One Day the Soldiers Came

by Charles London

  Tanks and artillery surrounded Sarajevo, which sits in a valley, and sealed the roads in and out. For the next three years, cut off from the outside world, the city was bombarded and starved while the Bosnian army, made up of local conscripts and police, tried to keep the city from falling.

  When they returned to the city from that 1991 meeting, less than a year before the siege began, the leaders of Sarajevo’s Jewish community, Jacob Finci and Ivan Cersenjes, started to organize. They gathered the community’s doctors together and talked about what they would need. The Jewish Joint Distribution Committee, based in New York, helped them prepare, sending them stockpiles of medicine and bandages—and, at the doctors’ grimly pragmatic urging, body bags.

  On the first night of intense shelling, late in April 1992, Ivan Cersenjes returned to the community center to work. To his surprise, he counted about sixty people sleeping on the floors and benches as he walked around. He didn’t know who they were. The building was open to the public, so he assumed they were frightened people from the neighborhood who did not know where else to go. From that day forward, the Jewish community never closed its doors to anyone. Within days of the outbreak of war, Jacob Finci had called his counterparts in Zagreb and Belgrade, who, despite any nationalist sentiments they might have had, were eager to help. Throughout the conflict, Finci used all his connections on all sides, and, with skillful negotiation, the Jews were able to keep their supply lines in and out of the city running.

  But it was not just their neutrality and their influential friends that helped them. According to Yechiel Bar-Chaim, a Joint Distribution Committee field worker in the region during the conflict, “an awareness of the Holocaust—of what had already happened to the Jews of this region—was one of the elements that everyone had in mind.” Empathy with the Jews, Bar-Chaim points out, was nearly universal. In the face of their own suffering, each ethnic group identified with the Jews. Parallel to this empathy, which certainly existed on the Serb side, who saw their entire history as a series of wrongs committed against them, there may also have been a fear of international intervention if Europe or the United States suspected a second genocide attempt against European Jews. Empathy and pragmatism combined to allow the Jewish community to remain supplied throughout the war, ensuring not only that their own would be fed, which was a first priority, but that they could feed as many of their neighbors as possible too.

  They opened three pharmacies—“the best pharmacy in town,” according to Finci—created a clinic in the community center, and arranged for doctors to make home visits to patients who could not make it out of the house. A psychologist who worked with the community immediately after the war told me that, if not for their arrangements, many more residents of Sarajevo would have died.

  Muslim and Croat nurses, doctors, and volunteers dashed through the streets, risking their lives under the sights of snipers and under the mortar blasts in service of the Jewish community’s aid operations. According to one report, of the 60 La Benevolencija employees during the war, 19 were Jews, 19 were Muslims, 13 were Serbs, and 9 were Croats. The Jewish community worked with everyone. There seemed to be no doubt among any community members that their doors should be open for all.

  They even arranged for bus convoys to evacuate “members of the community” from the city. They stretched the definition of who counted as a member of the community as far as it could go. Of the three convoys that left Sarajevo and took refugees to Croatia, more than half the evacuees—over a thousand people—were non-Jews.

  Many members of the Jewish community chose to stay. Sarajevo was their home. There were elderly community members who could not leave, who were housebound or confined to the nursing homes. These were their people too. The leadership also stayed. They were just as determined as members of the army and government not to let Sarajevo fall. How could they simply abandon their friends and neighbors?

  The siege turned Sarajevo into a nightmare. Mortars and grenades crashed into all parts of town indiscriminately. Machine gun fire tore the streets apart. The city lost power. It lost water. People burned furniture to stay warm. Snipers shot women and children running with buckets full of water on their way home. The Olympic stadium, once a symbol of Sarajevo’s unity and prosperity, became a different kind of symbol. It was transformed into a graveyard. Bodies filled the field.

  Jaca, who was thirteen during the war, walked with me toward Bulevar Mese Selimovica, the street that was known as Sniper Alley, which she told me I must see to understand how the people of Sarajevo lived. When we arrived, she warned me, she might break into a run, “just out of habit,” she laughed. “Try to catch up with me if I do. You’ll look silly if people see a girl running away from you. Many people still duck and sprint when they reach this road. The war, you know,” she smiled. “It made us all insane.”

  Up above us on the hills, I could see the Jewish Cemetery. Snipers had a straight shot to where we stood, to this entire stretch of road. They hid behind the gravestones, which provided excellent cover. The hid behind the graves and they rained bullets on the city. Rumor had it that visitors who were so inclined could pay for the privilege of taking a few shots into Sarajevo for themselves. During the siege, anyone who walked or drove along this road risked taking a bullet from one of these snipers who did not distinguish between civilian and combatant. Life was cheap. Cars would race at dangerous speeds, swerving up and down Sniper Alley from the airport trying to make themselves harder targets. The city erected metal barricades to protect the sidewalk from sniper fire, but the Serb guns quickly turned those to Swiss cheese. Jaca too looked up at the cemetery and sighed.

