When the packaged holidaymakers arrive in their coaches the Meteor Hotel, Makarska, will not disappoint. Its restaurants, bars, flowery concrete terraces and pool match descriptions in the brochures, and night-time discos please young couples who have chosen a cheap(ish) holiday on Croatia’s beautiful Dalmation coast. No war now, they say, quite safe to go. Indeed, the hotel provides a haven for an incongruous figure who wanders through the hunky suntanned young men, and girls in wobbling bikinis who crowd the lobby. Berta Papo is 87 and Jewish; with her white hair, and dark, lace-collared dress, she personifies the mittel europa of another age. Because she has much time on her hands she stops to study the notices from Tour Guides, in Czech, German, Italian, English....then goes slowly upstairs to knit in her tiny hotel room. Berta arrived at the hotel seeking safety from war-smashed Sarajevo. Then Makarska seemed like Paradise. Now it has become her prison.
It takes the smallest leap of imagination to understand the feelings of Berta Papo, and her fellow refugees from Sarajevo now stranded in Croatia. In terror, deafened by the bombardments, just desperate to get out, you left your home and all your possessions behind. You handed over your keys to the leaders of your community, trusting in your right to return. Now that home is either badly damaged OR inhabited by displaced persons from elsewhere in Bosnia who have flooded into Sarajevo - and the Bosnian authorities have passed a law which says that because you chose to leave your home is deemed vacant. You have no tenancy rights. You have lost your property. Everything has gone.
The story of how Berta Papo and the others from Sarajevo end up beached in a holiday resort in Croatia began when a further cataclysm of evil convulsed former Yugoslavia in 1992, and the first shells hit the ancient, famously tolerant city of Sarajevo.
But....no. It begins long before - with a more ancient exodus, linked to Berta’s through history, and the long, collective memory. In 1492 the Jews were hounded from Spain by the Inquisition, bringing to an end over ten centuries of Jewish culture. By 1565, in that diaspora, the first Sephardic (Spanish) Jews reached Central Bosnia, exchanging the rich world for a poor one, ruled severely by Ottoman Turks. They brought their skills: metalworking, textiles, glassblowing, trading; later there were pharmacists and doctors - all essential to the wealth of Sarajevo and the growth of a famous, multi-culural community. For once not persecuted, the Jews still bore in their blood the nostalgia of a race aware there would be no new Moses to lead them to the Promised Land. Those first refugees from Catholic Spain carried with them the keys to their apartments and synagogues, hoping one day their children might return. Some of those ancient keys are still possessed by Jews in Sarajevo. They passed on a haunting lyric: ‘Where is the key that was in the drawer? / My forefathers brought it here with great love ,/ They told their sons: This is the heart / Of our home in Spain/ Our dreams of Spain.....’ And for generations these settlers amongst the Slav peoples taught their children Ladino, a unique Spanish dialect, thus enshrining loss within their very speech.
Born in 1943 Jakob Finci, President of the Jewish Community in Sarajevo, learned Ladino. His parents were amongst the fortunate ones who survived the Holocaust, probably because they were deported south to an Italian-controlled camp, rather than north to the hell-hole Jacenovac, just over the border in Croatia and run by the Croatian Ustasha with such enthusiastic cruelty their Gestapo masters allowed them to slaughter unsupervised. Before 1941 there was a 12,000 strong Jewish Community in Sarajevo - one fifth of the town. After the war barely 1,000 remained. Some had fought with Tito’s Partizans; others were saved by Moslem and Serb neighbours. They returned to Sarajevo and found nothing left -everything destroyed or looted. And so, secure in the reassuring straightjacket of communist rule, they started to rebuild, wanting what all people want: peace, stability, relative prosperity, family - all symbolised by the old keys.
Jakob Finci says ‘perhaps it was something genetic’, that his people saw the war in Bosnia coming. In 1991 he sent his oldest son to Israel; the young one followed less than a year later. But the Jews did not fear persecution this time, since the old hatreds were not (for once) directed towards them. When the barricades went up, isolating their city from the world, they challenged history by throwing off the culture of the victim and acting. The Jewish community had the foresight to stockpile food and medicine. Jacob Finci ays they did this because of the old sixth sense for disaster, and because ‘There is a special obligation to help fellow Jews’. International Jewry was always there, to help. But the crucial point is this: the humanitarian rebirth of ‘La Benevolencia’, the Jewish Cultural Organisation (exactly one hundred years after its foundation in Sarajevo in 1892) was to save hundreds of lives in all the ethnic groups under seige.
