When Neighbors Were Real Human Beings

"We have a really diverse culture and history here in Bosnia and Herzegovina. The people who live in Sarajevo in particular are proud of this legacy. The Bosnian culture was additionally enriched with the arrival of Jews, who came from Spain some 500 years ago and became part of our country and part of our city. In this book, Eli Tauber, who is a Bosnian Jewish author, is trying to teach us more about the heroism of the Muslims who saved the Bosnian Jews during World War Two. Eli Tauber was born in Sarajevo, but his mother was a Sephardic Jew, and his father was an Ashkenazi Jew, because both Ashkenazi and Sephardim settled in the city. He decided that he wanted to describe these incredible actions of moral courage among ordinary neighbours ( Komšije ), and tell the story of those people from this area who were ‘righteous among the nations’. In this case, he’s talking about Bosnian Muslims who saved Jews during the war. The reason why I chose this book is because its story is really close to the Post-Conflict Research Center’s core project, which is called ‘Ordinary Heroes’. Our ‘Ordinary Heroes’ project features stories from the Holocaust , Rwanda , Cambodia and Bosnia, of people who during wars and genocide stood up against evil and tried to protect people they didn’t know or with whom they were friends and neighbours, and who risked their own lives to save them. They portray the thematic issues of transitional justice , discrimination, active and passive bystandership, and the different roles that individuals adopt during conflict. So this book tells the story of the legacy of the Jewish community and how they repaid this humanity during the last war. During the Bosnian war (1992-1995), the Jewish community of Sarajevo refused to take sides, opened their own humanitarian aid agency inside the city’s synagogue, and were soon joined by their Muslim, Croat and Serbian friends. They set up a huge hospital, and also a huge kitchen, where the ordinary people of Sarajevo were able to come for humanitarian aid and for medical aid. Throughout the siege of Sarajevo, the Jewish community provided the city with over 300 meals a day, seven days a week; offered Sunday school for children and language classes for adults; organized cultural activities. They organized convoys getting out not just the Jews from Sarajevo, but also Muslims, Serbs and Croats, by printing fake certificates allowing people to actually leave the city. The moral courage of the Jewish community during this war in the 1990s really does connect with this book by Eli Tauber and the story of the Second World War. The Jewish community from Sarajevo and Bosnia had a chance to return, in some way, this symbolic favour. The rescuers from Eli Tauber’s book, the Bosnian Muslims, have been commemorated at Yad Vashem. There is this big recognition, and it does explain this incredible connection among neighbours we have in our country. We have a saying that a neighbour is more important than a brother because your neighbour is closer and lives closer than your brother. So in the case of an emergency, he will be there before your brother. We do have this connection through centuries of helping each other. And through this book, Tauber highlights examples of courage in doing that."