Elvis Budimlic spent 200 days in concentration camps before resettling in Rochester

In February of 1993, 20-year-old Elvis Budimlic — just a year after having been forcibly taken from his home in Bosnia and trucked to what would be a torturous 200- day stint in Serbian concentration camps — sat at a desk in Zagreb, Croatia, being interviewed by a member of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.

The Bosnian War was still raging, and Elvis could not go back home. Elvis was a Bosniak (that’s the term for Bosnian Muslims), and the Serbian paramilitary forces (mostly Eastern Orthodox Christians) still controlled his hometown of Prijedor, in his home country of Bosnia and Herzegovina.

Serbian forces, fearing those recently released Bosniak POWs would return to fight in the war, insisted they be relocated to other countries. The United Nations began by resettling those individuals who had faced some of the harshest treatments in the POW camps. Who had been victims of violence. Who had been victims of torture.

That was Elvis.

His U.N. interviewer, an American named Jim, asked Elvis where he wanted to move to, where he wanted to live. Elvis thought about his wife, Sebiha (they’d gotten married just three months before the war broke out). He knew he wanted to take her far away from Bosnia and Herzegovina.

“Do you have any relatives that could help you, that you could stay with?” Jim asked.

Elvis, though, did not want to be a burden to some European relative. He did not even want to stay in Europe.

Here’s something, seemingly unrelated: Beginning in the early 1990s, Money magazine had regularly named Rochester, Minnesota as one of its “Best Places To Live.”

One of those annual “Best Places” issues sat on a table near Jim’s desk. In Zagreb, Croatia.

So Elvis looked at that magazine and said “How about the U.S.?”

“Where in the U.S.?” Jim asked.

“I don’t want to go to a big city,” Elvis told him. “I want to go to a small city that’s safe and where I can make a living.”

Jim picked up that Money magazine. Read the highlights of the Rochester write-up. “Good healthcare,” he read. “Good schools, low crime, low unemployment.”

“I want to go to Rochester, Minnesota,” Elvis told him.

Four months later, in June of 1993, Elvis and Sebiha Budimlic landed in Rochester.

Within three years, nearly 70 Bosnians— including Elvis’ brother, sister, and mother—had followed. Today, that number may be closer to 1,000.

Elvis Budimlic was born in Prijedor, back when it was still part of the Socialist Federative Republic of Yugoslavia, in 1972. It was a city about the same size as Rochester in a county about the same size as Olmsted.

He was eight years younger than his next oldest sibling, the sixth surviving child of a paper-factory-worker father and a stay-at-home mother.

Elvis’ teenage sister, Fatima, was not exactly excited about the announcement of another sibling-to-be. So her parents, as appeasement, let her choose the baby’s name. She was a big Elvis Presley fan.

“I wouldn’t trade my childhood for anything,” says Elvis. “In fact, I would say our childhood was more rich than kids here, because here they’re kind of sheltered and parents take them everywhere.”

His father owned a bike, which was a luxury in Yugoslavia, and the kids could do chores to earn a chance to ride it.

“We had absolute freedom,” Elvis says. “Our parents would not have to watch us. Our neighborhood watched us. The whole town watched all of you because we had about the same values as everybody in the neighborhood and people knew each other. So I was never inside the house when we had time off. We were always out there doing kids’ stuff.”

That next-older sibling, brother Armin, describes growing up in Prijedor in almost identical terms.

“I remember my early years being really happy, having a lot of friends,” says Armin, who also lives in Rochester. “Most families had five, six kids. Most people in my neighborhood were from the working families. My childhood was really happy all the way to high school. The country at the time was still stable economically, and politically.”

Their oldest brother, Mizret, saved up and bought a car in the 1980s. It was the first car in the family.

Elvis learned English by watching American movies and TV shows on the two government-run TV channels (which broadcast subtitled versions of everything from “Dynasty” to “Twin Peaks.”). He watched John Wayne movies with his dad. Listened to Madonna and Michael Jackson on the radio.

