Part One: 1492 to 1942
Where is the key that was in the drawer?
My forefathers brought it with great love.
They told their children, this is the heart of our home in Spain…
dreams of Spain. – Flory Jagoda
Jews lived in Spain for 2,000 years. By 1492, most of the Iberian Peninsula – Al-Andalus – had been Muslim for over 700 years. For much of that time Muslims, Jews and Christians had lived in a “golden age” of tolerance and harmony, producing works of vast cultural and scientific significance. The period was known as Convivencia, (”the Coexistence.”) Traditional Islam requires tolerance of the Dhimmi, the other Abrahamic faiths.
Modern Spanish is an amalgam of Latin and Arabic. Many Spanish-based English words that begin with “al” – alchemy, almanac, algebra, alfalfa, alcohol, albatross, almond, etc, have Arabic origins.
You can still see evidence of this cultural harmony in the city of Toledo. Its Synagogue, “El Transito,” was built for the Jews in 1360 – by Muslim craftsmen, at the blessing of the Christian King.
(This was during the lifetime of Hafiz, and not long after Rumi’s death). In addition to Hebrew lettering, its elaborate carvings include symbols of the Catholic King and verses from the Koran. Unfortunately, the peace was destroyed a generation later, when anti-Semitic violence broke out all over Spain, and thousands of Jews perished.
Thousands converted to Catholicism and were known as conversos, or New Christians. At first these conversions seemed an effective solution to the cultural conflict; many converso families met with social and commercial success. But eventually this made the New Christians unpopular with the church and royal hierarchies. Catholic suspicions were only heightened by the fact that some of the coerced conversions were undoubtedly insincere. Some, but not all, conversos had chosen to salvage their social and commercial prestige by the only option open to them – baptism and embrace of Christianity – while privately adhering to their Jewish faith. These secret practitioners were commonly referred to as crypto-Jews or marranos.
In 1480, King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella created the Spanish Inquisition; under its authority, thousands of marranos were found guilty of false conversions and killed. They also presided over the last wars with the Muslims, which Christians call the Reconquista.
The city of Granada, the last Muslim-held territory in Spain, succumbed to the Christian armies in January 1492, and the Inquisition quickly moved to stamp out all traces of both Islam and Judaism. One of its first acts was to burn thousands of books (a common theme in this essay), the heritage of Spain’s golden age. Then the monarchs gave all Jews four months to convert or leave the country. They were permitted to take their belongings with them – except “gold or silver or minted money.” The punishment for those who did not leave by the deadline was death. Christians who hid Jews were punished with confiscation of all belongings and hereditary privileges. Scholars disagree about how many Jews left Spain because of the decree; the numbers vary between 130,000 and 800,000.
The head of Spain’s Jewish community negotiated a slight but symbolic reprieve from the original date of July 31st to August 2nd. Why? Because that date corresponded to the ninth of Ab (Tisha B’Av) in the Jewish calendar, the anniversary of the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem. He wanted history to understand the depth and breadth of this loss by recalling the date of this second Diaspora when commemorating the first. Perpetrators as well as victims take notice of dates like this. In 1942, well aware that the eve of Tisha B’Av was July 22nd, German authorities would begin liquidating the Jews of the Warsaw Ghetto.
On August 2nd 1492, the last Jews left Spain, or as they had called it for two millennia, Sepharad. As they searched for new homes in the east, they became known as Sephardic Jews, haunted forever by memories of their lost homeland. Many Sephardim still live in Turkey and the Mid-East. Prior to the Holocaust, 50,000 of them lived in Greece but still spoke Ladino, their old Spanish-Hebrew dialect. It is said that as recently as the 20th century, some of their descendants still kept the keys to the houses they had left behind.
We also note that many Palestinians still possess the keys to houses they had owned for generations, but which the Israeli army evicted them from in 1948.
In the 2014 novel The Bosnia List, a refugee Muslim brings her door keys with her to America. This essay is about just that: the ironic narrative of Jews and Muslims, their shared respect for each other and some astonishingly synchronistic events.
While art lovers have long appreciated Medieval illuminated manuscripts such as the Lindisfarne Gospels and the Book of Kells, few realize that not all these masterpieces were Christian in origin; some were created by Jews. Until a certain codex was discovered in 1894, historians widely believed that figurative painting had been entirely suppressed among medieval Jews because of the injunction against “graven images” in the Ten Commandments. This iconoclastic proscription is echoed in Islamic culture and certain historical periods of Christianity.
One Sephardic family took with them such a manuscript, a Passover prayer book that had been produced during that harmonious period in the 1350’s. Known as the Sarajevo Haggadah, it is considered one of the most valuable books in the world.
