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History · ·7 min read

Sarajevo — Kemal Bakaršić called it The Book That Saved Our Lives, and it was a Pasternak-Tsvetayeva-Rilke correspondence from 1926

On 22 April 1992 an 82mm mortar exploded in the garden of Kemal and Marina Bakaršić. The blast knocked a book off its shelf. When they picked it up the next morning, they found a piece of shrapnel embedded in the cover — instead of in them. It was the letters of Pasternak, Tsvetayeva and Rilke from the summer of 1926, the first book Kemal had ever given his wife. He named it 'The Book That Saved Our Lives' that morning. Two years later he wrote the essay of the same title, and it was one of the first Sarajevo siege witness texts to reach the world through the early public internet.

By Nedim Hadzimahmutovic · Sarajevo

The story is a single paragraph in a single essay. In the autumn of 1994 the American journal The New Combat published an essay by Kemal Bakaršić, then the chief librarian of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, titled “The Libraries of Sarajevo and the Book That Saved Our Lives.” He wrote it from a dim dusty office in the Sarajevo Presidency building, in a city that was in its third year of siege, for an American editor named William Ney who had made it in through the Tunnel of Hope in 1993. The essay was composed as an essay-plus-transcript, tape-recorded across a single kitchen table, and became one of the first Sarajevo witness texts to travel about the “nascent public internet” (the phrase is Ney’s), and it reached readers in cities the city itself was not going to reach for another decade.

The book of the title is named on page four.

The book itself

On the evening of 22 April 1992 an 82mm mortar shell exploded in the garden of the Bakaršić family apartment. About 9:30 pm. The blast shattered the windows of the living room where Kemal and his wife Marina were sitting. Glass filled the air. They felt the warm blast, the smell of explosives and melted glass. “Are we still alive?” Kemal wrote. “For a moment, which seems to last about an hour, we do not know.”

The next morning they found that the blast had knocked a book off its shelf. It was the Yugoslav-era Cyrillic edition of the correspondence between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke from the summer of 1926, three of the great poets of the twentieth century, exchanging letters across Berlin, Muzot and the Kremlin in a single summer, before Rilke died in December. The first book Kemal had ever given his own Marina. A courtship present.

When they picked it up from the floor, they found a large piece of shrapnel embedded in the cover. Not in them. Not in the window frame. In the book.

“From this morning on,” Kemal wrote in the autumn of 1994, “we call this collection of poets’ letters The Book That Saved Our Lives.”

What was around it

Kemal’s essay does not stay on the book for long. It cannot. He was writing in the third year of a siege that had already destroyed the two greatest research libraries of Bosnia and Herzegovina. He recorded, in order:

17 May 1992, the Oriental Institute of Sarajevo was destroyed by incendiary shells. Losses: 5,000 unique manuscripts in Turkish, Persian and Arabic; over 100 land registers (plat books) from Ottoman times; roughly 200,000 pages of other Ottoman-administration records; 300 microfilm files of Bosnian writings from other manuscript libraries; the Institute’s 10,000-volume research library; and 300 sets of periodicals. Kemal’s line on it is exact: “All lost in flame.”

27 August 1992, early morning, the attack on the Vijećnica, then housing the National and University Library. Twenty-five mortar shells, launched from four positions in the surrounding hills. In support: forty shells dropped on adjacent streets to prevent the fire brigade from coming into action. Kemal notes the technical peculiarity: the water to the district had been cut off before the attack, so bombing the fire brigade was operationally redundant. The attackers did it anyway. The fire lasted into the next day. Sheets of burnt paper drifted across the whole city like “a dirty black snow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand.”

Approximately 1,200,000 book items and 600 sets of periodicals were destroyed in that one attack.

His comparison, which is the sentence quoted in every subsequent piece about that night: “It seems the Nazis burned about twenty million books. But not in one place (rather, in about 45 different places). August 27, 1992 in Sarajevo, then, may have been the biggest book burning in history. In one day, and one night: a million and a quarter books.”