You gaze at Jakob Finci, the lawyer, as he sits in his office surrounded by portraits of rabbis, framed awards for his work in the war, and a fuzzy photograph of Tito, and a phrase from Bosnia’s Nobel-prizewinning novelist Ivo Andric, comes to mind: ‘the unexpected stature of an ordinary man’. For the (relatively unsung) altruism and heroism shown by men like him is the only means we have for keeping at bay the terror of the mass grave and the burnt-out village; the Jews of Sarajevo are the frail balance in the scales, with the dead weight of ethnic cleansing on the other side, threatening universal hell. Mr Finci simply shrugs, ‘We had more than enough for ourselves, so we could supply our neighbours’.
The figures must be given, and somewhere amongst the sums is the incalculable aggregate of energy and commitment shown by Mr Finci, Ivica Ceresnjes, and countless volunteers. In the two years of siege La Benevolencia opened three pharmacies and gave away 1,600,000 prescriptions; opened the city’s only clinic where multi-ethnic staff tended 25,000 patients; gave away 380 tons of food; served 110,000 hot meals in the soup kitchen that is still going; started a postal service that handled 100,00 letters; set up a two-way radio connexion with the outside world; looked after refugees from elsewhere in Bosnia; started a thriving Sunday school which entertained and educated fifty children, only twenty of them Jewish: and sent 11 rescue convoys to safety, carrying 2,300 people - less than half of whom were Jews. People were helped according to need, not creed.
None of this would have been possible without the help of JOINT - the American Joint Jewish Distribution Committee and the Central British Fund for World Jewish Relief. Still - generosity on such a scale meant that, after about three months, the supplies started to run out. Then Jakob Finci and his colleagues had to negotiate with all sides, Serb, Croat and Moslem, asking permission to bring food and medicine in through the checkpoints. Unexpectedly they all agreed on one thing: they had nothing against the Jews. Moreover, ‘even the soldiers knew we were helping everyone’. So Mr Finci would go with the two trucks a month to Split, on the Dalmatian coast, to get supplies: “It was very difficult. There would be about 38 checkpoints held by different militias, many of them drunk....You had to pull out the right piece of paper with the right authorisation - or you’d be dead. At the time it was the only thing to do. (He pauses and thinks) I wouldn’t do it now’.
His own explanation of why the warring sides in a particularly chaotic and brutal war allowed this small flame of humanitarianism to shine is threefold. ‘Why? We were the main victims in the last war, so maybe they all feel guilty. Then, we are such a small community we cannot be a threat. Then again, they are perhaps a little bit afraid of international opinion. If the Moslems, Serbs and Croats hurt the Jews the world would say, ‘Oh, they are attacking the Jews again - and the Jews are trying to help everybody’. So maybe that’s why we were lucky’.
The further question of why the Sarajevo Jews should have used such vast resources to help others as well as themselves is perhaps found in Ivo Andric’s great ‘Bosnian Chronicle’ (1945), which, though set in Napoleonic times, is as good a key to understanding Bosnia as any modern history. At the end of the novel the French Consul, a good man, lacks the funds to leave Bosnia, and is visited by the old Jew Atijas, who offers the needed sum. Moved the Frenchman asks how this is possible after the fiscal persecution of the Jews by the Vizier. The Jews replies that the powers-that-be come and go, ’But we remain, we remember, we record everything we have suffered, how we defended ourselves and we pass this dearly bought experience on from father to son. That is why our coffers have two bottoms. The Vizier’s hand reaches one, taking everything, but below that there is always something left for us and our children, to save our souls and help our families and a friend in distress......that is how we keep going, and manage to acquire, and do not regret...for friends, for justice, for the kindness that is shown us’.
But no international funds, no cameraderie, no courage could protect the Jews of Sarajevo from a new exodus. Young parents and the very old wanted to leave the city first - the love of home and extended family in conflict with terror and the instinct for survival. La Benevolencia sent a total of 11 convoys of refugees out of Sarajevo - 1000 Jews and 1300 citizens of different nationalities. In Jakob Finci’s office are stored the sheafs of names of those who applied - although in many cases, and arbitrarily, the Bosnian authorities refused permission. Everybody wanted the Jews to help them escape - including the family of little Zlata Filipovic, whose diary became a best- seller. On November 15th 1992 she records her father’s hand injury: ‘He says his mind...was on the Jewish municipal centre, the departure point for leaving Sarajevo. Well-known people are leaving. Sarajevo will be the poorer for losing so many wonderful people, who made it was it was’. Families were split; people would receive a day’s notice and be told to take one bag. They would close their apartments and hand the precious keys to Jakob Finci for safe keeping. Then, the tears on departure, the fear of the long journey, the last look at the city of their forebears, the silence of relief.....And the convoys trundled south to the Croatian coast to the very country which had inflicted such appalling persecution on them and their parents fifty years before.