A Haggadah, from the Hebrew root “HGD” (“to tell”) relates the story of the exodus from Egypt, which Jews read during the Passover Seder. (Wine stains on the parchments of the Sarajevo Haggadah testify that this book, though lavishly designed, was read at such family feasts.) The little parchment codex was rich in gold and silver leaf, lavishly illuminated with precious pigments made from lapis lazuli, azurite, and malachite. The illustrations resemble those of medieval Christian Psalters, but some of the decoration appears to be in Islamic style. One particularly mystifying scene depicts a Spanish Seder with a woman whose black skin and African features contrast with those of other participants, but who holds some matzo and wears the costume of a wealthy Spanish Jew of the era.
Other things were happening in 1492 Spain. As I have noted, the last Jews left on that auspicious date of August 2nd. The next day – August 3rd – three ships left Seville’s port heading west to find the fabled Indies. Cristobol Colon took with him a Jewish scholar, Luis de Torres, who knew Arabic. Since Arabic was still the language of high culture in Spain, Columbus naturally but naively assumed that it would be spoken in the Indies, and that he’d need a translator.
In Portugal, where many Spanish Jews found a brief refuge before being expelled a second time, ownership of Hebrew books became a capital offense. One man’s account from 1497 tells how he “dug a grave among the roots of a blossoming olive tree” to hide his books, knowing that he’d never return to unearth them:
Yet, although a tree flourishing with lovely fruit stood there…did I call it Tree of Sorrows.
A place to settle, but not to call home: Sometime in the following century, the Haggadah appeared in Venice, where a Jewish community thrived on a tiny island that had previously served as the city’s foundry, or geto. The first Jews arrived from Germany in 1516. Next came Jews from Egypt and Syria. The exiles from Iberia gradually increased the population, and the ghetto’s tight-pressed, multistory dwellings became the tallest in the city. In Venice, you can visit the neighborhood that housed thousands of Jews on only a few acres.
Venice offered Jews property rights and legal protection unmatched elsewhere in Europe at that time. Still, they had to wear colored caps to identify them when they left the ghetto, and its gates were locked at night. They were banned from most trades, including printing, and any Hebrew books that were not approved by the Pope’s ecclesiastical censor were publicly burned.
Books could be destroyed or defaced for many perceived heresies – such as suggestions that the Messiah was yet to come, or arguments against the use of saints or any other intercessors as mediators between humans and an indivisible God, or any reference to Jews as “holy”. A Catholic priest, Giovanni Domenico Vistorini, inspected the Haggadah in 1609. Little is known of him, but many Catholic Hebraists of the time were marranos. He apparently found nothing objectionable in the Haggadah, on which he wrote Revisto per mi (“Surveyed by me”).
How or when the book left Venice and arrived in Sarajevo is a mystery, but in 1894, just over 400 years after it left Spain, the National Museum in Sarajevo, Bosnia, acquired it.
Because Bosnia was then occupied by Austria-Hungary, officials sent the Haggadah for evaluation to the empire’s capital, Vienna, where it was immediately hailed as a masterpiece, and then damaged by an inept conservator who bungled the rebinding. No one knows what the original covers of the Haggadah were like, but most books with such liberal use of gold leaf and expensive pigments also had elaborate bindings – hand-tooled kid, embossed silver, or mother-of-pearl inlay. The Viennese conservator discarded whatever binding was on the book in 1894 and replaced it with cheap boards covered in an inappropriate Turkish floral design.
Bosnia was one of the few territories in Europe to welcome Jews after the expulsion, although there is archeological evidence of Jewish residence there since Roman times. By the early 16th century, Jews settled in what was then an Ottoman market crossroads. The city grew to graceful, cosmopolitan maturity and became known for its tolerance. Muslim mosques and Serbian Orthodox and Catholic churches occupied the same neighborhoods as synagogues, and residential neighborhoods were mostly mixed. It was another “Convivencia.” In 1921, 10,000 of Sarajevo’s 70,000 inhabitants spoke Ladino.
Geraldine Brooks fictionalized the story in her novel People of the Book. You can read an essay of hers with more details here. But the true story is more amazing.
Part Two: 1942 to 1992
To be born is to be weighed down with strange gifts of the soul, with enigmas and an inextinguishable sense of exile. – Ben Okri
The basis for the Ustasha movement is religion. For minorities such as Serbs, Jews, and Gypsies, we have three million bullets. – Mile Budak
Sarajevo was a rich cultural ferment that included Muslim Albanians, Catholics, orthodox Christians, Roma and Jews. Some called it “Little Jerusalem.” This lost world is depicted in the novel and TV series The Scent of Rain in the Balkans.
