A book that might have been

“Bosnians like to remember things that never happened” – Daniel Nikolic, Franciscan priest, Bosnia in an interview to BBC Radio.

The quote from the BBC radio podcast complemented my trip down the memory lane, which I often walked this past week, thanks to “The Cellist of Sarajevo” book. It also illustrates what the book failed to convey: the spirit, the humor, the unbeatable soul of Bosnians. The book paints—correct, but only partial—a bleak, depressing picture of Sarajevo during the siege. The three characters we’re following never meet, don’t have anything in common other than living in Sarajevo, and fail to give the reader the most important feeling of the Bosnian spirit, the true reason behind the survival of Sarajevo. Bosnians were always known as jokesters within former Yugoslavia, and that constant joking kept them alive in the days of darkness. I guess, being written by a foreigner, a Canadian, the book is as good as it gets. One can’t expect an outsider to grasp the subtle humor which carried every individual through the bleak months and years of the siege. I was in Bosnia, albeit outside Sarajevo, during those long years, and I went to the town as soon as the siege was lifted courtesy of British and other NATO troops. And although I like to write, I would never muster enough courage to write about something as sensitive as the siege of Sarajevo, from fear of not conveying the whole picture. The author, Steven Galloway, reminds me of a Canadian officer, a major, whose name eludes me, but whom I met in Slavonija, Croatia, near the front line, in 1991. He was a part of EU team of observers. They were, quite literally, observing the war, the killing, the massacres, between the Croats and the Serbs; that was a year before the war spread to Bosnia. At a dinner during which a fellow photojournalist and myself were invited to join the EU observers’ table, the major stated how it took him full 4 months of observing and talking to people, but now he can finally say he understands about 80% of what’s going on. My colleague and I looked at each other, then he turned to the major and said: “See, the two of us live here for over 20 years, but neither would dare to say we understand even 50% of what’s behind the war. So, you must be either very smart, or very wrong!”
Although I don’t claim Steven Galloway is wrong, I wish he did more of a homework and researched the other aspects of the story. It could have been a good one. If only…