chronicles the book of exodus

A double rescue in wartime . by Geraldine brooks

hen the Axis powers conquered commanded to tell to their children. It Korkut pleaded to be allowed to take and divided Yugoslavia, in the is used at the table during the the and keep it out of Nazi springW of 1941, Sarajevo did not fare Seder. (Wine stains on the parchments hands. The director was reluctant. “You well. The city cradled by mountains that of the Sarajevo Haggadah testify that will be risking your life,” he warned. Rebecca West once described as like “an this book, though lavishly designed, was Korkut replied that as kustos—custodian opening flower” suddenly found itself read at such family feasts.) of the library’s two hundred thousand absorbed into the Nazi puppet state of There were rumors at the time of volumes—the book was his responsibil- Croatia, its tolerant, cosmopolitan cul- Hitler’s nascent plan for a “Museum of ity. So the two men hurried to the base- ture crushed by the invading German an Extinct Race.” Synagogues and com- ment, where the Haggadah was kept in Army and the Croatian Fascist Ustashe. munity buildings in Josevof, the Jewish a safe whose combination only the di- Hitler’s ally, Ante Pavelic, who had quarter of Prague, had been spared de- rector knew. He took the book from a headed the Ustashe through the nine- struction so that, when all of Europe’s protective box and handed it to Korkut. teen-thirties, proclaimed that his new Jews had been obliterated, it could be- Korkut lifted his coat and tucked the state must be “cleansed” of Jews and come a caricature “Jew Town” for Aryan small codex, which measured about six Serbs: “Not a stone upon a stone will re- tourists to visit, populated by Czech ac- by nine inches, into the waistband of his main of what once belonged to them.” tors in Hasidic garb. The museum’s fu- trousers. He smoothed his jacket, mak- The terror began on April 16th, ture exhibits would eventually fill fifty ing sure that no bulges broke the line of when the German Army entered Sara- warehouses. The best of Europe’s Juda- his suit, and the two men made their jevo and sacked the city’s eight syna- ica was being amassed as part of the way back upstairs to face the general. gogues. The Sarajevo pinkas, a complete general plunder under the authority of record of the Jewish community from its Alfred Rosenberg, the Reich Minister he man so determined to protect a earliest days, was sent to Prague and was for the Occupied Eastern Territories. Jewish book was the scion of a never recovered. Deportations followed. Rosenberg’s collection was intended to prosperous,T highly regarded family of Jews, Gypsies, and Serbian resisters facilitate a new branch of scholarship: Muslim alims, or intellectuals, famous turned frantically to sympathetic Mus- Judenforschung ohne Juden (Jewish stud- for producing judges of Islamic law. lim or Croat neighbors to hide them. ies without Jews). Hitler admired Dervis’s brother, Besim, a professor of Fear of denunciation spread through the Rosenberg’s impeccable Fascist aesthet- Arabic, made the first good translation city, penetrating every workplace, even ics (Rosenberg had decried Expression- of the Koran into Serbo-Croatian. Der- the imposing neo-Renaissance halls of ism as “syphilitic”) and in 1940 had di- vis, born in the old Ottoman capital of the Bosnian National Museum. rected the Wehrmacht to extend all Bosnia, Travnik, in 1888, aspired to be The museum’s chief librarian, an Is- possible assistance to his unit. By the a doctor, but his father insisted that he lamic scholar named Dervis Korkut, war’s end, the Germans had looted continue the family tradition of reli- was an unlikely figure of resistance, but more than thirty thousand items of Ju- gious scholarship. He studied theology he had already made his anti-Fascist daica—silk Torah mantles, prayer at the University of Istanbul and Near feelings clear, in an article defending the shawls, silver ritual cups and dishes, and Eastern languages at the Sorbonne. He city’s beleaguered Jews. A handsome, portraits, kitchenware, and other do- spoke at least ten languages and served dapper man with a neatly trimmed mestic items that reflected centuries of for a time as the senior official in the mustache, he wore well-tailored three- Jewish life. And there were more than a Kingdom of Yugoslavia’s ministry of re- piece suits complemented by a fez. In hundred thousand Yiddish and Hebrew ligious affairs and as an honorary consul early 1942, when Korkut heard that a books. The Sarajevo Haggadah could for France. Nazi commander, General Johann easily have been one of them. His interests were wide-ranging. He Fortner, had arrived at the museum to Korkut probably hadn’t heard of wrote papers on history and architecture speak to its director, he immediately Hitler’s museum, but he had seen an- and a tract against alcohol abuse. But his feared for the museum library’s greatest cient Torah scrolls destroyed in Saraje- abiding interest was the culture of Bos- treasure, a masterpiece of medieval Ju- vo’s streets. When the museum’s direc- nia’s minority communities, including daica known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. tor, a respected Croatian archeologist Albanians and Jews. In 1940, when Yu- A Haggadah, from the Hebrew root who did not speak German, called for goslavia tried to appease the Nazis by “HGD”—“to tell”—relates the story of Korkut to act as a translator, a few min- passing anti-Jewish laws, Korkut wrote a from Egypt, which Jews are utes before his meeting with Fortner, paper titled “Anti-Semitism Is Foreign to