Most students of history know that the city played a small but significant role in 1914, when the assassination of a Serbian noble set off the mad chain of events that led to war. But here we are interested in Sarajevo’s role in World War Two. The Jewish community of Bosnia and Herzegovina numbered 14-22,000 in 1941. Most lived in Sarajevo, comprising 20% of the city’s population.
In 1942 the city was absorbed into the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, whose fascist Ustashe crushed its tolerant, cosmopolitan culture. Its head was Hitler’s ally, Ante Pavelic, who proclaimed that his new state must be “cleansed” of Jews, Roma and Serbs: “Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them”.
Now some actual names enter our story, and some are still alive.
The terror began on April 16th, when the German Army entered Sarajevo and sacked the city’s eight synagogues. The Sarajevo pinkas, a record of the Jewish community from its earliest days, was confiscated. Deportations followed. Jews, Roma and Serbs turned frantically to Muslim or Croat neighbors to hide them. Fear of denunciation spread through the city.
Hitler, meanwhile, had a plan for a “museum of an extinct race.” The Germans had already spared synagogues in Prague’s Jewish quarter, so that, when Europe’s Jews had been obliterated, it could become a caricature “Jew Town” for Aryan tourists to visit, populated by Czech actors in Hasidic garb. The museum’s future exhibits would eventually fill fifty warehouses. The best of Europe’s Judaica was being amassed as part of the general plunder under the authority of Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories Alfred Rosenberg, who dreamed of a new branch of scholarship: Judenforschung ohne Juden (Jewish studies without Jews). Hitler had directed the army to extend all possible assistance to his thugs.
The Nazi commander in Sarajevo was General Johan Fortner. In addition to commanding his own Army division, he oversaw an Ustashe regiment known as the Black Legion. Reputedly the most vicious of the Nazi allies, the Legion conducted large-scale massacres of Serbs and Jews and tortured and murdered suspected partisan sympathizers.
Shortly after the Germans took control of Sarajevo, Fortner arrived at the museum demanding to speak to the director, Jozo Petrović, who knew very well what Fortner was looking for. Speaking no German, he asked chief librarian Dervis Korkut, a Muslim, to translate.
Korkut’s family were alims, or intellectuals, famous for producing judges of Islamic law. His brother Besim was a professor of Arabic. Dervis aspired to be a doctor, but his father insisted that he continue the family tradition of religious scholarship. He studied theology at Istanbul University and Near Eastern languages at the Sorbonne. Speaking ten languages, he served briefly as the senior official in the ministry of religious affairs and as an honorary consul for France. His abiding interest was the culture of Bosnia’s minorities, including Jews. In 1941, after Yugoslavia tried to appease the Nazis by passing anti-Jewish laws, Korkut wrote a paper titled “Anti-Semitism Is Foreign to the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegovina.”
As a prominent intellectual, Korkut had come under intense pressure to join a Fascist-leaning Muslim group. He refused. Later, he also refused an order signed by Pavelic, requiring him to relocate to Croatia to take charge of the Ustashe-controlled library.
Korkut’s passionate interest in Bosnia’s cultural diversity manifested itself in his studies of the region’s art and literature. He was fascinated by the myriad influences in Sarajevan writing – how a lyric poem composed by a Slav might use classical Arabic and yet echo Latin verse forms carried to Sarajevo from the court of Diocletian. Of all the treasures in his care, none embodied the possibilities of diversity – or the fragility of intercultural harmony – as the Sarajevo Haggadah.
A few minutes before meeting with Fortner, Korkut pleaded to be allowed to take the Haggadah and keep it out of Nazi hands. The reluctant director warned, “You will be risking your life” but agreed.
The two men hurried to the basement and removed the Haggadah from its safe. Korkut tucked the small (6 by 9 inches) codex into the waistband of his trousers. Then they made their way back upstairs to face the general, who had come specifically for the Haggadah. Petrović lied, claiming that he’d already given it to one of Fortner’s officers. Frustrated, Fortner left, and Dervis took the Haggadah home.
What happened next? In 2007, Dervis’ widow Servet told Geraldine Brooks:
I knew he had a book from the library, and that it was very important. He said, “No one must know or they’ll kill us and destroy the book”...That afternoon, he drove out of the city, to Visoko, where one of his sisters lived, on the pretext of visiting her. From there, he took the book to a remote village on nearby Trescavica, where his friend was hodza, or imam, of the local mosque. There, the Haggadah was hidden among Korans and other Islamic texts for the duration of the war. When it was safe, the hodza brought it back to us, and Dervis returned it to the museum.
