One Day the Soldiers Came - Charles London [99]
“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.