By the time Elvis was in his teens, the region’s political landscape was changing drastically.

“The Soviet Union collapsed. The Berlin Wall fell in 1989,” says Elvis. “We knew things were shifting, but we didn’t expect the war.”

Elvis’ dad died in 1991. The rest of the family stayed close.

By the early 1990s, the former Yugoslavia began to fall apart. Slovenia and Croatia had declared their independence from Yugoslavia. The people of Bosnia and Herzegovina—the section of the country that included Prijedor— were deeply divided as to whether to remain a part of Yugoslavia (which the mostly-Christian Serbs desperately wanted) or to declare independence (the overwhelming choice of the region’s mostly-Muslim Bosnians and the Catholic Croatians).

“In our city, for the most part, everybody either had somebody in the family or knew somebody in their immediate family who was married to another religious group or another ethnic group,” says Armin. “So nobody, at that time at least, thought that something like the war that happened in Bosnia was even possible.”

Elvis, meanwhile, met Sebiha, a woman from the nearby town of Kozarac.

“She was a hairdresser, and I went in for a haircut,” Elvis says. “She gave excellent haircuts. I think she liked me because I played it cool.”

They fell in love, got married in early 1992.

But tensions in his neighborhood were rising. In March of 1992, Bosnia and Herzegovina declared its independence from Yugoslavia. Serbian authorities, though, refused to recognize the vote for independence. The Serbian factions, led by paramilitary forces, began to push back, started to exert more control over everyday life.

Neighboring families—those parents and kids that played soccer in the streets together—now found themselves divided along political and often religious lines. Longtime acquaintances turned on each other.

By early 1992, those TV stations—the channels on which the Budimlics used to watch “Dallas” and “Tarzan”—were showing Serbian-controlled government propaganda laced with anti-Muslim sentiment. By April, Serbian paramilitary troops had set up roadblocks around Prijedor.

“There were no jobs,” says Elvis. “We had hyperinflation at the time. If you get your paycheck, it’s worth $1,000 today. Tomorrow, it’s worth $900.”

Soon, Serbian-controlled checkpoints went up through town.

“They started asking for my ID, and they would search me,” says Elvis. “These were people I knew. Then they started beating people at the checkpoint for no good reason. Based simply on ethnicity.

“I thought these were my friends,” says Elvis. “That they would never do this to me. And they did.”

By mid-May, Serbian troops had fortified their position in Prijedor. Armored vehicles patrolled the streets, heavy artillery dotted the hillsides.

Elvis felt it would be safer for Sebiha to move back to her parents’ home in nearby Kozarac, which was predominantly Muslim. He thought she might find safety in numbers.

On May 31 of 1992—what is now known as White Armband Day or White Ribbon Day— Serbian military authorities issued an order requiring all non-Serbs to “display white linen on their homes and wear white armbands in public places.”

That day, Serbian paramilitary troops knocked on the Budimlic’s door. Elvis answered.

“They told me they were taking me in for interrogation. They told me I’d be back home in two or three hours,” he says. “I knew that wasn’t going to happen. So I grabbed my winter coat and a good pair of shoes. And I never saw my home again.”

Then, he says, “the world fell in like a house of bricks.”

The Omarska concentration camp has been called “one of the true hells on earth.”

That’s where they took Elvis Budimlic.

Omarska was set on an abandoned open-pit iron mine just 10 miles east of Prijedor, where dozens of rivers and streams cut through the rolling plains of northern Bosnia.

The Serbs called Omarska an “investigation center,” with a handful of buildings designed, they said, for holding and interrogating members of the Bosniak and Croatian population to determine their role in the war.

By the time the United Nations closed it down in mid-August of 1992, most everyone was calling it a “concentration camp.”

Elvis Budimlic doesn’t like to say much about his time at Omarska. He will say he lost 65 pounds and could barely stand. He was lucky, he says. He was only beaten a few times.

But when I read aloud the camp descriptions, when I read a few excerpts from the many books and articles about the camp, Elvis nods his head in agreement.

“It was that bad,” he says. “And worse.”