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 74—133SC. the Muslims of Bosnia and Herzegov- intriguing. In a scene that has mystified One man’s account, from Lisbon in ina,” in which he explored the benign his- scholars, a depiction of a Spanish Seder 1497, tells how he “dug a grave among tory of Bosnia’s intercommunal relations includes a woman whose ebony-black the roots of a blossoming olive tree” to and pointed out that the Jews, rather than skin and African features are in stark hide his books, knowing that it was un- being the predatory financial manipula- contrast to those of other family mem- likely he would ever return to unearth tors of propaganda, were more likely to be bers around the table but who holds a them: “Yet, although a tree flourishing found in the Bosnian underclass. piece of matzah—unleavened bread— with lovely fruit stood there . . . did I call As a prominent Muslim intellectual, and wears the costume of a wealthy it ‘Tree of Sorrow.’ ” Korkut had come under intense pres- Spanish Jew of the era. Sometime in the following century, sure to join a Fascist-leaning group known as the Young Muslims, which served as a kind of proving ground for the Handjar, a Muslim division of the S.S. He refused. Later in the war, he also refused an order signed by Ante Pavelic, requiring him to relocate to “the Croatian People’s Liberated Zagreb” to take charge of the library under the Ustashe government’s control. Korkut’s passionate interest in Bos- nia’s cultural diversity manifested itself in his studies of the region’s art and lit- erature. He was fascinated by the myr- iad 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 on the Dalmatian coast. Of all the treasures in his care, none embodied the possibilities of diversity—or the fragility of intercul- tural harmony—as exuberantly as the Sarajevo Haggadah. The little parch- ment codex, rich in gold and silver leaf, lavishly illuminated with precious pig- ments made from lapis lazuli, azurite, and malachite, was created in Spain, perhaps as early as the mid-fourteenth century, during the period known as convivencia, when Jewish, Christian, and Muslim communities lived in the sol y sombra—sun and shadow—of a shared existence. The illustrations re- semble those of medieval Christian Psalters, but some of the decoration calls to mind an Islamic style of orna- mentation. Quite apart from the opu- The Sarajevo Haggadah shows a woman with African features at a . lence and artistry of the illustrations, the na fact that they exist at all is extraordinary. The book’s survival is remarkable. In the Haggadah found its way to Venice, ovi eg rz

Until the codex came to light, in 1894, 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella issued the where a polyglot Jewish community e art historians widely believed that figu- Alhambra Decree expelling all Jews from thrived on a tiny island that had previ- d h an

a rative painting had been entirely sup- Spain. If, as seems likely, the book left ously served as the city’s foundry, or i pressed among medieval Jews because Spain with a Jewish family at that time, ghetto. The first Jews, German loan sn of the injunction in the Ten Command- it was one of very few religious texts of its bankers among them, had arrived in the

ments, “Thou shalt not make unto thee kind to survive confiscation and destruc- early sixteenth century. Next came Le- um of bo any graven image, or likeness of any tion. In Portugal, where many Spanish vantine Jews, whose ties to the Ottoman se l mu

thing”—a proscription echoed in many Jews found a brief refuge before being ex- Empire were valuable to the city’s vast na

Islamic, and some Christian, societies. pelled a second time, ownership of He- trading enterprise. The exiles from the io The content of the illustrations is often brew books became a capital offense. Iberian Peninsula gradually increased nat

