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It is November 1991 and my wife Marina and I have been watching reports of the brutal destruction of Dubrovnik, on the Croatian shore, by the Yugoslav Peoples Army. We cry. We cry long into the early morning hours. It cannot be true-but it is happening before our eyes. It cannot be that bad. Yet the old town is in vacations, dozens of weekends, and even a honeymoon, in Dubrovnik. It is happening on television. Will the pounding aggression ever knock on our door? This night the question seems not a simple one to answer. Holding each other in bed, we matter what to stay together, and to protect ourselves, our parents, our friends, our books, our memories and our consciousness of who, as individuals, we are.

April 21, 1992. Afternoon shelling rudely interrupts what had seemed to be a nice spring day in Sarajevo. In the early evening the shelling resumes, and just before curfew (10 p.m.) the aggressors shell and burn down the Museum of the 14th Winter Olympiad. The Olympics were really something fantastic here. Now a beautiful old building from the Austrian era and all the documentation of the Sarajevo games have been destroyed. April 22, 1992. Again the daily routine of bombardment all across the city. At about 9:30 p.m., an 82 mm. mortar shell explodes in our garden, shattering the windows of the living room where we sit. Tiny particles of glass air. We feel a warm blast, and smell the intense smell of explosives and melted glass. Are we still alive? For a moment, which seems to last about an hour, we do not know.

Then yes. We have survived.

The next morning we notice that the blast has knocked a special book off its shelf: the letters of 1926 between Boris Pasternak, Marina Tsvetayeva and Rainer Maria Rilke. It is the it up from the embedded in the cover. And yet, we are grateful, because a kind of miracle has occurred. From this morning on, we call this collection of poets' letters the Book that Saved Our Lives.

May 17, 1992. The aggressors have deliberately destroyed the Oriental Institute in Sarajevo. The loss cannot be measured or ever repaired. In less than two hours, 5,000 unique manuscripts, Turkish, Persian and Arabic, over a hundred plat books from Ottoman times (books that can no longer show that Slavs professing Islam have lived in Bosnia for many centuries), other records of the Ottoman rule numbering some 200,000 pages, 300 microof Bosnian writings from other manuscript libraries, the 10,000 volumes of the Institute's research library, and 300 sets of periodicalsx All lost in I hate to go on with this, with this bibliometric accounting of the destruction of two years of terrorism in the Sarajevo ghetto. I hate myself, and deeply regret that the figures are not part of a program of recovery. They are merely history.

On August 27, 1992, in the early morning, the National Library was deliberately attacked and burned. Twenty-building, launched from four positions in the surrounding hills. In support of the attack, forty shells were dropped on adjacent streets, preventing the attack is that the aggressors had cut off the water to the district before the attack, so there was no need to bomb the anyway. The attack lasted less than half an hour. The The sun was obscured by the smoke of books, and all over the city sheets of burned paper, fragile pages of grey ashe, fsnow. Catching a page you could feel its heat, and for a moment read a fragment of text in a strange kind of black and grey negative, until, as the heat dissipated, the page melted to dust in your hand. Approximately 1,200,000 book items and 600 sets of periodicals were destroyed. Administrative documents and the card catalog, computer equipment, microfcollections, and the university library, which was housed in the same building.

It seems the Nazis burned about twenty million books. But not in one place (in about 45 different places). August 27, 1992 in Sarajevo, then, may have been the biggest book burning in history. In one day, and one night: a million and a quarter books.

So. We have to deal with these criminals. I don'' know what the best term is. "Aggressors? "But I think the aim of this kind of aggression, against museums, against libraries, is to erase our remembrance of who we are. Why else would someone want to burn books? Simply to create the situation where the people of a society have no memory of their past. Can Hooderlin's famous verse lend us any comfort?

Where danger is,
There salvation also grows.

Yes. But only if one can truly believe, as Bulgakov insisted, that Manuscripts do not burn.

Before this "War"I was the chief librarian of the National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was founded in 1888 as the Landesmuseum of B-H, as Bosnia came under Austrian rule. We celebrated the centennial not long ago. The museum''library is the the oldest scientifin Bosnia. As kustos, I cherished and treasured about a quarter of a million books, among them the most famous book of the Sephardic tradition in Bosnia, the Sarajevo Haggada. A haggada is a collection of Hebrew literature. The Sarajevo Haggada contains poems and paintings about Passover and the escape of the Jews from Egypt. It was made between the 12th and 14th centuries, and was brought to Bosnia by the Cohen family in the 16th century, when Isabella expelled the Jews from Spain. It is perhaps the most beautiful and important haggada in existence. Scholars from all the world come to see it. But when people come now, I show them a copy. The original is safe and sound. The aggression began unexpectedly, and with a cruelness that was unimaginable. When the fGrbavica district, my colleagues and I realized the museum was in danger. It had been built in 1914 on the edge of town, but today is in the center, and unfortunately sits right on the Grbavica "Front line."