But what really matters to the Korkut family is another rescue – of a young Jewish woman. “In our family,” his son Munib tells, “the Haggadah is a detail. What my father did for Jewish people – that is the biggest thing that we, in our family, have to be proud of.” The girl, Mira Papo, like most Sarajevo Jews, was descended from Sephardim who, over the centuries had made the same journey as the Haggadah, from Spain to Bosnia.
But the ethnic cleansing had begun. Mira’s father was rounded up along with other Jewish men and sent to a so-called labor camp. These camps were little more than way stations of starvation and brutality en route to Bosnia’s notorious death pits.
Bosnia-Herzegovina sits on a limestone lacework of underground caves. The geology, as Brian Hall wrote in The Impossible Country, is “a mass-murderer’s dream come true, a mighty necropolis of empty mass graves, high and dry, waiting to be filled.” Jews and Serbs – Salomon Papo almost certainly among them – had their throats cut before being pushed off the edge. The most notorious death camps were at Pag and Jasenovac, where 100,000 people were murdered, including 20,000 Jews. Most of the 4,000 Jews who survived fought with the partisans or escaped to the Italian-controlled zone. Balkan memory is long. The fact that half of the victims were Serbs helps explain why, 50 years later, Serbs would be so brutal to both Croats and Muslims.
When they came for the women, Mira defied an order to assemble at a Jewish community center. When she found that her mother and two aunts were being held there, she climbed in through a back window and urged them to escape from the city with her. When they refused, she said that she would stay with them, but they insisted that she get away and survive. She watched as the women were loaded onto trucks, never to be seen again.
Mira escaped from Sarajevo and joined the communist partisan resistance. Before the war, she had been a member of a socialist Zionist youth group called the Young Guardians. She’d had to slip away to its meetings because her father did not approve of its modern, secular bent. The Young Guardians fostered an ethos of idealism and self-sacrifice, qualities held to be necessary to future Zionist pioneers. The group had learned outdoor skills and first aid, which were now useful to the partisans.
At the beginning of the war, when Josip Broz Tito – who would become Yugoslavia’s postwar leader – called for Yugoslavians of all ethnicities and political persuasions to rise up against the German occupation, her youth group joined an odred, or partisan unit. They used classic guerrilla tactics, conducting hit-and-run strikes and then retreating to the mountains, where local people hid them. The partisans included 3,000 Jewish fighters, including 700 members of the Rab battalion. Over 1,300 would die.
Throughout the brutal mountain winter of 1942, Mira served as muleteer and medic while her unit harassed the Germans. The mule was essential to the odred’s survival, carrying ammunition and medical supplies. Memoirs by British and American officers who conducted parachute drops into partisan territory, romanticize these partisans as bands of high-spirited teenagers who danced late into the night in barns before setting out to blow up a bridge.
At this early stage of the Resistance, there were two anti-Fascist forces, Tito’s Communist partisans and the anti-Communist, Serbian Chetniks. For a while, the two groups buried their ideological differences, but eventually the Chetniks betrayed the partisans. In March 1942, Tito reorganized his forces. Mira’s Jewish odred was stripped of their weapons and abandoned.
Helpless, they split into small groups to increase their chances of eluding German patrols. For days and nights, they moved through the forest, hunted constantly. Those who were discovered died gruesomely. One account tells of captured partisans being tied up on a roadway and repeatedly run over by German trucks. Of the odred’s 30 members, only a handful made it back to Sarajevo. Mira was one of them, but her family was gone.
“I entered Sarajevo at dawn of a spring day. The streets were still empty,” Mira wrote. She was carrying a few eggs tied up in a scarf that had been given to her by the family of one of her comrades, whose mother had also supplied her with papers allowing her to enter the occupied city.
Exhausted, Mira drifted toward the center of the city, “thinking about what to do, who to go to.” She came to the Finance Ministry building, where her late father had been a janitor. The only light in the building at that early hour came from the porters’ room. A man emerged, whom she recognized as her father’s friend. “I called out his name and the traditional Bosnian greeting, ‘God help us.’” He did not recognize her after her year of hardship. “Then he said, ‘Are you Salomonova?’” – Salomon’s daughter – “I nodded my head and started to cry.” He left but returned with a distinguished-looking gentleman – Dervis Korkut – who drove her to his home.
Despite not knowing her and despite the considerable risk – he was a prominent person at whose home German officers frequently attended concerts – he and Servet took Mira in and called her Amira (“princess”). Servet gave her one of her own traditional Muslim veils – a zar – that conceals the body and most of the face and passed her off as a servant who was caring for the infant Munib. Mira and Servet, who were the same age, became close friends.
For four months, Mira lived in hiding with the Korkuts. Then, in August, a stranger arrived with an envelope for her containing false identity papers and a rail ticket. An aunt who was married to a Catholic had arranged for her to hide in a family house on the Dalmatian coast, where there were no Germans. She stayed there until the end of the war.