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 76—133SC.—live art r16842, critical cut to be watched throughout entire press run! the population, and the ghetto’s tight- feared in Sarajevo: in addition to com- members in elaborate Ottoman cos- pressed multistory dwellings became the manding his own Army division, he over- tume, and a family tree tracing Dervis’s tallest in the city. Venice offered Jews saw a Croatian Fascist regiment known as lineage to Korkut Beg, a Turk who had property rights and legal protection the Black Legion. Reputedly the most vi- arrived in Herzegovina in the sixteenth rarely matched elsewhere in Europe at cious of the Nazi allies, the Black Legion century. In the midst of translating a bi- that time. Still, they had to wear a col- engaged in massacres of Serbs and Jews; it ographical sketch of her uncle, Halima ored cap to identify themselves when also tortured and killed those suspected of paused suddenly and looked up, saying, they left the ghetto, and the ghetto’s sympathizing with the partisan Resis- “You know, if you really want to know gates were locked each night. They were tance. (After the war, Fortner was tried about what happened during the war, banned from most trades, including for these crimes by a Yugoslav court. He you should ask his wife.” printing, and any Hebrew books that was hanged in Belgrade in 1947.) I was astonished to hear that the were not approved by an ecclesiastical In the museum director’s office, after widow of a man who was in his fifties at censor of the Pope’s Inquisition were a few minutes of small talk, which Kor- the outbreak of the Second World War destroyed in public burnings. Books kut translated with what charm he could was still alive. Certainly none of the could be destroyed or defaced for many muster, Fortner got to the point: “And scholars who had written about the res- perceived heresies—such as suggestions now, please, give me the Haggadah.” cue of the Haggadah had mentioned that the Messiah was yet to come, or ar- The museum director feigned dis- her as a source of information. Soon guments against the use of saints or any may. “But, General, one of your officers after, I travelled to Sarajevo to meet Ser- other intercessors as mediators between came here already and demanded the vet Korkut. Halima Korkut was also in humans and an indivisible God, or any Haggadah,” he said. “Of course, I gave Sarajevo, assisting a new contingent of reference to Jews as “holy” or “pious.” A it to him.” American diplomats, so she offered to Catholic priest, Giovanni Domenico Korkut translated. translate for me. Servet lives alone, on a Vistorini, inspected the Haggadah in “What officer?” Fortner barked. low floor of a hillside apartment block 1609. Nothing is known of him beyond “Name the man!” in one of the least shelled neighbor- the books that bear his signature, but The reply was deft: “Sir, I did not hoods of the shrapnel-torn city. An el- many of the Catholic Hebraists of the think it was my place to require a egant and vivacious woman of eighty- time were converted Jews. Vistorini ap- name.” one with lively, deep-set brown eyes and parently found nothing objectionable in silver hair swept back from a still un- the Haggadah. His Latin inscription, n scholarly articles about the Sarajevo lined brow, she greeted us warmly. Revisto per mi (“Surveyed by me”) runs Haggadah, there are conflicting ac- Halima and I took off our shoes at the with a casual fluidity beneath the last, countsI of what happened next. Some say door, according to the Muslim custom. painstakingly calligraphed lines of the Korkut hid the small volume within the Servet’s sunlit sitting room was lined Hebrew text. library, simply misshelving it among the with shelves of art books. A watercolor How or when the book left Venice large collection of venerable tomes. The of a village mosque and pastel drawings and came to Sarajevo is a mystery. It was most dramatic version of the story has of Sarajevo’s famous landmark water acquired by the museum in 1894, when him climbing out a window and sliding fountain hung on the white walls. It was an indigent Jewish family named Kohen down a drainpipe to take the book into early spring; the birch trees outside the offered it for sale. Because Bosnia was hiding. To reconcile the accounts, I windows had not yet begun to leaf out, occupied by Austria-Hungary at that sought out Halima Korkut, the wife of and snow still flared on the summit of a time, the Haggadah was sent for evalu- Dervis’s nephew. Halima, who works in nearby mountain. Servet offered us a ation to the empire’s capital, Vienna, Arlington, Virginia, teaching Bosnian glass of her homemade sour-cherry cor- where it was immediately hailed as a to State Department officers preparing dial and sat down to talk about the two masterpiece, and then damaged by an for foreign postings, is immensely proud brutal wars she had lived through. inept conservator who cropped the of her husband’s uncle. She remembers When the Korkuts married, in 1940, parchments and bungled the rebinding. him as “a walking encyclopedia, full of less than a year before the invasion of No one knows what the original covers marvellous stories and information Yugoslavia, Servet, an ethnic Albanian, of the Haggadah were like, but most about everything.” We sat at a large was only sixteen years old; Dervis was books with such liberal use of gold leaf table in an unused classroom at the in- thirty-seven years her senior. In Alba- and expensive pigments also had elabo- stitute as she spread out the various pho- nian families, arranged marriages were rate bindings—hand-tooled kid, em- tographs and documents that she had the norm. “But my father asked me if I bossed silver, or mother-of-pearl inlay. assembled. There were two small books liked Dervis, if I wanted to marry him,” The Viennese conservator discarded in Serbo-Croatian that she wanted to Servet said. “He looked much younger whatever binding was on the book in show me, one of which Dervis had writ- than his age. I couldn’t tell he was older 1894 and replaced it with cheap boards ten, on the history and architecture of than me. I liked him very much. And I covered in an inappropriate Turkish flo- his birthplace, Travnik. The other was think he waited so late to marry because ral design. an admiring memoir, written by a for- he was waiting for me.” When I asked This was the book hidden under Der- mer colleague and published in 1974. to see a wedding picture, Servet opened vis Korkut’s coat in 1942, as he translated There were blurred photocopies of old her hands in her lap. “All gone,” she for General Fortner. Fortner was greatly photographs, showing Korkut family said. The home in which she kept the

