After a week, the infection had reached the bone in her left ankle. Without antibiotics, the risk of gangrene and ultimately, losing her life, Kazazic had no choice but to have the leg amputated without any anesthesia.

“After the amputation, every morning, nurses would cut away the infected flesh before changing the dressings,” said Kazazic. “A friend had given me a blue bear, and I would put it in my mouth and bite down.”

After nearly two months in the basement hospital, Sally Becker, a British aid worker who had received special permission to take three injured children out of Bosnia, had an interpreter ask her a question that changed her life: "Do you want to come with me?"

“I was given 20 minutes to make a decision,” said Kazazic. “I didn’t want to leave my family, but I knew I was getting sicker. I was running a fever and hadn’t eaten in days.”

Kazazic had her first surgery in a U.S. Army base in Croatia, and the next surgery in an Army base in Germany. She was then transferred to a U.S. hospital in Maryland.

“I stopped counting after 100 surgeries," she said.

While in the Maryland hospital, Kazazic learned about American culture. She also became familiar with a new language in an unfamiliar way.

“I learned English through The Cosby Show,” she said.

Finally Kazazic was considered well enough to attend school first in a wheelchair with an IV hookup, and next in a prosthetic leg. But due to the scope of her injury, it did not fit properly. So, walking was both difficult and painful.

After years of no communication with her family, Kazazic received a letter that a friend’s brother had snuck into the enemy territory to mail to her. Kazazic said that she had no idea how her family knew where to mail her. She was just glad that they got a message to her that “they were safe.”

After the war in Bosnia had calmed, she went through a lengthy process to bring her mother, father and younger brother to the United States.

Eventually, Kazazic graduated high school and attended St. Francis University, graduating with a degree in psychology. She moved to Tampa to escape the frigid Maryland climate.

A 2009 visit to the Clearwater Marine Aquarium would change her life for yet a second time.

A young dolphin that initially could not swim because she had lost her tail in a crab trap was being fitted with a prosthetic tail. Instantly, she was swimming like a normal dolphin.

“I watched this, and thought if that company can make a tail for a dolphin, maybe they can make a leg for me," Kazazic said.

So Kazazic contacted Hanger Orthotics and Prosthetics. Within 10 days, was fitted with a comfortable, vacuum-system prosthetic limb.  

When Kazazic finished her story, the room at Lee Academy was at first silent. Then, a hand went up. Another and another.

“If you knew then what you know now, would you run down those stairs?” echoed a girl’s voice from the back of the classroom.

Kazazic did not hesitate to answer.

“Yes,” she said. “The saying, ‘What does not kill you makes you stronger’ – it is true. There is always a light at the end of the tunnel. What happened made me who I am. I learned to conquer the world. A leg is a small price to pay for that.”

Afterwards, upper school student Augustine Haile and teacher Jennifer Lindley summarized their feelings about hearing Kazazic’s story.

“It was a lot of work, and she came so far. It was really motivational to hear about,” said Haile.

Said Lindley: “She was phenomenal. She catered her story for all three of the age groups. It was very inspiring. She created a purpose out of what happened to her.”

Kazazic said that she began motivational speaking two years ago because of the many people who donated services and invested their time, energy and money into her surviving.

“I want to make a difference as much as I can to as many people as I can, just so I can make it worth it for the people that helped me. There’s so many, I just can’t thank them any other way."

When asked if she’d been back to Bosnia since her rescue, Kazazic said that she walked through the entire city and visited the place of her injury and her friends’ death.

“The shrapnel and everything is still there," she said. "They haven’t repaired it, so you can actually see ghosting of where I sat, how the shrapnel picked me up and how close I was to the bomb. Right where my body was, there’s no shrapnel. Everywhere else, the shrapnel is all around me.”

Learn more about Kazazic at www.onestoryoneworld.com.