Most devoted Catholics dream of a snow blanketed, white Christmas and imagine an immaculate midnight Mass with voices singing perfectly in practiced harmony: Silent night, Holy night. All is calm, all is bright.'Round yon virgin, Mother and Child.

Dreams, however, cannot replace the sharpness of reality. Biljana Lovrinovic still holds back tears remembering what she calls the "most silent and holiest night of her life."

"I was 11 years old," Biljana said. "After the Christmas Eve Mass, I was walking alone down snow covered streets in Zagreb [Croatia.] There were no people on the street. They were all inside with their families. At this moment, I knew the real meaning of a 'holy night.' It was a sad moment."  

Biljana longed to be united with her mother and father in Bosnia-Herzegovina. Biljana was born and raised in Travnik, a city cradled between two mountains, slightly Northwest of Sarajevo.

"I know there were a lot of people worse off than us. I lived the war differently," Biljana said. "I lived the war by not having parents around and being a child on my own."

On April 6, 1992, war erupted between the Bosnian government and Bosnian Serbs residing in or near the capital, Sarajevo.

At the beginning of April, Biljana's mother, Visnja, had already decided to put her daughter and Boris, Biljana's six-year-old brother, on a bus filled with elderly, children and women fleeing to Croatia. She was concerned for her children's safety and arranged for them to stay with her brother in Zagreb until the situation in Bosnia-Herzegovina improved.