The destination (six hours by car today, but usually far far longer for the convoys) was Split, the old Croation city that began as the Roman Emperor Diocletian’s retirement palace. Ironically, after the Emperor’s death in AD 313 it was used as a sort of VIP exiles’ detention centre. From ‘92 until ‘95 the first person the exhausted exiles from Bosnia would see would be Edoard Tauber, Jacob Finci’s counterpart in Split - and with as much energy to help night and day. A retired army officer, Mr Tauber was born in Sarajevo in 1926, fled with his family to Mostar in 1940, was imprisoned by the Italians, escaped to fight with the Partizans when Italy capitulated, and at 16 was horribly wounded when a Ustasha dum-dum bullet blew away the bottom part of his face. Many nights he would sleep in the office waiting for the arrivals (many of whom were so exhausted they could not even walk or speak) organised food and drink, and then the further transport to wherever they hoped to go. Many of the young ones wanted to travel on, seeking asylum in Canada, Israel, America,Switzerland. The old had to remain in Split, and the surrounding area (Makarska is one hour’s drive away) - some as lodgers, others in hotel rooms Mr Tauber (funded by JOINT) was able to organise at a time when the tourist trade was in the doldrums.
The story of Albert Pesah is typical. His family arrived as refugees to Sarajevo 400 years ago. They are buried in the ancient Jewish graveyard, Uncle Pesah near the gate. Albert survived a concentration camp and fought with the Partizans, like many Jews. When he returned to Sarajevo after the war he found nothing at all: ‘The Ustasha had taken away everything we owned, and there was another family living in our apartment.’ So he and his mother created a new life; he became an economist, and when his wife died, moved in with his son and his wife and children. But in 1992 his son was wounded by a sniper, then, still sick, taken with his wife by convoy to Split, then to Belgrade (‘the Serbs having nothing against Jews...’). Albert failed to get permission to leave until four months later, ‘ and since then I have just been sitting in Makarska’. He is unable to join his son, and none of them can return to Sarajevo because the authorities have put somebody else in their apartment. ‘I telephoned the man, a military man, and he told me his own house was bombed and that’s why he moved in. He says he will move out when somebody finds him a home. What can I do? he can’t live with his family in the street. I am a reasonable man but I can’t wait forever. I want to make sure that my grandchildren can come back...’
From the outside the situation of these refugees might look enviable - after all, people pay to go on holiday to Makarska and Split. And the elderly people are at pains to point out that they are grateful, especially to ‘La Benevolencia’ and to JOINT. Yet, the truth is, unless the situation is resolved they will probably die in Croatia., and this was not the destination of their dreams. That is what happened to the beloved husband of Mirjana Papo. A former Professor of Family Law, she is in her seventies but looks older, sitting on the terrace above the noisy pool at the Meteor Hotel, her eyes shaded by a floppy hat. Four years ago she and her husband came by convoy, after one daughter had escaped to Belgium and the other to Spain. Mirjana says she had planned her old age - in the comfortable apartment in Sarajevo, surrounded by her books, with her ‘best friend’ (husband), and the two daughters and three grandchildren nearby...
Four years ago she and her husband escaped to Split and Makarska; two years ago he died. Even the fact that he is buried in Split, an hour away, means that it is hard for her to visit and place a pebble on his grave. Ask Mirjana if she is homesick for Sarajevo and her eyes mist. ‘I don’t cry for the material things but for my life - my way of life. And for my husband...and my children all over the world, my grandchildren I don’t see. This is the fate of the Jews. I will never forgive the nationalists for breaking up our life.’
Her chief desire would be to return and make a home for her family. But the apartment was shelled; it is one of thousands of homes in Sarajevo that need repair. What’s more, Mirjana points out that the atmosphere in the city is oppressive: the influx of displaced persons has changed the old, easy character, the economic situation is so terrible that many many people still use the Jewish soup kitchen, and few people look to the future believing in peace. ‘So I don’t know what will happen. Perhaps I will see my children again - before I die in Makarska.....’
