One Day the Soldiers Came (26 page)

The multiethnic youth group with whom I was visiting on
Mount Igman, run by the Jewish community in Sarajevo, began informally during the siege. As the former communist nation of Yugoslavia began to break apart in 1991, the Jewish community saw unsettling signs of rising nationalism—new flags and slogans, angry rhetoric, guns everywhere—signs that brought back painful memories of the Holocaust.

Before World War II, Jews made up 13 percent of Sarajevo’s population. By the time the war was over, they made up less than 4 percent Their numbers dwindled, as they did for all of Europe’s Jews at the hands of Nazi death squads or in concentration camps. Still others escaped to join the partisans and
fight the German occupation, dying in combat to liberate their homeland from foreign invaders. Just down the hill from the soccer field stood a monument to the fallen partisans who liberated Yugoslavia from the fascist regime. Many Muslims and Christians in Bosnia hid their Jewish neighbors from the SS or the Ustashe (the Croatian branch of the Nazi party, essentially) at great peril to themselves. The war ended, and Marshal Tito took control of Yugoslavia, forging arguably one the most successful communist states in the post-war era.

Under Tito’s rule, ethnic tensions were suppressed and Jews were treated like any other member of the state. Yugoslavia tried to stand as an example of cosmopolitanism among the communist nations, and Sarajevo was the prime example. They touted their ethnic and economic harmony, wore it like a badge. They were the intersection of East and West, Muslim, Orthodox Christian, Catholic, and Jew. The architecture in the city was a rich assortment of styles and eras. Sarajevo hosted the 1984 Winter Olympic games, building a lovely Olympic Village, a new stadium and hotels, and a mammoth Alpine Jump on Mount Igman. Muslim, Jews, Catholics, Serbian Orthodox—all called themselves Yugoslavian.

This picture of harmony masked the nationalism brewing underneath the surface. Throughout the seventies and eighties, Serbian nationalism began to grow. The Serbian Orthodox Church aligned itself with Serbian nationalist politicians, largely due to the crisis in Kosovo. Serbs held a majority of government posts. At the same time, the Islamic revolutions around the globe—most notably in Iran—began to inspire Muslims to claim their own identity as a national group rather than a private religion as they had been defined. The Croats, Slovenes, and Serbs all claimed nationality, and the Muslims wanted the same. Agitation to that end met with hostility from the Serb
majority in the Communist Party and the argument that would eventually lead to the destruction of Yugoslavia and the start of the Bosnian war began to roil with accusations of repression and religious fanaticism.

But the Jewish community who remained in Bosnia—some two thousand of them—never forgot who they were, though they generally tried to stay below the radar of nationalist debates. They tended the old cemetery in the hills, where the graves dated back to the sixteenth century. They maintained the old Sephardic synagogue in the Turkish quarter; they understood how easily a people could be lost, despite the illusion of harmony and prosperity, and how dangerous the revival of ethnic nationalism could be. They also remembered the great kindness many of their neighbors had shown them during the Nazi time. Perhaps more than any group in Yugoslavia, they remembered the sting of war, which put them in an historically unique position in the early nineties: the ethnic conflict that erupted was not about the Jews.

At their annual meeting in Belgrade in June 1991, arguments between the Jews of Serbia and Croatia broke out over the question of independence. That month, Slovenia and Croatia had declared their independence from Yugoslavia—something Belgrade opposed because 12 percent of Croatia’s population was Serbian. The arguments between the Jews living in Serbia and the Jews from Croatia were fierce. There were loyalties among the Jews, of course, but these Jews were also members of nations and not completely immune to the patriotic fervor of the time. The Croatian Jews argued for the necessity of an independent Croatia, while the Serbian Jews argued with equal vigor for the maintenance of a state led by Belgrade.

The Bosnian Jews found themselves isolated from the other Jewish communities, who spent much of the meeting arguing
with each other. Loyalties divided between the family of Yugoslavian Jewry (who had met together every year since the end of World War II) and the national identity of the Jewish members. The tensions at the meeting made it clear that greater violence was coming. If the Jewish communities fell to bickering among themselves, what would happen between the other ethnic groups?

Jacob Finci, the head of La Benevolencija, the humanitarian arm of the Bosnian Jewish community at the time, recalls a visit to the beach in Croatia that summer when, in the parking lot, he experienced of shudder of terror. A group of men draped a Croatian flag over their car and stood around it drinking and singing patriotic songs. What struck Jacob was how much the nationalist flag of Croatia resembled the flag he had seen as young boy, fifty years earlier: the flag of the Ustashe, the Croatian Fascists. It was then that he was certain there would be no more peace in the Yugoslavia.

As independence movements stirred throughout the Balkans, tensions were highest in his home country of Bosnia, the most ethnically mixed of the former republics of Yugoslavia. Radovan Karadzic, the leader of the Bosnian Serbs and a trained psychiatrist (and, oddly, an amateur poet of mediocre ability), stated that if Bosnia tried to declare its independence, they would be on a “highway of hell.”

When the Bosnian parliament overwhelmingly passed a referendum on independence in April 1992, the Serb MPs boycotted the vote. Soon afterwards, both sides erected barricades around the city.

On April 6, 1992, during an independence rally, Serb forces and Bosnian police clashed, starting the civil war. True to his threat, Radovan Karadzic and the head of the Bosnian army, Ratko Mladic (both currently under indictment for crimes
against humanity), did indeed turn much of Bosnia into a hell for the Muslims: mass rapes and massacres spread throughout the country. Under the banner of Orthodox Christian zeal and patriotism, Serbian nationalists aimed to “cleanse” Bosnia of its Muslim population. They forced Muslims from their homes, stole their identity papers, and destroyed their mosques and cultural sites. While Muslim forces were also guilty of human rights abuses, little evidence suggests that targeting civilians was a matter of policy as it was for the Serb army. The Serbs hoped to hold Bosnia as a part of Slobodan Milošević’s aspirations toward a “Greater Serbia.”

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 snip
ers 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.