The Nazis and the Ustashe murdered 80% of Sarajevo’s 12,000 Jews and destroyed its eight synagogues. In 1944 they rounded up, deported and gassed the Jews in the Venice Ghetto, as well as all but a handful of Salonika’s 50,000 Ladino-speaking Sephardic Jews.
Only one German-occupied country refused to give up its Jews – Muslim Albania, and it has its own remarkable heroes, such as Ali Sheqer Pashkaj. “Why did my father save a stranger at the risk of his life and the entire village?” asks his son, “My father was a devout Muslim. He believed that to save one life is to enter paradise.” There are many such stories, including some in which local police refused to denounce their neighbors for hiding Jews. Not a single Jewish life was lost to the Nazis in Albania. Of the 22,000 righteous gentiles honored at Israel’s Yad Vashem (which has its own complex history), 70 are Muslims, most of them Albanians. Elsewhere – in North Africa, Bulgaria and even in Paris, Muslims protected Jews.
But, as always, because of its multi-ethnic nature, Balkan history is unusually complicated. Various groups fought both the Germans and, due to ancient enmities, each other. The Ustashe, and at times, Serbian Chetnicks massacred Muslims. And not all Muslims were so kind to their Jewish neighbors. A division composed mostly of Muslims served alongside the Germans, fighting against the partisans.
It earned a reputation for brutality, not only during combat but also for atrocities committed against Serbs and Jews. Many deserted to the partisans. After the war, ten of its officers were executed as war criminals, while hundreds of its veterans fought in the 1948 Arab–Israeli War.
By that time, any partisan veterans were well placed in the new Tito regime. Mira returned to Sarajevo and was commissioned as an officer in the Yugoslav medical corps. She married a fellow army officer and former partisan named Bozidar Bakovic, and their future in the new Communist era seemed assured.
Then Servet found her and begged help for her husband. The new Yugoslav regime was taking vengeance against the Nazis and the Ustashe and executing many, including General Kortner. But they were also using these war-crimes trials to silence dissident voices. Dervis Korkut, just as unwilling to bow to Communist excesses as he had been to fascism, had become an outspoken critic of Tito’s repression of religion. He had also compiled a list of people whom the Chetnicks had executed. Tito considered such lists inconvenient. He had granted amnesty to many Chetniks, suppressing potential intercommunal rifts to consolidate his unified Communist state. The regime had arrested Dervis as a Nazi collaborator.
Mira assured Servet that she would testify on his behalf, but she never came to court. Her husband feared that the Party would turn its wrath upon them if she appeared as a witness for someone in what was clearly a political trial. He refused to let her give evidence for the man who’d saved her life.
She didn’t know it, but Dervis survived. Others came forward who knew about the Haggadah to testify on his behalf. Still, he received a stiff prison sentence of six years, mostly in solitary confinement.
Servet’s apartment was confiscated and her food ration rescinded. She, Munib, now five years old, and her two-year-old daughter Abida became temporarily homeless. Since Dervis’s large and prosperous family was unwilling to risk associating with her, they went to stay with one of her own relatives who lived in the province of Kosovo, arriving there in the middle of a meningitis outbreak. Abida became infected and soon died.
Upon release, Dervis resumed his old job but lost all citizenship rights. Then 67, he had not wanted another child. “He didn’t want, but I wanted,” says Servet. Lamija was born in 1955, thirteen years younger than her brother, and her parents chose to shield her from their difficult past.
Dervis and Lamija were very close until he died, when Lamija was fourteen. “I always felt I could ask him about anything, and he would explain it patiently to me,” Lamija says. “When I was a small child, afraid before going to sleep, he would tell me a story...I could visit him at work, anything, and he always had time for me”.
“When he died,” Lamija recalled, “so many people came to the house, saying, ‘He helped me find a job,’ ‘He gave me loans,’ ‘He guaranteed my credit,’ ‘He found a flat for me.’ Then I realized how he was a good person and how many good things he did and never mentioned.” One of those things was his rescue of Mira Papo, and Mira had also never mentioned it.
Mira remained a devoted Communist. But her husband died and she was left alone with two infants, Davor and Daniel. Recently demobilized, she lost her right to military housing and was herself briefly homeless. Eventually the Army took her back as a medical officer, in charge of public health on the Dalmatian coast. Over time, she became disillusioned with the dream of a socialist utopia. Davor immigrated to Israel in 1970 and she followed in 1972.
As time passed, Europe seemed to let go of its wounds. But the old enmities, like the Titans of Greek myth, had merely been cast into the underworld of unresolved forgetfulness, where they festered and gained strength. In 1984, modern Sarajevo hosted the Winter Olympics and once again proudly displayed its cosmopolitan, tolerant self. Soon, however, the Bosnian War erupted, shattered that image and eventually claimed another 250,000 dead.