Berta Papo is no relation is Mirjana’s - or a least, not that she knows. Papo is a very common name; most likely they are all descended from one of those families who settled Sarajevo in the sixteenth century. Like many of these old people she is compelled to talk about the Second World War, reliving its horrors. And then the narrative will shift to the Bosnian War, and the dates become mixed, so by a slip of the tongue she says ‘1943’ when she means ‘1993’. In the words of the Yugoslav poet Vasco Popa, ‘Sorrow has closed/ Into a circle/ For the road has no ending...’
In the tiny, bare hotel room there are few momentos of Berta’s former life in Sarajevo, but she shows a small photograph of herself in 1941, aged 32, wearing a Moslem chador . Strangely the expression on the face of the old woman of today mirrors that look in the relic of the past - unfathomable, a mixture of pride, resignation and rebuke, as if to say you cannot begin to imagine the things that I have seen.
‘I dressed as a Moslem to escape the Germans, and ran away with my sons down to Mostar, where the Italians were. My husband had been taken away. The Italians weren’t so bad...but when the Croation fascists arrived I was taken to a closed camp at Rab, an island. I had nobody left, no husband, no mother, no father , bo brother - the Ushasha killed my sister and her husband and two babies by throwing them from a cliff into the river...’ Here the tears well up. ‘So I had to protect my children. Later, when the Italians captulated, I was able to join the Partizans; we lived in a liberated area, and I mended their uniforms for extra bread. When the war was over all I wanted to do was take my sons home to Sarajevo, but when we got there by train we found a Croation living in our home. I was lucky then, I managed to get my tenancy back, but I didn’t find my possession - everything had been looted. I went to the Red Cross and got some things...to start again, you understand?’
Berta got a sewing machine from a Moslem friend and began making and mending clothes to feed her sons. The years passed; one son died, the other two married and lived nearby, until just before the war Berta gave up the old apartment and moved in with one of them. ‘It was a nice two-bedroomed apartment. We bought two new couches which we didn’t have time to warm up!’ For when this war broke out the sons, Albert and Hari escaped with their wives and children to Switzerland. ‘The most important thing was to protect their children. I stayed behind to look after the apartments - somehow we thought it would be over soon and maybe they would come back, and we could start again.’
So she remained - in a dark and freezing home near the front line. She would skulk from cellar to cellar, on forays for food. One night a sniper started shooting at her. ‘Everybody in the street knew me as “Grandmother”. So I shouted, “Stop shooting! It’s Grandmother!”. Next minute they sent up a flare. They could see me clearly. And he didn’t shoot again. So it must have been somebody who knew me. That was what it was like. Neighbour killed neighbour....’
Now Berta is caught, not knowing what to do. But she does know what she wants. ‘I would like to go back to Sarajevo, of course! Why? There is a story ...A man had a rabbit and the rabbit escaped. The man hunted for him and finally found him, and asked, ‘Why did you leave me?’ The rabbit said, ‘The forest is my home, the grass is my food, the water of the rain is my drink....That is my environment’.
She shakes her head, ‘But even if I went back, I cannot live alone now. Who will take care of me? It is too late for me to start again. All I want is to see my sons’. She has applied for a Swiss visa but it has been refused. There is no room in one of the richest of Europe’s countries for another old refugee, even though her sons have both written to say they will take care of her. She cries and clasps her hands together, ‘Is it too much to ask, that I can see my children and grandchildren before I die? I don’t want to die here in Croatia alone...Oh, if there is anything you can do to help me...’
The stories are told; the listener stays silent, stunned both by the enormity of Bosnia’s problems and the particularity of individual grief. Rifka Levi, Elza Gris Sceta, Hanika Gaon, come one by one to talk, and the fragments of their narrative form a mosaic of collective grief:...’My two sisters were gassed in Belsen.....I’m not going to begin to tell you the suffering of 1941.....My son wants me back at home but he cannot find a flat....I’ve lost everything, everything.....In ‘43, no I mean ‘93... It was so horrible, at the time you only think of saving your life.....Oh, we are grateful and comfortable, and they look after us well, but if you don’t choose it, it is not your own life......’
It is not just the old. Lenka Montiljo-Bilalagic is fifty, and did not see her husband for three years or her teenage sons for two years, because the war split them up. Now the family is together again, but crowded in one tiny room in Makarska, where they show photographs of their former home in Sarajevo. Lenka teaches other refugees needlework in a Container supplied by the educational organisation ORT, because she wants to show her gratitude for the help Edo Tauber and JOINT have given them. ‘But we don’t know what we’ll do or where we’ll go’. She shrugs, with a small wry smile, ‘We are Jews - and we are refugees’.
