Not a book, but about books

This is not a review of a book. This is a review of a programme about books that I just loved… http://balkans.aljazeera.net/video/ljubav-prema-knjigama-prica-o-sarajevu

The love of books: Sarajevo Story

I loved this programme. It was so moving.

A true story of how a director of a library in Sarajevo tried to save books during the 1992-95 war, and one miraculous survival of an old and irreplaceable manuscript.

Just before the war started a translator asked to take out manuscript she was working on about the history of Bosnia. Director gave her the permission to take them home and return them as soon as she is done. However, the war started; gunfire and explosions could be heard everywhere. One night, the lady got a knock on her door. She was alone with her friend and daughter in the apartment and they were reluctant to open. After some deliberation, they did open the door and their neighbour informed them that they are on an ‘evacuation’ list and that they should leave first thing in the morning with nothing, so that no one suspects they are running away. The woman, her friend and daughter did as they were advised; they left the next morning thinking they will never return.

The war in Bosnia and bombardment of Sarajevo went on and on. In the mean time, the director of the library collected some manuscripts in boxes and took them to a fire department for safe keeping. The old library was bombarded and everything in there was burned.

At the end of the war, the director took the manuscripts he managed to save to another safe place and the lady managed to return to her apartment. Serbian forces had occupied her home and destroyed it. She found one dress that had bullet holes all over it, a souvenir from the East and some books on the floor, just piled on top of one another. As she picked each one to see what titles survived, she found the manuscripts that she had taken from the library. It was hard to believe. The next day she took them back to the library and the director began to cry. They are safe now in their new home very close to where they originally lived.