On May 17th, 1992, Serbian artillery destroyed Sarajevo’s Oriental Institute. Tens of thousands of books and manuscripts burned. Then, on August 27th (almost precisely 500 years from the date the Jews left Spain, and fifty years after Dervis had saved the Haggadah), the Serbs shelled the National Library and Museum. They dropped dozens of shells on adjacent streets, deliberately preventing fire brigades from approaching. Ironically, their snipers fired from the Jewish cemetery.
The fire lasted into the next day, and everywhere sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ash, floated down like dirty snow. Catching a page, said local people, you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand.
People did what they could. Vedran Smailović, known as the “Cellist of Sarajevo”, risked sniper fire to play Albinoni’s lament Adagio in G minor in ruined buildings.
The Jewish community provided aid. Its leader announced that their nonsectarian relief effort was partly a gesture of gratitude to local Muslims who had hidden Jews 50 years earlier. They aided in the evacuation of 2,500 Sarajevo residents, only one-third of whom were Jewish.
The Serbs targeted so many important buildings that Sarajevo architects coined the term “warchitecture” to describe war carried out through the destruction of architecture. During WW II the Nazis had burned twenty million books, but not in one place (rather, in about 45 different places). This single event in Sarajevo, then, may have been the biggest book burning in history – some say over a million books. And yet, under sniper fire, Sarajevo citizens formed human chains, passing books from the flames.
Why, like 16th-century Catholics, 20th-century Nazis – and 21st-century Israelis – would the Serbs want to burn books? The answer is that cultural productions are the places of memory, the kindred fruits of the human imagination. They tell stories of complexity and nuance, the very things ideological purists hate the most.
Burning books and destroying culturally important buildings creates the situation where the people of a society (in this case, Muslims who had lived in Sarajevo for 500 years) might have no memory of their past. So, don’t the surviving artifacts symbolize both tolerance and resistance? Modern white nationalists, inspired by these atrocities, know this very well.
But what about the Haggadah? It was saved once again by an archaeology professor, another Muslim.
Enver Imamovic convinced several policemen to drive him through a rain of bullets and mortar shells to the burning museum. When the police chief asked him incredulously whether the book was as valuable as a human life, Imamovic, without hesitating, said yes.
He and the policemen spent hours searching the cavernous structure before they found and broke into the fortified safe that held the Haggadah. Then they braved the bullets once again to get it to the city’s central bank vault and locked it up for most of the war.
Imamovic has remarked that only foreign reporters ask why Muslims would risk their lives for a Jewish book. The fact that all the rescuers were Muslims reveals the most important quality of pre-war Sarajevo.
Although Serb nationalists attempted to separate ethnic identities, most Bosnians – especially those in Sarajevo – didn’t see themselves as Muslims, Croats or Serbs, but as part of a shared identity. Imamovic says the city’s Jewish heritage was as important to them as any other because it’s what made Bosnia the rich cultural mix that the nationalists wanted to destroy. The Haggadah was a symbol of that.
After the war, the Muslim Bosnian authorities were accused of having sold the Haggadah (valued at $700 million) for weapons. But the Bosnian President quelled the rumor by presenting it to the Jewish community.
This story, however, is not over, not even close.
PART THREE: 1994 to 1999
Whoever saves one life is as though he had saved the entire world. – The Talmud
Mira Papo, now 72 and an Israeli citizen, had been wracked by guilt ever since 1946 for not having appeared at the show trial of the man who had saved her life.
During the breakup of Yugoslavia and the siege of Sarajevo from 1992 to 1996, Israel offered temporary shelter to Bosnian refugees. One of them left behind an out-of-date newsletter that Mira came across in Jerusalem. Printed in Serbo-Croatian with items of interest to Jews in the former Yugoslavia, it featured an article commemorating Korkut. Spellbound, she read about the good deeds of the man she had failed, including his role in saving the Sarajevo Haggadah.
Stunned to discover that he had not been executed in 1946 but had died from natural causes in 1969, she wrote, “It was as if a stone fell from my heart.” Her daughter-in-law remembers Mira, after finding the article, weeping and murmuring to herself in Serbo-Croatian. It was the first she or Davor had heard of Korkut.
Hoping to give the testimony she had failed to deliver at his trial, Mira wrote to Yad Vashem. The letter states that what follows is “...my true story, how Dervis Efendi Korkut saved me from certain death.” By describing what really happened, Mira wrote, she hoped to make amends: “Perhaps this modest material will help to clarify his identity as a great friend of the Jews of Bosnia long before World War II. I remain as a solitary witness that Dervis was indeed so, even in a time when we had few true friends.”
