Sarajevo Will Be (Everything Else Will Pass)

Lasting from 5 April 1992 to 29 February 1996 (1,425 days), the siege of Sarajevo was a prolonged military blockade of Sarajevo, the capital of the Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina, during the ethnically charged Bosnian War. The city was initially besieged by the Yugoslav People’s Army, before they were replaced by elements of the newly-formed Army of Republika Srpska. The siege was three times longer than the Battle of Stalingrad and more than a year longer than the siege of Leningrad, making it the longest siege of a capital city in the history of modern warfare.

When the siege began, Sarajevo’s Jewish community numbered roughly a thousand people. Many were Holocaust survivors who recognized what was starting. They stayed, and turned their community center into a pharmacy that dispensed medicine without checking ethnic ID cards, a soup kitchen that fed anyone who walked in, a ham radio that carried messages when the phone lines died, and a bus convoy operation that evacuated thousands of Sarajevans, most of who were not Jewish.

Tikkun Olam usually gets translated as repair of the world, and then left there, floating somewhere above the actual world. In Sarajevo this happened in the real, present sense; it looked like counting pills, keeping lists, and loading buses, for four years, without stopping, for whoever showed up.

Yeda Theatre traveled to Bosnia and interviewed the people who ran it, including Jakob Finci, the former president of the Jewish community who led twelve evacuation convoys. Those recorded voices are what created this piece, alongside movement, live violin and accordion, and shadow puppetry.

Through movement, we remember. Through remembering, we act.