  Now twenty-six, a writer and translator, she is a vivacious woman, a stunningly beautiful brunette with a dry sense of humor and a lot of plans for the future. She’s written a children’s book and plans to write others. She has a great love for children’s literature, perhaps because the war that cost her her father and her best friend, many of her friends, also cost her her childhood.

  “I never thought about ethnicity before the war,” she told me. “My grandmother was Jewish, my father was Muslim, my mother was Catholic. We were a little of everything. When the war started, my friends began to ask me ‘What are you?’ I said I didn’t know. They told me I was a Muslim, so I came home and told my father I was a Muslim. The next day, my Catholic friends said, ‘No, you’re no Muslim. You’re a Catholic like us.’ So I went home and told my father I was a Catholic. But it didn’t matter. We were all in the same situation in Sarajevo. Catholic, Jew, Serb, or Muslim. We were all in the same kind of hell.

  “For example, on my eleventh birthday, I was walking to school. I lived near the Holiday Inn and had to cross this street here, just up ahead.” She pointed toward the infamous yellow building, a branch of the global hotel chain, which, during the war, housed most of the international press corps, though the rooms facing the street were uninhabitable due to sniper and mortar fire. I noticed with some degree of horror that the building was surrounded by tall apartment buildings that housed thousands of Sarajevans during the siege, many of whom could not simply take rooms away from the street as the journalists could. Their homes were easy targets, and many had to be abandoned for safer ground. Though nowhere in the city was safe. Death was always above it in the hills that ringed Sarajevo, sealing it.

  Ten years since the siege ended and Jaca began to grow tearful as she told me her story, a story about walking to school.

  “I was walking with my friends when a bullet hit the pavement in front of me. I turned to run backwards but a bullet hit there too, so I lay down on the road next to my friend, like we had been taught. My friend, though, had been shot in the head. I saw him bleeding, dead. It was very sad because I had a crush on this boy; he was my best friend. I thought I would have profound thoughts when I was about to die, but all I could think was that it was good this day was my birthday. My parents would save money on engraving the headstone. They would only need to put one date on it and they woul
d save money on throwing a small party for me that night.

  “I lay there for hours that day. The sniper would shoot near me sometimes to tell me he was still watching. The UN tank came and escorted me and the other children to safety, and we left my little friend’s body on the street there. Others would come get him to bury him—we could not do it. We were just schoolchildren, you know.”

  By the time she finished, she was crying, thinking about her ruined birthday and her lost friend. “Everyone has stories,” she said. “When we hear thunder, everyone in the city ducks for cover. I hid in my bathtub during the celebration for the first day of the Sarajevo film festival one year, before I realized it was only fireworks.”

  “There were a lot of terrible times,” said Dada Pappo, a stylish woman in her forties who has worked with La Benevolencija since the war. She sat in her beautiful apartment near the center of town and pointed out to me all the places where bullets and mortars hit. As she spoke, we drank her homemade liquor, travaritza. She gestured with elegant fingers that held a powerful Bosnian cigarette. Turkish delight was laid on the table in front of me. “Even in the war, we tried to live well, though this was not always possible,” she said. “A mortar destroyed the apartment above mine. If the neighbors had not been staying with me at the time, they would have been killed.”

  She talked with one of her neighbor’s children, who had been a young boy at the time of the war, about how they used to gather together to sing and play the guitar. They laughed as they shared memories of their time under siege.

  “You remember the night when they were shelling upstairs we had a fashion show down here?” he asked her. Dada laughed and talked about the outfits they put on and how they strutted and wore crazy hats as if they were on the runway in Milan or Paris, all by the light of flickering candles and the rumble of crashing artillery.

  “You know,” said Dada, “it was during the war, those were some of the best times too. We laughed and played music and we all came together. Life was very full in those years, with the good and the bad.”

  I sipped her liquor and tried to broach the subject of ethnicity. I was not sure how to ask. She had worked with the Jewish community for years, all through the siege of Sarajevo, risking sniper fire and mortar blasts to cross the river to get to work.

  “Are you Jewish?” I blurted, somewhat tactlessly. Her homemade liquor was strong.

  “Me?” she smiled. “No. I am not very religious, though I was raised a Muslim.”

  Dada, along with a Jewish community member named Giselle, was at the forefront of creating the children’s group.

  During the siege, the Jewish Community started a Sunday School for the children of community members to teach them about their religion. They watched videos and heard lectures about Judaism. I imagine, with so many of the community members fleeing the city, the motivation for these lessons was one of preservation. While religious observation was never a high priority for the rather secular Jews of Sarajevo, they feared, perhaps, a loss of the last cultural ties to Judaism in the Balkans. They were cut off from their cemetery in the hills on the front lines. To this day, there are bullet holes in even the oldest of the graves, dating back to when Ladino-speaking Jews arrived in Sarajevo fleeing the Inquisition. Land mines littered the rows between the graves. For years, one could not come up here safely. Cut off from their dead, the Jews used the Sunday School to keep their history and their culture alive as best they could.