Here, then, is one of those descriptions of life inside the camp, from Mark Danner’s “The Horrors of a Camp Called Omarska”:

“In Omarska as in Auschwitz the masters created these walking corpses from healthy men by employing simple methods: withhold all but the barest nourishment, forcing the prisoners’ bodies to waste away; impose upon them a ceaseless terror by subjecting them to unremitting physical cruelty; immerse them in degradation and death and decay, destroying all hope and obliterating the will to live.”

“We won’t waste our bullets on them,” a guard at Omarska told a U.N. representative in mid-1992. “They have no roof. There is sun and rain, cold nights, and beatings two times a day. We give them no food and no water. They will starve like animals.’”

And this, for Elvis, was the worst part: Many of those guards were from his hometown.

“The people of Prijedor,” Omarska survivor Rezak Hukanovic told Al Jazeera newspaper, “were killed by the people of Prijedor.”

Elvis Budimlic was held in Omarska for 68 days. He marked his 20th birthday there.

In the summer of 1992, Serbian leaders invited journalists to visit Omarska to dispel growing whispers of atrocities.

On August 17, a photo of the camp, showing an emaciated prisoner standing behind barbed wire, appeared on the cover of Time magazine. “No one anywhere can pretend any longer not to know what barbarity has engulfed the people of the former Yugoslavia,” read the accompanying article.

The coverage led to immediate United Nations involvement, and Omarska was closed a few days later.

Official reports estimate that 6,000 inmates were held at the camp in its four-month existence. They put the number killed at 700.

Elvis Budimlic was moved to a second camp in Manjaca, in the mountains of northwestern Bosnia.

“The second camp was bad,” Elvis says. “But honestly, it did not compare to Omarska.”

This camp, he says, was “what you guys think of when you watch World War II movies, right? There was a minefield before the barbed wire fence, so you don’t want to go close. There were at least 5,000 inmates.”

But, he says, “the most important thing was the guards didn’t come in. We were safe at least from the beatings and torture.”

They cooked their own food (“whatever they gave us”). They had enough room to sleep on the floor of what was a collection of horse barns. Most importantly, the Red Cross was allowed into camp to register the detainees.

“Before that, I had just disappeared,” he says. “Nobody knew where I was. Not my wife, not my family. They guessed that I was in Omarska, but they didn’t know for sure. Now, the Red Cross let us send a very, very short message on paper. Obviously, it was censored by the Serbs, but they allowed us maybe 30 words. I just wrote ‘I’m okay. I’m alive.’”

Elvis, too, had long wondered what had happened to Sebiha. To his mom. To his brother and sisters.

He would find out soon enough, he says, that we “all had our stories of the war.”

An estimated 3,000 to 4,000 people would be killed in the city of Prijedor and the neighboring county during the Bosnian War. An estimated 100,000 were killed across the country.

None of Elvis’ sisters—or his mom—were taken by the soldiers. One brother was forced to work in the paper mill. His two other brothers were working abroad when the war broke out. Armin was separated from his wife and 3-year-old daughter for months before they were reunited.

The town where Sebiha had fled to, Elvis says, “had been leveled. They destroyed everything, burned it to the ground, killed a lot of people. They killed her father, brother, nephew, brother-in-law ... all pretty much in that one day.”

Sebiha spent a few months in house arrest, then escaped Bosnia by walking to Croatia.

Elvis spent 132 days at the camp in Manjaca. Finally, the United Nations negotiated the release of the prisoners, with one caveat: These prisoners would be treated as enemy combatants and taken to Croatia. Then resettled to a host country.

He was released on December 15, 1992. Taken to a refugee center in Croatia, where he was reunited with Sebiha.

After a few months in the center, he was taken to that office in Zagreb. Had that meeting with Jim. Saw that Money magazine on that desk.

On June 15, 1993, Sebiha and Elvis landed in Rochester, Minnesota.

When they got off that plane at the airport, Sebiha and Elvis were met by, among others, Sister Kathryn Berger of Catholic Charities, the organization that sponsored Elvis and Sebiha’s trip—and resettlement—to Rochester.

