One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [97]
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,