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 77—133SC. memorabilia of her marriage was close to the old city and was shelled to rubble by Serbs in 1994. The modern apart- Subject, Verb, Object ment that she now occupies belongs to her son, Munib, who lives in Paris. It I is not ego, not the sum was only at the height of the siege that of your unique experiences, Servet was persuaded to leave Sarajevo just, democratically, and stay with her son. As soon as the whoever’s talking, war was over, she insisted on returning. a kind of motel room, “I wasn’t afraid,” she said. “Not in that yours till the end— war, or the other one.” that is, of the sentence. Servet remembers very clearly the day her husband arrived home for lunch with The language, actually, the Haggadah still under his jacket. “I doesn’t think I ’s important, knew he had a book from the library, and stressing, even in that it was very important,” she recalled. grandiose utterances— “He said, ‘Take care, don’t tell. No one e.g., I came must know or they’ll kill us and destroy I saw I conquered— the book.’ ” Over the midday meal, he the other syllables. pondered what to do with the Hagga- dah. That afternoon, he drove out of the Oh, it’s a technical problem, city, to Visoko, where one of his sisters sure, the rhyme lived, on the pretext of visiting her. From on so-so-open there, he took the book to a remote vil- lie, cry, I lage on nearby Trescavica, where his harder to stitch tight friend was hoca, or imam, of the small than the ozone local mosque. There, Servet said, the hole in the sky. Haggadah was hidden among Korans and other Islamic texts for the duration But worst is its plodding insistence— of the war. When it was safe, “the hoca I, I, I— brought it back to us, and Dervis re- somebody huffing uphill, turned it to the museum,” she said. face red as a stop sign, When I asked the name of the imam, scared by a doctor she tapped her head with an apologetic or some He She It smile and made a fluttering gesture, as surprised in the mirror. if the memories had flown away. Halima sighed. “Two years ago, she knew it,” —James Richardson she said. “She mentioned the name to me. But we didn’t write it down.” The reason for that became clearer as In April of 1942, soon after the Hag- family to help with the Korkuts’ infant the afternoon wore on. As I learned gadah had been taken to safety, Dervis son, Munib. “I told her if anyone came from Servet, and then from Munib, once again came home from the library to the door she should go to the pantry.” when I met with him later in Paris, the unexpectedly. This time, Servet re- Servet said that the two of them, both rescue of a Jewish book may be what called, it was a person he needed to hide, just nineteen years old, became great Dervis is best remembered for. But rather than a book. “ ‘This is a Jewish friends. In spite of the immense risks, what really matters in the Korkut fam- girl,’ he said to me. ‘We have to keep her she told me, “I loved having someone ily is another rescue—of a young Jewish safe here.’ ’’ Servet remembers a short, my own age around. She called me woman. “In our family,” Munib told studious-looking young woman with Auntie Servet.” me, “the Haggadah is a detail. What my spectacles who had been a high-school father did for Jewish people—that is the senior before the Numerus Clausus laws ira Papo, like the majority of the biggest thing that we, in our family, prevented Jews from attending state in- ten thousand Jews in Sarajevo be- have to be proud of.” As Servet and I stitutions. “Of course, I accepted her,” foreM the war, was from a family of La- talked on into the fading light of that Servet said. She gave her one of her own dino-speaking Sephardim, descendants spring afternoon, she became increas- traditional Muslim veils—a zar—that of Spanish exiles who, over the centu- ingly engaged by her memories of that conceals the body and most of the face ries, had made the same journey as the other rescue. It was a story of bravery, like a chador. The girl’s name was Mira Sarajevo Haggadah. As early as 1565, betrayal, and restitution that had shaped Papo, but the Korkuts called her Amira, the first Jews had settled in what was her life and the lives of her children, passing her off as a Muslim servant sent then an Ottoman market crossroads. As long after her husband’s death. from a rural Albanian village by Servet’s the city grew to graceful, cosmopolitan

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 78—133SC. maturity, they lived largely unmolested, based on the Scouts but designed to en- tisan territory, romanticize the partisans little-noticed lives, with very few rising courage migration to Israel. Mira had to as bands of high-spirited boys and girls to positions of wealth or influence. By slip away to the group’s twice-weekly who might dance late into the night in the time the Austro-Hungarian Empire meetings because her father did not ap- a farmer’s barn before setting out to occupied Bosnia, in the late nineteenth prove of its modern, secular bent. The blow up a bridge. Reportedly, they wore century, and Sarajevo began to receive a Young Guardians fostered an ethos of grenades on their belts, which they small influx of Yiddish-speaking Ash- idealism and self-sacrifice, qualities held would use to commit suicide rather than kenazi Jews, the city was known for its to be necessary to future Zionist pio- risk capture, torture, and betrayal of tolerance. The Muslims’ mosques, the neers. The group had hiked in the Sara- their comrades. churches of the Serbian Orthodox, and jevan mountains and learned outdoor At this early stage of the Resistance, the Croatian Catholics occupied the skills and first aid, which were now use- there were two anti-Fascist forces, Ti- same city blocks as the synagogues, and ful to the partisans. At the beginning of to’s Communist partisans and the residential neighborhoods were mostly the war, when Josip Broz Tito—who mostly Serbian group known as the mixed. Yet had it not been for the acci- was to become Yugoslavia’s leader in the Chetniks, anti-Communists who dents of war there is little chance that Communist era—called for Yugoslavi- sought the restoration of the exiled Yu- Mira would ever have known the Kor- ans of all ethnicities and political per- goslav king, Peter II. For a while, the kuts. The Papos were neither promi- suasions to rise up against the German two groups buried their ideological dif- nent nor prosperous: Mira’s father, Sa- occupation, members of Mira’s youth ferences, but eventually the Chetniks lomon Papo, worked as a janitor at the group joined an odred, or partisan unit. turned on the partisans, and by March, Finance Ministry; her grandfather was Generally outnumbered by the German 1942, the partisans were in disarray, a laborer who sold seeds at Sarajevo’s forces, they used classic guerrilla tactics, with high casualties and increasing outdoor market. conducting hit-and-run strikes and numbers of deserters. Tito ordered a Not long after Croatian Ustashe then retreating to the mountains, where ruthless reorganization of his forces. forces began ethnically cleansing Sara- local people could be counted on to help Mira’s depleted odred was commanded jevo of Serbs and Jews, Mira’s father was them hide. Throughout the brutal to gather in a wide field, where for two rounded up along with other Jewish mountain winter of 1942, Mira Papo or three days the unit was culled of “bal- men and sent to a so-called labor camp. served as muleteer and medic as her unit last.” Thirty youths—students, laborers, These camps were little more than way harassed the Germans. The mule was farmers, and even a few Communist stations of starvation and brutality en essential to the odred’s survival, carrying Party members, all of them Jews from route to Bosnia’s notorious death pits. ammunition and medical supplies. Sarajevo—were told that they weren’t Bosnia-Herzegovina sits on a limestone Memoirs by British and American offi- tough enough to face the coming hard- lacework of underground caves. The ge- cers who, at a later stage in the war, con- ships, or skilled enough to wage a highly ology, as Brian Hall wrote in “The Im- ducted daring parachute drops into par- mobile war. They were stripped of their possible Country,” is “a mass-murderer’s dream come true, a mighty necropolis of empty mass graves, high and dry, wait- ing to be filled.” Jews and Serbs—Salo- mon Papo most probably among them—had their throats cut before they were pushed off the edge. Then gre- nades were hurled in. The women were taken later that year. Mira defied an order to assemble at a Jewish community center. When she found that her mother and two of her aunts were being held there, she climbed in through a back window and urged them to try 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. From a hiding place, she watched the women being loaded onto trucks. Mira managed to escape from Sara- jevo and joined the Communist partisan Resistance. Before the war, she had been a member of the Young Guard- ians—Hashomer Hazair, in Hebrew— a socialist Zionist youth movement “It’s meaningless, lady, believe me—I painted it.”

TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 79—133SC.—live art a12864 National Museum, where she waited for what “seemed like an eternity.” The por- ter had spoken “not one word,” and she had no idea what his intentions were. He finally returned with a distin- guished-looking gentleman wearing a fez, who led her out of the museum by a back door and drove her to his home. 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.

fter the war, anyone who had served with the partisans was well placed inA the new Tito regime. Mira returned to Sarajevo, and was commissioned as an officer in the Army medical corps. She became engaged to a fellow army officer, also a former partisan, named Bozidar Bakovic. Their future in the Communist era seemed assured. But one day in June, 1946, as Mira “I’m afraid you’re retaining lawyers.” later wrote, she was walking in the city when “an unknown woman fell under •• my legs.” She begged help for her hus- band, who was being tried as a Nazi col- laborator. Mira had no idea who the weapons and instructed to wait in the Exhausted and preoccupied, Mira woman was. “I asked her how she knew field for half a day, until the reorganized drifted toward the center of the city, me. She took off her black veil and in- units got clear of the area. Then they “thinking about what to do, who to go stantly I recognized Dervis Efendi’s were to return to Sarajevo. Anyone who to.” Lost in these thoughts, she sud- wife. She held the hand of a boy of four, disobeyed would be shot. denly realized that she had come to the whom I had left an infant in 1942.” The abandoned Jews split into small Finance Ministry building, where her In postwar Yugoslavia, as Tito groups of three or four to increase their late father had been a janitor. The only strengthened his hold on power, he used chances of eluding German patrols. For light in the building at that early hour war-crimes trials to silence dissident days and nights, the young Jews moved came from the porters’ room. Mira voices. Dervis Korkut had proved just as through the forest unarmed, hunted heard footsteps, and a man emerged unwilling to bow to Communist ex- constantly by Germans and their dogs. from the shadows. She recognized him. cesses as he had to Fascism. He had be- Those who were discovered often died The porter was a decent, honorable man come an outspoken critic of Yugoslavia’s gruesomely. One account tells of cap- who had been her father’s friend. “I oppressive attitudes toward religion, tured partisans being tied up on a road- called out his name and the traditional and of its new Prime Minister’s plan to way and repeatedly run over by German Bosnian greeting, ‘God help us.’ ” raze the old Ottoman buildings of Sara- trucks. Of the thirty partisans, only a He did not recognize her after her jevo and replace them with Soviet-style handful made it back to Sarajevo alive. year of hardship. “Then he said, ‘Are modernist blocks. He had also compiled Mira was one of them. you Salomonova?’ ”—Salomon’s daugh- a list of people who had been executed “I entered Sarajevo at dawn of a ter—“I nodded my head and then I by Chetniks in eastern Bosnia. For Ti- spring day. The streets were still empty,” started to cry.” to’s regime, which had granted amnes- she later wrote. She was carrying a few The porter took her to a cloakroom, ties to the defeated Chetniks (though eggs tied up in a scarf that had been and she told him her story of flight and not to the Fascist Ustashe) and saw the given to her by the family of one of her survival. At the end of it, she said, “Save suppression of intercommunal rifts as comrades, whose mother had also sup- me if you can. If not, then give me to the crucial to the consolidation of the uni- plied Mira with papers allowing her to Ustashe.” Taking her by the hand, he led fied Communist state, such list-making enter the occupied city. her to the porters’ room of the nearby was inconvenient. Before long, Dervis