What Kemal did about it

Kemal was chief librarian of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, the Landesmuseum, founded in 1888, the oldest scientific library of the western type in Bosnia. Its collection: about a quarter of a million books. Its single most-famous holding: the Sarajevo Haggadah.

The National Museum sat, in April 1992, on the Grbavica front line. Snipers in the residential towers across the street had a direct line of fire into the windows. Mortar shells could and did land in the courtyard.

Kemal and his colleagues evacuated the library in silence, over the course of many weeks, moving books to safe locations by hand. He described their working method in one of the essay’s most-quoted paragraphs: “I was absent from home for days at a time over the course of many weeks, and whenever I left the museum I kissed the walls and doors, saying ‘Please God! Don’t let my library get burned! Not yet!’ At home with Marina, I would describe for her the books we had rescued, the titles and authors, the design, the front covers, all in great detail, as if making the confession of the last man who would ever see them.”

About two kilometres of books were evacuated by hand. They didn’t have many boxes. They just carried them. After several months of this, Kemal reported, all of the museum’s exhibits had been preserved. Some were 105 years old.

“They did horrible things to the museum. As a building it is almost totally in ruin,” he wrote. “But my colleagues and I managed to preserve all of the exhibits, some of which had been there 105 years. It is something that I am proud of. I am the kustos, the custodian of the library. My job is to keep things the way they are.”

The Sarajevo Haggadah was among the books he moved.

What the essay did

Bakaršić’s essay is quoted, cited and paraphrased across the twentieth-century scholarly literature on cultural destruction — András Riedlmayer’s classic 1995 study, Rebecca Knuth’s Libricide (2003), John Fine’s When Ethnicity Did Not Matter in the Balkans (2006), all of them lift paragraphs from it. The Hölderlin quote he closed on, “Where danger is, there salvation also grows”, has become one of the standard epigraphs of siege-era studies. His paraphrase of Bulgakov, “manuscripts do not burn”, is on plaques in three European libraries.

More important than the citation record: the essay became one of the first Sarajevo witness texts to travel widely by email and early web. In 1994, when Bakaršić wrote it, the public internet was in its second year of mass adoption. The New Combat posted the essay online. It was reposted, forwarded, screencapped, and archived, the way essays reach the world now, but a novelty then. William Ney’s later note called it “one of the first Sarajevo texts to reach the world through the nascent public internet.”

Bakaršić’s line, from that same paragraph, is the one that anchors this story. He describes what he wants most in the third year of siege, not food, not electricity, not running water, though those matter, but “to communicate with the world, to exchange ideas. The debate, the dialogue. This is the main thing we must secure to have a future.”

Two years later, the Dayton Peace Agreement was signed. Ten years after that, on 4 June 2006, Kemal Bakaršić died of cancer. Marina still has the book.

What is still on Marina’s shelf

The Yugoslav-era Cyrillic edition of the Pasternak-Tsvetayeva-Rilke Letters of Summer 1926 is not a rare edition. Not the Sarajevo Haggadah. A mid-market Yugoslav-era translation of a well-known correspondence. Anyone can find a copy today, in any of the second-hand bookshops on Ferhadija or in the online catalogue of the National Library. What makes this copy the book of the title is that a piece of shrapnel is still in the cover.

Marina has kept it. It is on a shelf in an apartment in Sarajevo, three decades after the mortar. The four exhibits Kemal named as most-precious in his 1993 kitchen-table interview, the Haggadah, the Avdo Karabegović manuscripts, the Svetozar Čorović three-act play, the Landesmuseum’s oldest exhibits, are all still in the collections of the National Museum, which reopened after multiple rounds of closure and now runs full open hours. You can go and look at them. The Haggadah is on view. Its guard-case sits under climate control.

The essay sits in the online archive of The New Combat. Six pages. Twenty minutes to read. Kemal’s line from page five is the one to keep: “Where danger is, there salvation also grows.” Then he added the sentence Bulgakov gave him: “manuscripts do not burn.”

Both propositions were tested on the ground in Sarajevo in 1992. Both, in the way the essay documents, held.

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