From: sharon@unixland.natick.ma.us (Sharon Machlis Gartenberg)
Subject: A WW II Story, From Sarajevo
Organization: Unixland Public Access Unix  (508) 655-3848
Date: Fri, 2 Oct 1992 20:26:55 GMT

The following are excerpts from the book ``The Book of the Just: The 
Unsung Heroes Who Rescued Jews from Hitler'' by Eric Silver. 
Please note that these are Silver's words, NOT mine.

`Yosef, you are our brother, and Rivkah, you are our sister, and the
children are our children. Everything we have is yours, this is your
home.' In Sarajevo in April 1941, the Arabian Nights greeting meant
more than the usual effusive eastern hospitality. In a gesture that
made him one of the four Muslims decorated by Israel for saving Jews,
Mustafa Hardaga, a merchant who owned property all over the city and
dealt in Persian carpets, was offering a roof to his friend and tenant,
Josef Kabilio, after the German air force had bomed him out of his
third-floor apartment. Mustafa shared the rambling house with his
older brother, Izet. Their wives, Zayneba and Bahria, lived in separate
women's quarters and veiled their faces with their pinafores when
they saw Josef. They had never before had a strange man to stay
with them.

Soon after their Jewish guest moved in with his wife, son and 
daughter, the Wehrmacht entered [Sarajevo]. ... About a third
of the population were Muslims, many of whom collaborated with
the invaders. There was an upsurge of anti-Semitism. The Great
Synagogue, which was in the same neighborhood as the Hardaga
home, was sacked by a mob. Priceless Torah scrolls, dating back
to the expulsion of the Jews from Spain more than 400 years
earlier, went up in flames. The Germans, aided by the local 
security police, began mass deportations of the city's 10,000
Jews, 90% of them Sephardi, in September 1941. Yet Mustafa and
Zayneba, who was 20 years his junior, kept faith with the Kabilios,
even when the Gestapo set up an interrogation centre opposite
their house and posters went up throughout the city threatening
death to anyone who hid Jews.

Yosef Kabilio watched the anti-Semitic riots from behind a
curtain in the Hardaga mansion. `These deeds,' he testified,
`only strengthened the Hardagas' feeling of friendship toward
us and their sympathy for what was happening to the Jews.' But
Yosef was worried that their presence was endangering his hosts.
He found a Serbian friend, who smuggled Rivkah and the children,
disguised as his own family, to the relative safety of the
Italian-controlled zone of Yugoslavia. However, Yosef, one of
Sarajevo's leading manufacturers, was too well known to accompany
them. He would have been recognized at the first checkpoint. ...

[Kabilio was hidden by a friend in a military hospital, disguised
as a sick prisoner.] Kabilio stayed in the military hospital for
two months, but one night the police came and arrested him. He was
held with 70 other Jews in the local prison. Because of an 
exceptionally hard winter, the Germans were unable to transfer them,
as planned, to the Jasenovac slave labour camp. ... Instead, they
were taken out every morning to shovel snow off the streets. One
day, as they were making their way back to their cells, chained
together, Kabilio spotted a veiled woman, weeping as she stood and
stared at the prisoners. He recognized her as Zayneba Hardaga.
`From that day,' he wrote, `for the whole month that I was imprisoned,
Zayneba and her sister-in-law brought enough food for me and a few
other hungry mouths.' ...

[Kabilio escaped after a month, but was turned in by an informer 
and sentenced to death. He and 8 other condemned men were sent to
Pale.] Partisans had sabotaged water and sewage pipes, and the
prisoners were set to work repairing them. `Our jailers didn't 
bother themselves about food for us,' he recalled, `so we lived on
the grass and snails.' Once again, the Hardaga family intervened.
One of their guards happened to know the Muslim merchant and
casually mentioned Kabilio and the other prisoners. `Two weeks 
later, when I had reached my lowest ebb because of the lack of food
and the harsh labour, they managed to get food parcels to us. The
courage of the Hardaga family touched all of us, and gave us 
strength to keep living in our imprisonment.'

Two months after their arrival in Pale, the guards received an
order to execute the nine prisoners. Before it could be carried
out, Capt. Reinman, an officer in the Domobrany, the Yugoslav
standing army, came during the night to their prison shack and
said that he would leave the door open. ...

[Kabilio made his way back to Sarajevo and the Hardaga family.]
The next morning Kabilio met Zayneba's father, Ahmed Sadik, who
told him that he had hidden the Papo family, Jewish friends of 
the Kabilios, and had managed to get them to the Italian zone. 
Ahmed Sadik was later denounced for helping Jews and was killed
in Jasenovac. ...

`I began to notice things around me, notices plastered on walls
warning the public against sheltering Jews or Communists on
pain of death. Terror once more engulfed my heart and I realized
I had to get out of the city the next day, a city where there
were no longer any Jews. My hosts did everything they could to
make my stay in their home as comfortable as possible, but I
feared that if I were to stay I might bring tragedy upon the
Hardaga family.'

So Kabilio turned to an acquaintance, who smuggled him out of
Sarajevo to rejoin his family in the Italian zone. This time it
was worth risking the journey. ... At the end of the war,
the Kabilios returned to the city and were warmly welcomed by
their Muslim protectors. ... Of the 10,000 Jews in Sarajevo
early in 1941, representing about 10% of the city's population,
only 2,400 survived the war, fleeing like the Kabilios to the
Italian zone. Most of the survivors emigrated to Israel after
the establishmet of the Jewish state in 1948.

Kabilio and his family settled in Jerusalem, where Yosef died
in 1989 in his 92nd year. On the strength of his testimony,
Israel honoured the Hardaga family in June 1985. Zayneba, by
then widowed, attended the Yad Vashem [Israel's Holocaust
memorial and museum] ceremony. The floor of the Ohel Yizkor,
the Hall of Remembrance, is studded with the names of 22
Nazi concentration camps. Zayneba placed flowers on Jasenovac,
where her father had met his death. ...
---------------------------------------------------------------
In the prologue to ``The Book of the Just,'' Silver writes:
 
``The aim of this book is ... to show that there were people who
cared, who were neither indifferent nor intimidated, who risked 
their own lives, liberty or careers to save Jews -- and sometimes
paid a heavy price. Hitler's Europe was not a world only of us and
them, Jews and goyim, victims and victimizers. The tragedy is that
there were not enough righteous ones. It was easier to look the
other way, to safeguard yourself and your own family, or even --
like the Polish `friends' who murdered the parents of the future
Israeli Prime Minister, Yitzhak Shamir, when they came begging
for help -- to join in the orgy of legalized bloodletting. But
it is important that there were some who said `No.' Important for
those who they sheltered, important if the rest of the human race
is to look itself in the eye.

``No one can know how many there were. ... They talked reluctantly
of their deeds. ... Decades later, they remained painfully
conscious of how little they had achieved, how much more would
have been possible if other ordinary people had shown the same
extraordinary courage, had dared to deny the prevailing barbarity.

```A few thousand righteous, a few million dead and a few hundred
million Europeans -- it all remains inconceivable in as much as
one dares to think about it at all,' wrote the daughter of a Red
Cross official who disregarded head office instructions and 
protected thousands of Hungarian Jews. `Can we, the heirs of that
generation, pass judgment or can we only mourn? History proves
that it was possible to fight the evil.' '' ...
-- 
Sharon Machlis Gartenberg
Framingham, MA  USA
email: sharon@unixland.natick.ma.us   or   uunet!think.com!unixland!sharon