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History · ·6 min read

Sarajevo — the book that took the shrapnel: a 1926 letters volume in a Kovačići garden, 22 April 1992

Kemal Bakaršić came out of the basement after a mortar attack, found his wife alive, and found the volume he had given her the first time they met knocked off the shelf. There was a piece of shrapnel embedded in the cover. They called it 'the book that saved our lives' for the rest of the siege.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

Two kinds of siege stories exist about Sarajevo. The big kind — the ones with the arithmetic, the numbers of dead, the buildings burned. The 1.25 million books lost in one night at Vijećnica is that kind of story. It’s the one the Explore Sarajevo site has to tell you, because it belongs on the record.

Then there’s the smaller kind. The human moment. The one particular book. The one window at one address on one morning in April 1992.

This is the second kind.

An interior arcade of Sarajevo's Vijećnica, the striped Habsburg-Moorish arches and painted upper walls — the kind of library-adjacent interior Kemal Bakaršić spent his working life in, before the siege put it under artillery.
The Vijećnica arcades — the working interior Bakaršić and his generation of Sarajevan librarians spent their working lives in. Photograph: Bjoertvedt, Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0

Kemal Bakaršić and the volume he had given his wife

Kemal Bakaršić (1954–2006) was the chief librarian of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina — the Zemaljski muzej at Marijin Dvor. He was one of the people responsible for the books that the siege was about to try to destroy. The Sarajevo Haggadah sat in his building. So did the two-kilometre-long National Museum library he would, during the siege, carry out by hand in the middle of the night with his colleagues.

He and his wife Marina lived in Kovačići — the residential slope on the south side of the Miljacka, above what is now the Old Jewish Cemetery.

The first book he had ever given her, when they were students, was the 1926 correspondence between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva, and Rainer Maria Rilke — the three-way exchange of letters that the Russian poets Pasternak and Tsvetayeva conducted with Rilke in the last year of Rilke’s life. Rilke died in December 1926. The three poets wrote to each other about poetry, illness, exile, love, and the weight of being writers in a Europe that was falling apart around them.

Kemal had given the volume to Marina because it was one of the things that had made him love her — the way she read poetry — and because he thought she should have the book he wished someone had given him. She had kept it on the shelf in the sitting room since.

The night of 22 April 1992

The siege had officially started on 5 April 1992, seventeen days earlier. Kovačići was already exposed to sniper fire from the surrounding hills. The Bakaršić family had been sleeping in the basement.

On the night of 22 April 1992, at around 21:30, an 82mm mortar shell landed in the garden of their house.

Kemal was in the basement. Marina was in the ground-floor sitting room. The mortar blew out the front windows, drove shrapnel through the fabric of the wall, and started a small secondary fire.

Kemal came up the stairs expecting to find his wife dead.

She wasn’t.

She was on the floor, dazed. Bleeding, but not seriously. The fragment that could have killed her had gone somewhere else.

What was on the floor

In the morning, when Kemal and Marina were surveying the damage to the house, they noticed that one book had been knocked off the shelf.

It was the Pasternak-Tsvetayeva-Rilke correspondence. The volume he had given her when they were students. It was on the floor, face up, its front cover exposed.

A large piece of shrapnel was embedded in the cover.

The fragment — an inch and a half long — had entered the volume at an angle that would have, if the book hadn’t been on the shelf where it was, carried it into the section of the room where Marina had been standing.

Kemal, in the essay he wrote two years later in The New Combat, does not overwrite this moment. He describes it in the tone of a man who is a librarian, who understands how books actually work, and who is not a novelist. He describes the book, the cover, the size of the shrapnel, and the coincidence of position that meant the book had absorbed a fragment that would otherwise have hit his wife.

Then he writes the line that everybody who reads the essay remembers:

“For the rest of the siege we called it the book that saved our lives.”

Why this matters, and why it matters at Explore Sarajevo

Spend enough time reading academic writing about the siege — the ICTY prosecution documents, the Riedlmayer testimony, the various dissertations — and you develop a numbness. The numbers numb you. The arithmetic of a mortar attack numbs you. The figures for civilian dead numb you. A working psychological defence against material that would otherwise be impossible to process.

Bakaršić’s essay does the opposite. No numbers. Instead, it offers one book, on one shelf, in one house, on one night, and the piece of shrapnel that the book absorbed instead of his wife.

That is what the human scale of the 1992–1995 siege looked like — in one library-family’s living room in Kovačići. Multiply it by 380,000 residents. That is the number Bakaršić is telling you not to numb yourself to.

The Pasternak-Tsvetayeva-Rilke correspondence, incidentally, is worth reading in its own right — the three poets discussing their own creative struggle in the last year of Rilke’s life is one of the more moving documents in twentieth-century European letters. If you’re in Sarajevo and you have not read it, you can find it in most decent English translations. Look for the Elaine Feinstein version.

Where the book is now

Kemal Bakaršić died in June 2006 at the age of 52. Marina survived him. The book is in her possession, in Sarajevo, with the shrapnel still in the cover.

She has not published photographs of it, and the site’s editor has not asked to see it, because it does not belong to us. It belongs to her, and it belongs to the story it is.

Kemal’s 1994 essay in The New Combat, republished by William Ney in 2006 with an introduction, is where the story lives in written form. If you want to read it, the volume is available through the University of Chicago Press’s website and various academic databases.

What to do with this

If you walk to Kovačići — the residential slope on the south side of the Miljacka, above the Old Jewish Cemetery — you are walking through the neighbourhood where this happened. You are not going to find the Bakaršić house on Google Maps, because it is a private house of a private family, and this is not a pilgrimage site.

But you can carry the fact with you as you walk. On the night of 22 April 1992, in one of the houses on this slope, a book that a librarian had given his wife twenty years earlier absorbed a fragment of a mortar shell, and she lived.

That is a Sarajevo siege story. It is one of thousands. Bakaršić wrote it down so you could know it.

Now you do.

Kemal Bakaršić: 1954–2006. His obituary appeared in the ALA Bulletin (Vol. 37, No. 3), 2006. Marina Bakaršić: still in Sarajevo, with the book.

Sources & further reading

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