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 80—133SC.—live art a12601 Korkut’s name appeared among those He settled in Israel, first joining a kib- Inexpertly typed in Serbo-Croatian, who had aided the Fascists. At the no- butz and later movng to an agricultural with accents added by hand, the letter toriously harsh prison in Zenica he was coöperative, or moshav, in the Judaean states in a rather formal preamble that placed in solitary confinement. hills, where he now works as a metal- what follows is “my true story, how Der- On the afternoon when Servet talked worker and sculptor. Mira followed him vis Efendi Korkut saved me from certain with me about Mira, she recalled that to Israel in 1972. She learnt Hebrew and death.” In stilted, formal phrases, Mira desperate day in downtown Sarajevo. “I soon joined Davor’s kibbutz, working in unflinchingly details her failure to help don’t remember kneeling,” she said the laundry and helping to run its com- Dervis Korkut. When she learned that wryly, as I read to her from Mira’s later munity center. In 1978, she moved to Je- he had survived despite this, she wrote, account. “I’m not the kneeling type.” rusalem to be closer to Israel’s small “It was as if a stone fell from my heart.” Still, the situation was grave. She was community of former Sarajevans. Dur- By describing what really happened, relieved to have found a firsthand wit- ing the breakup of Yugoslavia and the Mira wrote, she hoped to make amends: ness to her husband’s anti-Fascist activ- from 1992 to 1995, Is- “Perhaps this modest material will help ities and overjoyed when Mira assured rael offered temporary shelter to Bosnian to clarify his identity as a great friend of her that she would testify in court on his refugees. It was likely one of them who the Jews of Bosnia long before World behalf. left behind an out-of-date newsletter War II. I remain as a solitary witness But Mira did not show up for the that Mira came across in 1994. The that Dervis was indeed so, even in a trial. Her fiancé feared that the wrath of newsletter was printed in Serbo-Croa- time when we had few true friends.” the Party would be turned upon her, tian and featured items of interest to Mira died in 1998, just a year too soon perhaps even lethally, if Mira, as a mem- Jews in the former Yugoslavia. In it was to see how completely her belated testi- ber of the military, appeared as a witness an article commemorating Dervis Kor- mony would accomplish the restitution in what was clearly a politically moti- kut. Spellbound, Mira read about the she desired. vated trial. He refused to let her leave good deeds of the man she had failed. their apartment and give evidence for The article related Dervis’s role in saving t the time that Mira was writing the man who had saved her life. In the the Sarajevo Haggadah, which had once her account, Servet Korkut was in years to come, even as Mira came to ex- again been rescued during war by a Mus- reluctantA exile from Sarajevo; after suf- perience further hardships and difficul- lim. (In 1992, when the museum was fering a small heart attack, she was liv- ties, she was haunted by the thought of being shelled by Serb forces, who later ing with her son, Munib, in Paris. She Korkut. She assumed that he had been burned the city’s libraries to ashes, a li- was astonished when an Israeli diplomat executed, and imagined her friend Ser- brarian named Enver Imamovic re- called to tell her that she and Dervis had vet bringing up her son alone. trieved the book and took it secretly to a just been named as Righteous Among Mira’s husband died just two years bank vault.) As she read the account, Nations. Their names would be in- later, from a brain infection contracted Mira realized that Dervis had not been scribed in the gardens of Yad Vashem, while digging mass graves for the war executed, as she had always assumed. not far from the trees planted in mem- dead at Sutjeska. Having lost her entire She learned that he had died an elderly ory of famous rescuers of Jews, such as family in the war, Mira found herself man, from natural causes, in 1969. Raoul Wallenberg and Oskar Schindler. alone with two infant sons, Daniel and Davor’s wife remembers her mother-in- Because Servet was unable to travel to Davor. Recently demobilized from the law, just after finding the article, weep- Israel to see their names inscribed, a cer- Army, she lost her right to military hous- ing and murmuring to herself in Serbo- emony was held for her at the Israeli ing and was homeless until a friend of Croatian. It was the first she or Davor Embassy in Paris. She was presented her parents offered her a room. Mira had heard of Dervis Korkut. with a certificate of honor and a medal, lobbied with great determination until The teen-ager Korkut had rescued in and told that she had the right to Israeli the Army took her back as a medical of- 1941 was now seventy-two years old. citizenship. She was also awarded a ficer, in charge of public health on the She decided to give the testimony she monthly stipend from the Jewish Foun- Dalmatian coast and its islands. Davor, had failed to deliver at Korkut’s trial. On dation for the Righteous, a New York- now a wiry man of sixty, recalls going by a winter day in 1994, Mira sat down to based organization that provides mate- boat with his mother on her rounds, and write a three-page, single-spaced letter rial support to some thirteen hundred having soldiers as babysitters. Eventu- to the Commission for the Designation elderly rescuers. ally, they settled in Rijeka, on the north- of the Righteous at Yad Vashem, Israel’s “Mira called me in Paris,” Servet told ern coast. The town had a Jewish com- Holocaust memorial and study center. me. She explained why she had failed to munity center, and Davor remembers appear at the trial, and how tormented his surprise when, for the first time, his she had been by that failure. Servet said mother, anti-religious and a committed she tried to soothe her old friend, telling Communist, took him there to celebrate her that, even if she had testified, it Hanukkah. He became attached to his wouldn’t have made a difference, be- Jewish heritage. In 1969, after complet- cause the court was just a tool of the re- ing his Army service, he happened to gime and the regime had already made meet the captain of an Israeli freighter, its decision. “Mira said that ever since and, on impulse, he boarded the ship. she left Yugoslavia she had wanted to