Not only mortar shells but snipers from the towers across the street were a danger, so my colleagues and I were silent shadows as we evacuated the collections. I was absent from home for days at a time over the course of many weeks, and whenever I left the museum I kissed the walls and the doors, saying "Please God! Don't let my library get burned! Not yet!"At home with Marina, I would describe for her the books we had rescued, the titles and authors, the design, the front covers, all in great detail, as if making the confession of the last man who would ever see them. About two kilometers of books were evacuated. We didn'' have many boxes. We just carried them. And after several months they were safe. Then I said, "Okay. If you want to burn it now, just try it. All this is yours. If you want to destroy it, destroy it. You can't hurt me. You can't hurt me anymore. My books are in a safe place."They did horrible things to the museum. As a building it is almost totally in ruin. But my colleagues and I managed to preserve all of the exhibits, some of which had been there 105 years. It is something that I am proud of. I am the kustos, the custodian of the library. My job is to keep things the way they are.

I am a Muslim. I am an atheist. I am a computer man. I think I am a cosmopolitan kind of guy. Marina's father is a Croat from Sarajevo. Her mother is a Serb from Banja Luka. We celebrate all the religious holidays, Muslim, Catholic and Orthodox. Both my sisters are married to Croats. So we are mixed in every way. And with most people in Sarajevo I think the story is the same.

Of course, we have problems now. Many Serbs have gone. Croats have been active on both sides. But we simply cannot retreat into a Muslim ghetto in Bosnia. It would destroy our tradition, our pattern, our way of life. We are not forced to live together. We really live together. The Pale people, the Serb nationalists, say there is no way that Serb and Muslim can live together. It is ridiculous. And it is not true. Or the Croat nationalists say, "We want all of Mostar! Or let's divide it into east and west, we can live side by side!" How can I, with my wife, in one bed? I want to live in something that is dynamic and universal. That is the only intellectual atmosphere I can live in. Our destinies are crossed. We have to treasure the common tradition, a tradition of mutual understanding. This is the only hope for our future.

We are frustrated. We don't have any food. I am crazy about cigarettes. I am crazy about running hot water, about electricity. But one can get used to all this. The thing that is most important is to communicate with the world, to exchange ideas. The quarrel, the dialogue. This is the main thing we must secure to have a future. We are suffering from a total communications blockade: telephones, mail, convoys, buses, trains and planes, computers, intellectual conferences, and so on. It is something we must struggle for: a new structure of communicating with the world. I have no political background, but am working now in the government, until the aggression stops, and then will return to my work as a librarian. It is part of my job to rebuild the National Library. A while ago we received from UNESCO the process has begun. I have estimated that it will cost about four million dollars. I also have to rebuild my museum. We have to fhelp us get these things going again. It is also my job to support the teaching of people with M.A.s and Ph.D.s. Fifteen hundred people are involved, in 24 faculties. In current conditions, which have lasted two years, it is diffMarina, for example, is a professor of linguistics and Russian literature. Her monthly salary is three kilos of food something about it. We have many good ideas. But one is most important: to be connected, in many ways, with the world.

Strange things began to happen during the evacuation of the museum library. Manuscripts not listed in the catalog began to appear among known items. For example: a fmuseum and a professor of archaeology at Vienna University. I have also found a three-act play by Svetozar Corovic, a famous poet and novelist from Mostar. Mostar at the beginning of the century had three or four major poets. They published a magazine called The Sunrise Saga, and were famous in B-H and beyond.

This unknown drama by Svetozar C'orovic; is called In the Darkness. During night watches in the museum, I typed it into my computer, and tried to discover how this manuscript happened to be in the collection. Next to Svetozar'' play on the shelf were poems by a writer named Avdo Karabegovic;, the most talented poet we have ever had. He was born in the town of Modrica and died at age 22. I have found the original manuscripts of about seventy poems that have never been published. But here is the interesting story.

It seems that Avdo was very ill in the days of 1901. So Avdo, who is Muslim, sent his manuscripts to Svetozar, who is Serb, and wrote: "My brother Svetozar. I am very ill. Please, here are all my things. Try to publish them." And Svetozar did publish many of them, two years after Avdo died. And now I have prepared a Svetozar did not include in the That is the answer.

If anyone in the United States, or anywhere else in this world, asks about the national differences between Serbs and Muslims, please tell them this kind of story. We are really mixed in a very special way. Like the books in my library. They have no ethical background, no cultural background, no racial or geographic backgrounds. They are simply one by one. Alphabetical, perhaps. The only differences are the size, the cover, and the things they say. I think that is the story. Even here and now miracles can occur. Precious manuscripts have come to light, and the fsaved our lives. Do Marina and I have any reason to hope that a similar miracle may somehow restore the burned books of Bosnia and Herzegovina? Yes, if it's true that what you love well is your true home, and if sharing and cherishing are the milestones of your journey. We have always believed, with Gaston Bachelard, that up in the sky there must be a Heaven, and that Heaven must be something like a library.

Someday again a heavenly rain will fall.

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