Sarajevo Readers Crowd Front-Line U.S. Library; Shivering Bosnians Down a Dose of Culture

The Washington Post
January 5, 1993

SARAJEVO – Sniper fire is crackling along the frozen street and mortar rounds are exploding nearby when a passerby has a sudden urge to read a few lines of T. S. Eliot.

No problem. The American Cultural Center is close at hand, open for business a few hundered yards from the frontline in Dobrinja — the most dangerous suburb of Sarajevo. You can’t miss it — the boarded-up storefront adorned with a hand-painted American flag.

This is the sole U.S. presence in Sarajevo even approaching official status — aside from air crews flying in humanitarian aid. Although the United States recognizes Bosnia’s Slavic Muslim-led government, life in this shell-shattered city is judged too risky for an embassy.

At the start of the nine-month-old Bosnian war, the downtown American Cultural Center was hit by artillery fire from Serb nationalist forces besieging the city. People began pilfering books from its library, particularly those about warfare. The stacks of National Geographic magazines disappeared, too.

Librarian Bozana Benic, rather than watch the destruction of a resource she had nurtured for years, got permission to spirit the remaining books to an abandoned camera shop in Dobrinja, where she lived and could look after them.

Now, in a neighborhood where children dodge snipers, where the dead are buried in front of their apartment houses because the trip to the graveyard is too dangerous for mourners, you can check out American fiction. And check facts, too; the New Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 29 volumes, has pride of place next to the librarian’s red, white and blue desk.

“I am proud that even in a war zone we can have something like this,” said Senada Mavric, a teenager who minds the unheated library for a couple of hours every day, sitting on a bundle of clothes amid the works of John Steinbeck, James Michener and Garrison Keillor. “I thought that in a war everybody would forget about books and laugh about this . . . but many people want to read. Not everybody has fallen into a depression.”

The center’s triumph of culture over chaos, like much else in this forlorn land, was engineered by local citizens without outside help. And business is booming. About five new members sign up daily for lending priveleges, but this may be due partly to the fact that electricity has been cut off for a month, so no one can watch television and few people have enough money to pay black-market prices for radio batteries.

For fanfare, Dobrinja managed a reopening reception in October during a lull in the fighting. It was an extravagant affair by Dobrinja’s current standards — fruit juice and some snacks were served. Benic had hoped to arrange poetry readings during the winter months, but the lack of heat has made the place so cold that nobody can sit or stand around for very long.

“We are trying to have as normal a life as possible, or at least an illusion of normal life,” said Dizdar Srebren, a Dobrinja resident who earned a PhD in literature at the University of Southern California. “The library is one of those things that keeps us going. It keeps us sane.”

There are no picture displays outside the library because Dobrinja is not the kind of neighborhood where people can loiter. The 10-minute drive from downtown Sarajevo passes by gouged buildings, wrecked tanks and burned-out buses. At a checkpoint before the final sprint to Dobrinja, a Bosnian government militiaman waves cars through with the words, “Good luck.”

Because Dobrinja’s only connection to the city is along a road flanked with snipers, it gets fewer emergency supplies than Sarajevo. People burn books to keep their apartments warm, and one resident, Gabrijela Oprhal, captures pigeons to feed her cat. She used to have a second cat, but it was killed by shrapnel.

Benic, 40, used stealth to rescue the library’s books. The journey from Sarajevo to Dobrinja was too dangerous for slow-moving trucks in daytime, so Benic arranged for book-laden convoys at night, with headlights off.

About 3,000 books were salvaged from the old library, which now has been demolished. Benic even rescued the desks, chairs and bookshelves, so the new library has an incongruously snappy look in grim Dobrinje.

A big banner inside reads “USA,” and American graphics decorate the walls. The volunteer librarians shiver a lot but are generous with their time and pretend not to mind if a book is returned past due.

Benic left Dobrinje 10 days ago after grateful U.S. diplomatic personnel in neighboring Croatia arranged for her evacaution, but beyond that there has been no contact with the library by any U.S. official or agency. In any case, they would have a hard time communicating with the people here, since there is no mail service or working telephones.

“If the American government wants to thank us, it shouldn’t send a letter,” Srebren said with a laugh. “It should send F-18s to bomb the Serbs.”

Author: Peter Maass

I was born and raised in Los Angeles. In 1983, after graduating from the University of California at Berkeley, I went to Brussels as a copy editor for The Wall Street Journal/Europe. I left the Journal in 1985 to write for The New York Times and The International Herald Tribune, covering NATO and the European Union. In 1987 I moved to Seoul, South Korea, where I wrote primarily for The Washington Post. After three years in Asia I moved to Budapest to cover Eastern Europe and the Balkans. I spent most of 1992 and 1993 covering the war in Bosnia for the Post.
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