Flex Mentallo

Nigel Osborne returned to his university in Glasgow. Bobby founded ATI, which now works with traumatised children all over the world, from China to South Africa. And me? I founded an organisation as well, but that was sometime later, and nothing to do with Yugoslavia, War Child, or ATI. But after my return to London, I created my own version of one of the children’s shrines, comprised of found objects and things people had given me along the way. A rusty nail from the burnt out library, a crude whistle hand carved by a boy from the camp, a pack of cigarettes given to me by an art student in Sarajevo, Hitler's postcard, a wallet purchased in the old city, bottles of iodine and olive oil from the alpine chalet, my blue card, a ghastly post card from Hrastnik... and so on.. It has travelled with me, down the years…. Not as a work of art but as an act of remembrance...

And I thought about the way in which we are shaped by our experiences, in much the same way that Tarkovsky shows us in Nostalghia. The candle is still burning, but I have yet to reach the farther shore.

Just like this chalet. Like the Muslim library, like Sarajevo itself.

Itself destroyed by the allies...

And in another distant echo, I thought of the Berghoff, where Hitler had entertained the little girl....

I can never be sure of course, but knowing that the Croats were staunch allies of the Nazis, and the only country trusted by them to run its own concentration camps, where hundreds of thousands of Serbs and Bosnian Muslims were slaughtered, it is not too fanciful to think that maybe this was a last stronghold hold of the Chetniks, as the Croatian Nazis were known.

I could not help thinking of the children in the refugee camp and how in many ways the Second World War had created the circumstances leading step by step to the current tragedy.

Adolph Hitler, eating strawberries and cream with a little girl named Bernile Nienau, who shared his birthday. Just before coming to Yugoslavia I had been watching "The World at War", in which one of Hitler's home movies was featured. And this was a still from it.

Then, among the debris scattered across the floor, I found some papers with nazi swastikas on them – and then an old, worn out postcard.

I felt as though I were on the set of a Tarkovsky movie.

A tree had fallen into it, and there were signs of fire. It was gutted, and had seemingly been deserted for many years.

But high in an alpine meadow, just below the snow line, we came across the ruins of a chalet.

The Ruin Bobby and I returned to Hrastnik for another month with the children. We had spent everything we had by then and had no money to get back to the UK, but somehow, we knew we would manage – it didn’t seem important. At the very end, Bernard declared we should have a day off, and in his clapped out old banger we drove far out into the mountains. We climbed one of them – I never knew its name.

More from Vulliamy: "But the War Child story really started in Sarajevo – the multi-ethnic cultural heart of former Yugosalvia – in 1992, when the Bosnian Serbs, with backing from Serbia and Belgrade, began the siege of Sarajevo. When the founders of War Child arrived in this most cosmopolitan of cities, they beheld the most remarkable cultural landscape in post-1945 Europe – strangely, and unforgivably, now airbrushed from history. The Serbs attacked and persecuted a city with an entrenched cultural life that struggled on, come what may, throughout the war. I remember on my 39th birthday in 1993, after the massacre by shelling of civilians queuing for water in a suburb called Dobrinje, going to a lunchtime concert by the Sarajevo String Quartet in the blacked-out National theatre. The Serbs would usually attack such events, and one mortar landed so close to the theatre that the building shook and the viola player's stand fell over during an especially delicate moment of Haydn's String Quartet in D Major Op. 64, No 5, "The Lark". The first violinist, Dzevad Sabanagic, waited for his colleague to replace the score, called out the number of a bar prior to the interruption, and the quartet played on."

The rest, as they say, is history. With the proceeds from the album War Child launched a music centre in Mostar, Brian Eno gave workshops, star tenor Luciano Pavarotti became involved, and gave his name to the music centre. He famously flew across the Adriatic in a chartered helicopter to open it. The Serious Road Trip helped to launch the Sarajevo jazz festival, now one of Europe's foremost, and set up a network of music centres and workshops across the country. War Child now works all round the world, wherever children are affected by war. But they are far more professional and strategic in their approach than in the early days. No lives are risked. Local staff are now trained to run local programmes, as it should be.

If you look carefully you will spot Johnny Depp and Kate Moss as well as McCartney and Weller. http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/video/2010/jul/04/war-child-paul-mccartney

"War Child was launched in part by an album called Help, a phenomenon in the history of rock, put together over a single week by such artists as Radiohead, Blur, the Stone Roses, Paul Weller and Oasis, under the patronage of Brian Eno. Those involved felt – unlike the politicians and diplomats, after three years of stumbling impotence and connivance with the killers – that enough was enough in Bosnia. The album was released 15 years ago this September, and despite its modest ambitions and insane timetable, remains the most successful "aid album" of all time. This was music's declaration of war on war itself. " Ed Vulliamy The Observer, Sunday 4 July 2010

“Help” Another War Child volunteer remembers, physically taking Bruce Dickinson's analogue studio out of his house in Chiswick, which he had donated, and taking it to Travnik (a central Bosnian town, and crossroads of the war), where it is now used every day by the biggest youth music project in Bosnia, called Alter Art. Then War Child produced "Help".