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 81—133SC.—live spot art r16843D, pls inspect and report on quality get in touch with me, to apologize, but osity about other cultures that had Kosovo. The couple settled in the pro- that she wasn’t able,” Servet told me. “ shaped his career. vincial capital, Pristina, and had two ‘It’s O.K.,’ I said to her. ‘I understand.’ ’’ He said that he would never forget the children. By 1999, just as the Dayton Others had come forward to testify trip to the prison with his mother, and Accords were helping to bring a sem- for Dervis at his trial. “But nobody seeing his father, separated from them blance of normalcy back to Sarajevo, wanted to listen to them,” Servet told by a wooden partition. “The first thing Kosovo had started to slide toward war. me. Convicted of Fascist associations, he said to my mother was ‘Where is The Albanian majority in Kosovo had he served six years of an eight-year sen- Abida?’ ” Munib recalled. “My mother been politically suppressed by the Ser- tence, most of it in solitary confinement. said, ‘Abida died,’ and I saw my father bian government, and in 1998 a cam- “They kept him alone because they con- cry.” paign of ethnic cleansing began in ear- sidered him dangerous,” Servet said. His nest. Alarming reports filtered into ideas could too easily infect and inspire fter he was released, Dervis was al- Pristina of brutal attacks on Albanian other prisoners. Family accounts say he lowed to resume his old job, but life villages and of the public rape of young endured his imprisonment with uncom- wasA not entirely easy. His passport was women. mon fortitude: he never complained or never returned to him, and he was de- In March 1999, when NATO, spurred asked his jailers for mercy, and eventu- nied citizenship rights. In 1955, a daugh- to action by stories of widespread atroc- ally the prison guards came to regard ter, Lamija, was born. Dervis, then sixty- ities, started bombing Serb positions, him with awe. Despite the hard condi- seven years old, had not wanted to have Servet was in Pristina visiting her tions of the prison, he managed to keep another child after his long jail term. “He daughter. “My mother left on the last himself clean and well groomed, and he didn’t want, but I wanted,” Servet had bus to Bosnia,” Lamija told me. “I said occupied his mind by reading whenever told me, adding, “Women always find a to her, ‘I don’t want you to go through he was allowed. way.” Lamija, thirteen years younger another war.’ ” After Servet’s departure, Because Servet was now the wife of a than her brother, was shielded from the Lamija and her husband spent days on convicted enemy of the state, her apart- family’s difficult past, and doted on by the phone trying to get visas that would ment was confiscated and her food ra- her father. Munib told me, “Even though allow them and their children to leave tion rescinded. With Munib, now five he was an old man when she was born, the country. While her husband called years old, and a two-and-a-half-year- my sister is completely the product of my relatives in Sweden, Lamia contacted old daughter, Abida, she was forced into father. He connected so much with her.” Munib, who pulled every string he could the streets. Dervis’s large and prosper- Dervis and Lamija were very close until with friends in the Ministry of Foreign ous family proved unwilling to risk the he died, when Lamija was fourteen years Affairs in Paris, but to no avail. Next, opprobrium of association with her. It old. “ I always felt I could ask him about she tried to evacuate her daughter and was left to her own relatives to offer anything and he would explain it pa- her son, aged nineteen and sixteen. shelter, so she went to stay with one of tiently to me,” Lamija told me. “When I With great difficulty, she managed to them, a shoemaker who lived in was a small child, afraid before going to get them out of the city. Kosovska Mitsovitsa, in the province of sleep, he would tell me a story, over and Soon after the children left, the Kosovo. Servet arrived there with her over. I could visit him at work, anything, power to Lamija’s apartment was cut children in the middle of a meningitis and he always had time for me—except off. Then their phone lines went down. outbreak. Abida became infected, and when he was watching the news,” she Through the apartment wall, Lamija fifteen days later she was dead. added with a laugh. “When he died,” could hear the phone next door ringing. It was a two-day journey from Ser- Lamija recalled, “so many people came The neighbors were Serbs, and she was vet’s town to the Zenitsa jail, and visi- to the house, saying, ‘He helped me find disturbed to realize that the lines were tors were allowed to spend only five a job,’ ‘He gave me loans,’ ‘He guaran- being cut on the basis of ethnicity. minutes with a prisoner. When I visited teed my credit,’ ‘He found a flat for me.’ On April 2nd, Lamija heard Serbian Munib Korkut in his apartment in Paris Then I realized how he was a good per- militiamen banging on the door of a recently, he recalled making the journey son and how many good things he did downstairs neighbor and ordering them to the jail with his mother. An impos- and never mentioned.” One thing he had to leave. She and her husband, carrying ing man in a black Lacoste shirt, Munib never mentioned was his rescue of Mira what they could, joined thousands of bore a strong resemblance to the photo- Papo, just as Mira had never mentioned refugees surging toward the train sta- graphs I had seen of his father. He it to her children. Lamija learned in tion. They considered themselves lucky spoke in a rumbling baritone, express- vague terms that her parents had shel- to be packed aboard an overcrowded ing great bitterness about his mother’s tered a Jewish woman in their house train—“twenty-seven people in a car- suffering and the failure of so many rel- during the siege of Sarajevo: Sarajevan riage made for six,” Lamija recalled— atives to help her. “I am like the Alba- Jews, unaffected, for once, by the ethnic even though they had no idea what their nians,” he said. “We never pardon. hatreds of the war, had arranged a con- destination would be. At dusk, they ar- Never.” An engineer and designer who voy out of the city, and Servet was given rived at the border with Macedonia. In manages large projects for Technip, a a place in it. the press to disembark, they lost the French firm active in Kazakhstan, he Lamija became an economist. She small bags they’d managed to carry from said his father had given him a love of married an electrical engineer who was their apartment. But Lamija still had languages—he speaks six—and a curi- an Albanian, like her mother, from her pocketbook, and it contained a

