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Her Courage Inspired Him To Marry Her
A real-life love story against the backdrop of war
The first time Eric Adam saw Mirsada Buric, was on television in 1992. She was shown running under sniper fire in Sarajevo.
This was during the Bosnian War, which was an armed conflict between Bosnia and Herzegovina that started in April 1992 and continued until the end of 1995.
This occurred after the breakup of Yugoslavia. During this time, the Bosnian Serbs, supported by Slobodan Milošević, tried to secure territory for ethnic Serbs. The country also had Muslim Bosniaks and Catholic Croats, and it soon became an ethnic war complete with ethnic cleansing.
When Adam saw Buric, she had just been released from a concentration camp where she spent 13 days living on a slice of bread and cup of water a day.
She ran on the streets of Sarajevo at great risk to herself to train for the Olympics, which she wanted to use as a platform to inform the world of what she had witnessed during the war. The American media picked up her story and Adam was impressed by her courage.
Her goal was to use the Olympics as a stage to tell the world about the atrocities she’d witnessed. American television picked up her story, and Adam saw her on TV.