“Sure, it was a shock suddenly being in Rochester, Elvis says. “But honestly, coming here, I wasn’t scared of anything. My mindset was I got through the worst that could happen to a human. So I was like, ‘Whatever comes next, it’s going to be easy.’”

They were temporarily housed in a “transit home” near the old Kmart in southeast, which they shared with a Vietnamese refugee family with seven kids. Eventually, Elvis and Sebiha moved into an apartment, got whatever jobs they could find.

“My sponsors, who were the sisters of Assisi Heights, I owe a lot to them,” says Elvis. “When I came to Rochester, it was go, go, go. The first months were tough because we didn’t know how anything worked. All I could get was part-time jobs.”

He washed pots and pans at the monastery, three hours a day, three or four days a week. Assembled trophies and plaques at the local trophy shop when they needed it.

“My third job was actually with the Intercultural Mutual Assistance Association,” he says. “They needed some data entry done. I didn’t know anything about computers, but I took a job training course here in town.”

He took typing courses in which you played games on a computer (he was moving a turtle around a race course). Learned to fill out online forms. Learned spreadsheet basics.

He memorized the bus routes. Walked everywhere he could.

“The first year we didn’t have a car,” he says. “I was walking everywhere. It was so cold. When the snow would fall, it would only be my footsteps in that trail. I’m like, ‘There’s nobody else walking.’”

He took classes at RCTC then Winona State. After one class at RCTC, his English teacher asked him to stay after to work on a project.

“I said, ‘I can’t. I’ve got to catch the bus then transfer to another bus to get to my job.’”

Not long after, that RCTC teacher— Marilyn Theismann—donated an older car to Elvis.

“Oh, that was life-changing for me, seriously,” he says. “It meant so much to have someone being so nice to us.”

So, when family members from Bosnia asked Elvis about where they should go, he recommended Rochester.

“My sister Fatima moved out six months later,” he says. “Then my brother Armin and his family. And then my mom and my oldest brother came maybe two years later.”

Family friends followed. And friends of their friends.

From Elvis’ arrival in June of 1993 through 1996, 67 Bosnian refugees relocated to Rochester, according to Catholic Charities.

Elvis, who continued to work for the IMAA, then as a case manager, knew every one of them by name.

“I stayed at IMAA because I wanted to give them the kind of help that people gave me here,” he says. “That was the main reason I worked there, to help them make Rochester home.”

Today, an estimated 600 to 1,000 Bosnians call Rochester home.

Elvis graduated from Winona State with a degree in Computer Science in 2000. Got a job as a software engineer then senior project consultant at IBM. He’s now celebrating nearly 15 years as a
Senior Cloud Application Developer at Boston Scientific in Rochester.

Sebiha, now retired, worked as an IV Technician at Mayo Clinic. She and Elvis have two “really great kids,” Leyla, 30, and Emin, 27. Leyla works as a nurse; Emin is a soon-to-be veterinarian.

Elvis’ older brother Armin, has served as the executive director of the IMAA since 2018.

Their mother Nuniba, who died in 2019, was a popular figure in Rochester, especially with her Fontaine Towers neighbors.

“She was very wise,” says Elvis. “She survived World War II. She was orphaned. And then this war, and nine kids. People loved her. She loved to hug people. She was like a mother to many, especially the Bosnians who needed that.”

In 2016, Elvis visited Prijedor for the first time since 1992. For the first time since he was pulled from his home on White Armband Day.

“It wasn’t positive,” he says. “There are people that can relax and go back. I can’t relax. I saw people I knew. I saw a Serbian guy that I grew up with. We didn’t really talk. I just can’t talk about it.”

Elvis, though, says he tries to spend time looking ahead, not back.

“As soon as we moved here, we said ‘Let’s make a life as best as we can,’” he says. “I was convinced we could do it, and we did. We love Rochester. It draws people from all over the world. I have no regrets about coming here.

“Rochester is our home now.”