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TNY—2007_12_03—PAGE 82—133SC.82—133SC.—live art a12940 folded photocopy of her parents’ certif- down the head of the local Jewish com- airport to welcome them. “Today, we icate of honor from Yad Vashem. munity and produced the crumpled are closing a circle, by granting shelter They were herded into an open field photocopy that Mira Papo Bakovic’s to the daughter of those who saved occupied by thousands of refugees. testimony had provided for them. The Jews,” he said. Lamija looked around her at the strangely certificate bears a Biblical epigraph in “Are you happy to be in Israel?” a re- silent, huddled people, whose boots had English and Hebrew: “Whoever saves porter shouted. Exhausted by the jour- churned the soft ground of the meadow one life is as though he had saved the ney and the ordeal that had preceded it, into mud. Sanitary conditions were al- entire world.” The Macedonian Jews, missing her children, anxious about the ready dangerous: there were no proper delighted by the opportunity to repay a unexpected attention, uncertain of her latrines, and a bad smell hung over the debt from the Second World War, went future as a refugee in an unknown, very camp. Lamija told me, “There was a into a frenzy of lobbying and organiz- foreign place, Lamija hardly knew how hundred litres of water for thousands of ing. Four days later, Lamija and her to answer. people. People were fighting for water. husband flew to Tel Aviv; their chil- Then, in the midst of all the chaos, There was no food, no blankets, no shel- dren, they were told, would join them someone addressed her in Serbo-Croa- ter. People were sick. Some were already there two days later. tian. “It was a good feeling, to have some- dying.” There were rumors, too, of men- They arrived in the terminal at Ben- one speaking your language,” she said. ingitis in the camp—the disease that had Gurion Airport, blinking in the strong But she had no idea who it could be, killed her sister after the war. As night Mediterranean sunlight and the flash of greeting her so warmly. Pushing through fell, the temperature dropped sharply. reporters’ cameras. The story of how the crowd was a slender, wiry man she When a few food packs were given out, Dervis, a Muslim, had saved Mira and had never seen before, with a shock of the distribution turned into a riot. “Peo- Mira, a Jew, had saved Dervis’s child dark hair and a mustache. Opening his ple were grabbing from each other,” proved irresistible to the Israeli media, arms, he introduced himself, and Lamija Lamija said. She had managed to get two and to its politicians. The Prime Minis- fell into the embrace of Davor Bakovic, packs, but a frail old woman’s plaintive ter, Benjamin Netanyahu, was at the the son of Mira Papo.  crying moved her to give one away. That night, Lamija and her husband decided that staying in the camp was too dangerous. At three in the morning, taking advantage of the camp’s disorga- nization, they crept out of the muddy field and walked in the dark toward the Macedonian border. When they en- countered a border guard, they con- cocted a story about a car they’d left on the other side. They lied about the di- rection they’d come from and denied having been anywhere near the refugee camp. Whether he believed the unlikely tale or took pity on them, the guard let them cross. From the shelter of a relative’s house, in the town of Kumanovo, Lamija re- sumed the frantic phone calls. First, she tried to contact her children, and was fpo A12979 relieved to find that they had made it to safety in . But they had been refused admission at all the embassies where they’d gone to seek help. “There were, by then, almost a million refugees from Kosovo,” Lamija said, and most doors were closed to them. Her hus- band’s family had been able to do noth- ing for them in Sweden, and, from Paris, Munib also reported no hope. “Why don’t you go to the Jewish community in Skopje and see if they’ll help you?” Munib suggested. “Why not try?” Lamija and her husband tracked

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