At the time that Mira was writing this, Servet had escaped the new horrors of Sarajevo, living with Munib in Paris. She was astonished when an Israeli diplomat called to tell her that she and Dervis had been named Righteous Among Nations. Their names were to be inscribed in the gardens of Yad Vashem, near the trees planted in memory of Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler. Servet was unable to travel there to see their names inscribed, so Yad Vashem came to her. At a ceremony in the Israeli Embassy in Paris she received a certificate of honor, Israeli citizenship and a monthly stipend.
Then she received a phone call from Mira, who explained why she had failed to appear at the trial, and how tormented she had been. Servet told her old friend that even if she had testified, it would have made no difference, because the court had already made its decision. “Mira said that ever since she left Yugoslavia, she had wanted to get in touch with me, to apologize, but that she wasn’t able. ‘It’s O.K.,’ I said to her. ‘I understand.’’’
Mira died in 1998, just a year too soon to see how completely her belated testimony would accomplish the restitution she desired.
Servet’s daughter Lamija had become an economist, married an Albanian man (changing her last name to Jaha), had two children and settled in Pristina, in the Serbian region of Kosovo. At some point, Servet gave a copy of the certificate to her. Lamija couldn’t read Hebrew and had no idea of its significance, only that it had something to do with her father. By 1999, however, Kosovo was also sliding toward war. Serbia began another campaign of ethnic cleansing to rid itself of Albanians. In March, NATO began bombing Serbia.
Lamija and her husband were desperate to obtain exit visas for themselves and their children. While her husband called relatives in Sweden, Lamija contacted Munib, who requested help from friends in in Paris, but to no avail. Somehow, she was able to evacuate the children. Soon after, her apartment lost electrical power. Then their phone lines went down. Through a wall, she could hear the phone next door ringing. The neighbors were Serbs, and she realized that the lines were being cut on the basis of ethnicity.
Then soldiers demanded that everyone must leave the building and head for the train station. They were each allowed two suitcases. Everyone was frantically trying to decide which things to take, with gunfire in the background. Somehow in the rush, it occurred to Lamija’s husband to fold up the certificate from Yad Vashem and put it in his pocket. Neither he nor Lamija could read Hebrew, and neither could remember what it was about, but somehow it seemed significant.
It was yet another experience of exile. And how can this narrative fail to remind us of that earlier holocaust, and of the ones occurring at the same time to other Muslims in Palestine? The Jahas joined a swarm of refugees surging toward the train station. Soldiers packed them aboard an overcrowded train – “27 people in a carriage made for six,” Lamija recalls – without telling them where they were going. They were discharged near the Macedonian border. In the chaos, they lost their bags. But they still had the photocopy of the certificate.
They found themselves among thousands of refugees in a stinking field with no proper latrines. “People were fighting for water,” she says. “There was no food, no blankets, no shelter. People were sick. Some were already dying.” As night fell, the temperature dropped sharply. When a few food packs arrived, the distribution turned into a riot.
At 3:00 AM, the Jahas decided that remaining there was too dangerous. They crept out of the field and walked all night toward the Macedonian border, carrying nothing but her pocketbook. They concocted a story to a border guard about having left a car on the other side. They lied about the direction they’d come from and denied having been near the refugee camp. Whether he believed the unlikely tale or took pity on them, the guard let them cross.
The Jahas were safe in Skopje, if temporarily. Finding shelter with a relative, Lamija discovered that her children were safe in Budapest. But she and her husband – two of almost a million Kosovan refugees – were refused admission at all foreign embassies. And neither his family in Sweden nor Munib in Paris could do anything. Curiously, someone suggested they ask for local Jews for help.
On a whim, they found a leader of the local Jewish community and produced the crumpled photocopy. They were astonished to discover that it honored her parents. The Macedonian Jews, delighted by the opportunity to repay a debt from the war, went into a frenzy of lobbying and organizing. Four days later, Lamija and her husband flew to Tel Aviv, where they received the news that their children Fitore and Fatos would soon join them. They had become sudden celebrities.
The story of how Dervis, a Muslim, had saved Mira, and Mira, a Jew, had saved Dervis’s child proved irresistible to the Israeli media, and to its politicians. The war criminal Netanyahu, the unrelenting butcher of the Palestinians – remember those keys from Part One of this story? – took advantage of the photo opportunity and welcomed them. “Today,” he pontificated, “the state of Israel, which emerged from the ashes, gives refuge to the daughter of those who saved Jews.” The exhausted Lamija was speechless.