Vera Tirota’s life was splintered too. A tall blonde woman in her fifies who was once a secretary and lived happily with her widowed mother in a flat in Sarajevo, she is now a semi-invalid stranded in Croatia because there she can get the acute surgery she needs, since Sarajevo’s hospital services are still barely adequate . Vera comes into Edoard Tauber’s office in Split because she needs his help to arrange the medical treatment. She is weeping; he is over-stretched, but makes the long phone call. Then her broken English, tears and shaking hands evoke life in hell: all the windows in the flat were shattered, no electricity and it was 15 below zero; she had to walk one hour to fetch water, but over two hours lugging it back; at the entrance to the apartment block she would stop to gaze up eleven floors and think of carrying the water up, and ‘just cry’ (as she does now, in the telling). Then they were starving, and she went to gather grass from the park...’I had a little oil , but no vinegar, still I could make a salad. But I didn’t know, there is this little creature, a parasite, who lives in the dirt the dogs do on the grass, and I am infected with it. My liver, all round inside me....I am so ill. So the war took away my home, and my life and my health....’
There are many like Vera, traumatised and sick, as well as homeless. Their problems are yet another burden to the likes of Jakob Finci and Edoard Tauber - but drops in the ocean of misery which threatens to drown JOINT, and UNHCR and many other non-governmental organisations who are trying to reconstruct Bosnia whilst its own authorities seem paralysed, especially with elections in the offering, when even loving your neighbour might be deemed political. Key parts of the December 1995 Dayton Peace Agreement deal with the issues of Repatriation and Property. UNHCR was called on the provide a plan to allow refugees and displaced persons to return peacefully ‘ to their homes or a place of their choosing’. Housing is, of course, the key element in this programme. There are 1,300 families and 3,477 displaced persons needing help in Sarajevo alone; and an estimated 11,000 homes to be repaired. Sarajevo has to be re-glazed before the winter, wholesale repairs are needed on the water and sanitation systems....
Does it matter, therefore that a group of old men sit together in a hotel room in Split, having survived Jacenovac Camp (one for an incredible four years, watching his friends starved, stabbed, tortured, clubbed to death - just as this time round in Omarska), and having reconstructed their lives, only to lose it all again, in old age? Does it matter that they are resigned to their ache for Sarajevo? Bluntly, does it really matter that less than two hundred Jewish people have lost the keys to their homes - when UNHCR’s first, over-optimistic estimate was that up to 500,000 displaced persons would return and 370,000 refugees repatriate during this year?
Dr Mirko Pejanovic believes it does matter, and is at pains to explain why. He is one of the Serb Members of the Bosnian Presidency and the President of the Civic Council of Citizen’s Council, and remained in Sarajevo throughout the war, influencing hundreds of other decent Sarajevan Serbs, whilst being shelled by Karadzic’s breakaway Serb Nationalists. Dr Pejanovic believes that the return of the Jews will be symbolic. ‘When the Jews come back there will be peace and there will be business. And my theory is that when the smallest of the minorities feels at ease, everybody feels at ease. We could show that Sarajevo will become a multi-cultural city once more - Sarajevo must be a model for the rest of the country. The point is - the numbers are so small it is quite possible for the Bosnian authorities to do something for the Jews. They must receive a solution within six months. Anything else would be against the interests of Sarajevo’.
At the Jewish Centre - where ‘La Benevolencia’ still feeds and cures, still counsels and now is attempting to build and reglaze - Jakob Finci receives assurances like this with moderate impatience. President Izetbegovic has made fine noises about the Jews, so has Vice-President Ganic. ‘The City Council signed a contract which spoke of their special intention to have the Jews back. When we asked them for apartments, so we can bring the ones back from Croatia, they told us to make a priority list. So we asked for ten. We didn’t get one. Then we went to the Presidency ... promises, promises’.
He speaks of the Holocaust and the special lesson Jews carry with them, wherever they go - almost as a duty to the dead. ‘We have to tell people that reconciliation is the only way. The war criminals have to be punished; justice must be done and they will be punished. But we cannot wait for that. In all the holy books it says you have to forgive. Nor forget. But forgiveness is necessary if we are to live together. Without that - maybe there will be partition. Bosnia will be divided into three ghettos - and through Jewish history we know that the ghetto cannot bring happiness. Maybe it is better to realise that the bread is made up of three distinct things: flour, water and yeast. So there are the Serbs, the Moslems, the Croats. And the Jews? We are the salt - we give a special flavour to Bosnia.’ Then he frowns. ‘But we are not guilty of anything. We helped everyone. We are not giving them our homes’.