  Early on, the school began attracting non-Jewish children. Children would come to the program and ask if they could bring their non-Jewish friends. Activities were limited during the war, and this program helped everyone take their minds off the terrible events around them. The community had clowns perform and threw parties in addition to the religious classes. During the Jewish High Holidays, non-Jewish children from the club were invited to visit temple services. The club members also visited major Orthodox, Catholic, and Muslim services. By understanding and experiencing each other’s faith, the hope was that future ethnic conflict could be prevented. The multi-religious program for children continues today.

  After the war, with UN troops patrolling the city, the leaders of the Jewish community decided to continue reaching out to the children. Their children’s program, called Club Friends, has met every Sunday since the end of the war. The members come from all ethnicities.

  Primarily, the club was a venue in which to address the traumatic experiences that every child had during the war. Every summer, the Jewish community took the club on a trip into the mountains outside the city for a week. Giselle and Dada, along with other leaders of the community, hoped to create a safe space for children in which fun would flourish and the troubles of city life—where poverty and crime are still constant worries—would be left behind. It was a place to find childhood again. To this day, the scars of the war are visible on buildings in Sarajevo—many burnt out shells of structures stand in the city center. On Mount Igman, the community tries to put all that behind them and look to the future.

  “At first,” explained one mother, “the children didn’t know how to play. They had not been able to play outside for so long. They were very nervous.” Even now, years later, mementos of the war still interrupt play. The shell casing Christof dropped into my palm spoke of past horrors, horrors no one could fully forget. It was these memories, the memories of a time when everyone was forced to identify with one group or another in a way they never had before, that the club hoped to erase, but, looking at Christof, I could see much damage had been done. His loathing for our adopted mascot, the mutt we called Prijatelj, was a loathing of ethnicity, his own awareness of himself clashing with the identity imposed on him.

  I spent a lot of time over the four days on the mountain with Christof, kicking the ball around or walking without saying much. I tried to reinforce in him a sense of the validity of our dog’s existence, that he was no better or worse than other pure-bred dogs (there were two beloved German Shepherds at the guest house), but had everything to do with how loving and smart a dog he was and how amazingly strong he was because he survived. Christof listened, and at times when he thought no one was watching, would pet the dog, once even bringing him water, but there was no Aha! moment; no great breakthrough in his defensive shell. To the last day on the mountain, he still bullied the mutt, still shouted at him and called him names, his face red with anger that this ugly monster, this mixed breed, should live. Over the course of the next year, I learned, Christof and his little brother stopped coming to the club events on Sundays, and neither returned to Mount Igman the next summer. I like to think my experiment in historically conscious psychosocial animal husbandry had some effect on his thinking, but I doubt it. His anger ran deep, deeper than a dog could cure.

  Luckily, his anger was not the norm. Most of the children in the group got along quite well. There were few conflicts among the kids in the club. One boy told one of the American women I was with, a psychologist who had been coming to the group since the war ended, that the kids did not want to “mess things up the way their parents did.” She too tried desperately to show the children the worth of the mixed breed dog. In our minds, he became Bosnia. He was a survivor, beaten, but living still, and determined. We wanted the children to see that being purebred was not the most important thing, not so important at all. It was all about who you were inside. The dog was an uphill battle, a stretched metaphor perhaps, for which the kids had no time. They had real identity battles to fight and at the moment, real fun to have. No time to play with a big ugly dog they didn’t like, even if that “meant something” to the visiting psychologist types. The business of childhood continued.

  The adults worked hard to create a safe space for young people, where the ethnic tensions that surrounded them did not have to exist. The children too were committed to this idea, for the most part. They wanted the past to be the past and did not dwell on it, did not show any eagerness to talk about these issues—it was talking about ethnicity that c
aused all the problems in their minds to begin with. History was best left below—on Mount Igman at least, soccer or arts and crafts were the more pressing concerns. The dog was not popular, perhaps, because he was a reminder.

  I played soccer most days and watched Christof passing the ball eagerly to his Serb, Jewish, Croat, and Muslim teammates without hesitation—well, with a bit of hesitation because he could be a showboat in the game and wanted a bit of the glory for himself. As they all played together on the field strewn with shell casings, I took a short hike to the ruins of Hotel Igman and the abandoned Alpine Slide from the Olympic games, now riddled with bullet holes. In spite of the history right in front of me, the physical evidence that games are no match for destruction, I got the sense that as long as the children kept playing soccer, there was hope.

  The children certainly had their resentments and their prejudices and their fears. Their futures were uncertain—when we left the mountain, economic hardship awaited every one of them. War criminals were still at large. Neither Ratko Mladic—the general responsible for the massacre of nearly 7,000 civilians at Srebrenica—nor Radovan Karadzic—the architect of the campaign of ethnic cleansing—had been apprehended and put on trial. Bosnia was essentially divided into two hostile states—the Muslim-dominated Federation and the Serb-dominated Republika Srbska.

  Though under the banner of one nation, the divisions were still strong, and politicians still tried to fan the flames of nationalism that burned just below the surface. Each of the two states had its own parliament, police force, and school curricula, its own laws and regulations. They even had their own separate armies. The central government had limited responsibilities and limited powers. NATO forces still handled much policing in the country, maintaining an uneasy peace between the two sides.