Then, in all the chaos, someone addressed her in Serbo-Croatian. “It was a good feeling, to have someone speaking your language,” she says. But she had no idea who this stranger was. Opening his arms, he introduced himself, and Lamija fell into the embrace of Mira Papo’s son Davor Bakovic, who took them home as long-lost relatives.
Earlier, Davor had traveled to France to present the award to Munib, but he had been unaware of Lamija’s existence. Late at night before the day of her impending arrival a reporter shocked him with the news that this woman was another Korkut child, and he hurried to greet her.
The Jahas remained in Israel for four years before moving to Canada, but they and their children remain very close with the Bakovic clan. ‘’It was an amazing discovery,’‘ Davor recalls. ‘’I felt as if a sister had appeared from a faraway place. I felt close to these people even though I didn’t know them at all. The circle of my life had become linked with Lamija and her family. To me it proved that people can’t be divided up into nations and sects. They’re human beings who can touch each other.’‘
The meeting was also a revelation for Lamija. Her father had never spoken to her about sheltering Jews. Servet had told her briefly about it only a few years before. “My father did what he did with all his heart, not to get anything in return. Fifty years later, it returns somehow. It’s a kind of a circle.’‘
This is the wartime miracle of two families and two faiths. But when we realize that a similar story happened to two other families in Bosnia, we wonder if this is less a miracle and more a model for what everyone should aspire to.
Well, we all love happy endings, but our story still isn’t over.
Part Four – 1999 to the Present
Today, some 280 Jews live in Bosnia and Herzegovina and have good relations with their Muslim and Christian neighbors. But the man who crawled under a hail of bullets in 1992 to save the Sarajevo Haggadah is profoundly sad. He says Bosnian culture survived the war, but he’s not sure it can survive the peace. Enver Imamovic doesn’t know what the fate of the Haggadah will be, and he knows that the government doesn’t care.
The 1995 peace agreement split Bosnia along ethnic lines into two semi-autonomous parts linked by a weak central government and guided by a constitution that left Sarajevo’s cultural institutions no guardian and little funding. Still, the Sarajevan Bosniaks rebuilt their National Museum, which the Serbs had tried so hard to erase from memory, and the Haggadah went on display in 2002. The city hall reopened in 2014. Re-painting 2,000 square meters of arabesques on its walls and ceilings took a year. The imagination of another time when diversity was respected survived because some people in our time could still appreciate – and celebrate – difference.
The Siege of Sarajevo had been the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare, lasting nearly four years. Twelve thousand died, including 600 children. But culture had been “a form of resistance,” says an art professor. “Women were wearing high heels and running from snipers to get to openings.” An employee of the museum (whose director was killed in the bombardment) adds that despite it all, “we even put on two exhibits during the siege.”
The new Museum built a vault with a bulletproof glass door to protect the Haggadah.
Visitors need special permission to enter, and only curators can touch it.
Several copies were made and the original 660-year-old manuscript was insured for $700 million. The literary world became aware of it in 2008 when the novel People of the Book became a bestseller.
But post-war Sarajevo is a very different place. The peace agreement that was supposed to help the country heal enshrined its ethnic differences. Only institutions that support the national identities received financial support. There was no agreement on funding for the upkeep of a multicultural legacy. For years, the museum survived on dwindling grants and donations.
In 2011 the Muslim Grand Mufti of Bosnia and Herzegovina presented a copy of the Haggadah to a representative of the Chief Rabbinate of Israel as a symbol of interfaith cooperation and respect. But in 2012, the Museum went bankrupt and closed, leaving future exhibition of the Haggadah in limbo.
Two years later, many employees were still working without pay to maintain the collection and the 162,000 volume-library.
In 2013, Servet Korkut died at age 88 and the New York Metropolitan Museum of Art attempted to arrange for a loan of the Haggadah, but Bosnia refused.
Ethnic hatred still bubbles beneath the surface, a situation that is mirrored in Israel, where, nearly 80 years after its creation (and the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba) and over 500 years since they were expelled from Spain, many Sephardic Jews still claim that the dominant Ashkenazim treat them and the Mizrahim (originally from Muslim countries) as second-class citizens. It is, of course, all relative. Israeli Jews are relatively safe and prosperous, while 5 million Palestinians are not. As in America, racial/ethnic identity still trumps human compassion and solidarity. As Yeats wrote in 1919,
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity.
But the descendants of the two families whose fates have been so intertwined have prospered. And, while the Haggadah is safe, if unavailable for viewing, you can see its pages online here. The little book has lived through a story where myth and history come together, a story (like all the great stories) that has no happy ending, indeed has no ending at all but simply invites us into an imagination of where it might go from here. Has it – and we – arrived at an impasse, or it is merely taking a breather?