A savoury smell of bean stew drifts through, cooked and dished out by a wild-looking former restaurateur, Josef Abingun, who has worked in the soup kitchen since ‘92. A television flickers silently; pop music shrills from the radio. There are a babies in pushchairs, women chatting, men playing cards. And in the corner an elderly couple, who shake their heads nervously at the suggestion of a photograph, so engrained is their habit of fear. Moris and Leah Papo were unable to bear the absense from home any longer; they have returned to Sarajevo even though the Jewish Community Leaders have no keys to give them. So they are living separately, sleeping on friend’s sofas, ‘and here is the only place we can be together’.
Moris says proudly, ‘I am born in Sarajevo, and my father, grandfather and all my ancestors. We have been here over 400 years: they are all buried in the Jewish graveyard’. His complete family was wiped out in the Second World War; his wife Leah was five when she was taken to Bergen-Belsen. They both survived to become and engineer and a paediatrician respectively. In 1992, both sick and afraid, they took the convoy to safety, travelling to Split, then Zagreb, then to join their son in Germany. But they wanted to come back: “This is our country’. They found that the door of their apartment had been smashed down, and an ex-Bosnian army soldier had taken possession with his family. ‘The city gave them the right to live there, so we have no where to go’. Tiny and frail-looking, even though she is on in her sixties, Leah stares at the formica table; ‘I have only one wish- to come back and have my own home. This is a repeating of history for me.’ The music on the radio is the Bee-Gees, singing, ‘Stayin’ Alive’.
Sarajevo is bustling and noisy again, even though the water supply is still rationed. A little girl in lime-green leggings, carrying a Barbie Doll, wanders past a group of IFOR soldiers; they loiter at shop windows full of jewellery and souvenirs. There is a smell of minced sausages on the air; a cafe called ‘BODYGUARD’ spills young people on to the pavement, tapping their feet to blaring Euro-pop; graffiti proclaims, ‘I (heart) Sarajevo’. But everywhere the shattered office and apartment blocks bear witness to the recent destruction, whilst the distant power drills whine of the enormity of the task of rebuilding. And there are few people who will tell you that they are optimistic about the future.
On a hill above the city the stillness in the sixteenth century Jewish Cemetery is not that of mourning or respect; instead it shivers with menace. Not so long ago this was the front line, and the air thudded and screamed. Now the hidden evil is mines; a notice on the gate translates ‘ ENTRY STRICTLY FORBIDDEN’ and the grassy paths leading up through the graves are tied off with plastic tape. So the Saloms and Papos and Levis who lie there cannot be visited by their descendents; on the brow of the hill the most ancient graves of the Sephardim , rounded and prone according to tradition, are disappearing amongst the weeds. The Prayer Hall is full of sandbags, and the cool blue-grey walls blackened. A shattered Star of David looks down on walls defaced with soldiers’ graffiti, threatening endless sexual punishment to the ‘Chetniks’ (Serb Nationalists) and their families.This graveyard is as ruined as the ones desecrated by Nazis , and before them so many of others, back to the Crusaders and even before - who turned the Jews into martyrs, without cause. Except for being Jewish.
A Jewish Cemetery has many euphemistic names, like “House of Eternity’, and ‘Long Home, and ‘House of Life’. The sense of dwelling, and belonging is important. The Scriptures are full of phrases like ‘ was gathered into his forefathers’, and when in the Book of Samuel (11) King David invites Barzillai to remain at his Court, the invitation is declined with these words: ‘Let thy servant, I pray three, turn back, that I may die in mine own city by the grave of my father and my mother’. Family and home, the living and the dead united.....a need that is as as profound as the mourning in the Yizkor , when the dead are remembered. Then each man standing in the synagogue asks ‘Lord, full of compassion’ to grant ‘perfect rest’ to those ‘who were victims of the vilest atrocities in the countries under the Nazi domination...’
Like the former Yugoslavia.
They will also exclaim passionately, ‘In their memory I offer charity and would do good.’ And that is precisely what the Jews of Sarajevo did during this recent war, adding to the Mitzvot - the store of human goodness, which is at the root of all civilisation, in a benighted land. And that, one could say, is why the world should exercise itself on behalf of less than two hundred people, some of them very old, who have the right to return. Because their community did - and is still doing - inestimable good in Sarajevo. Because they have suffered before. Because they deserve better. Because they want only the keys to their homes.
Because they are Jews.
