Last year I spent Christmas with a Catholic Croat family in Sarajevo. There were six of them: Mario Susko, his wife Maria, his 17-year-old daughter Alexandra, his 24-year-old daughter Klea, her husband Zoran and their baby, Deni. We were in a tiny room of a former garage -— the family’s apartment had been bombed a few months before — with no electricity, no heat, no double-glazing, no water, and one candle in the middle of the table burning far too rapidly.

We had bread that Maria had queued for five hours to buy, a tin of fish that I had bought at Frankfurt airport, and one -packet of cigarettes which Mario was nervously working his way through. We sat in the darkness, smoking and talking and falling silent when we heard the terrible whistle, and then the impact, of shells. Earlier that week, Mario and I had gone from his house to the cathedral to hear a Christmas concert. Mario, who never went out into the streets, was terrified: he had been in two mortar attacks already, two very close calls, and did not believe in pressing his luck. So we moved quickly, not stopping to talk to the silent, faceless people who also moved quickly, dragging their plastic bottles of water or their slender piles of wood that they had chopped down from the last remaining trees in Sarajevo.

I remember the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova, at the time of the purges, being asked by a woman if she would ever be able to write about the desperation. I thought at that moment that no matter how visual I could be, I could never describe what it felt like to be in Sarajevo at that time: the unbearable cold, the foggy streets with people moving like ghosts, the sadness that permeated everything.

Before the war, Mario Susko had been a famous fixture in Sarajevo: every student who passed through the department of English at the university had stories about him. He was a professor, poet and gifted translator.

The effect of the war on his life was monumental. His hands shook, he had lost weight, he could not sleep. He stopped -going out, stopped reading. Once his flat was destroyed and his

books and life’s work went up in flames, he stopped thinking about the future.

I spent many emotional days with the family: waiting for bread, water, food packages, medicine for the baby, and talking about the past. I began to realise, with a sinking sensation, that from the way he talked and acted, Mario was breaking down

and that he had to get out of the city. “You’ve got to do -something,” he said to me one night.

Many people ask you for favours in Sarajevo; as a journalist, you can do only so much. But I said I would try.

Back in London, I had a letter from the University of East -Anglia: it had read my reports on the family and was moved. It was willing to give Mario, who had once spent a year there doing research, and his family a place to live and work. The Sunday Times agreed to pay their fare.

There were horrendous complications. Sarajevo is a city under siege and matters took more than six weeks to arrange. Two

days before they were due to get on a plane to Zagreb, Mario, Maria and Alexandra were told that they could go, but Zoran, who had fought in defence of the city, would not be allowed, and -neither would Klea or the baby. It was the first step in the -disassembling of a family.

I picked them up at Heathrow airport on a cold February morning. Maria saw me and promptly burst into tears, followed by Alexandra. We kissed and hugged and stared at each other under the garish lights: Mario looked stunned and thinner than I remembered. They were too confused, too shell-shocked to go to a proper restaurant, but we sat and had tea and talked: of Klea and Zoran; of the baby sick with flu; of the terrible shelling the week before.

Alexandra wanted a hamburger from McDonald’s. Mario smoked and said nothing as we drove to Liverpool Street and caught the train to Norwich. Maria cried as we rounded the -corner near Buckingham Palace. “We have left home forever,” she said. “I never wanted to be a refugee. I only wanted to have a -normal life.”