The Pale House (61 page)

O
n 6 April 1945, four years to the day since German bombers attacked the city, Sarajevo was retaken by Tito's Partisans. They found a city reeling after four years of German and Ustaše occupation. Sarajevo's infrastructure was in ruins, its people stunned by the brutality they had lived under, especially during the last months, when the Ustaše's rule had veered toward the crazed and uncontrollable.

Sarajevo's Jews were all but exterminated, as were the Roma. Thousands of Serbs were killed or imprisoned, their properties confiscated, and hundreds more fled to the hills and to the ranks of the Partisans or the
. The city's Bosnian Muslims, torn between the demands of their German and Ustaše overlords and their own visions of a future of their own, navigated a path to survival that involved a mixture of collaboration, tolerance, and resistance.

These years were among the worst in Sarajevo's history. Much of its commercial or industrial activity was stifled or shut down. Food was constantly in short supply. Outbreaks of disease such as typhus stalked the city. In the face of German and Ustaše disinterest and incompetence in making any attempt to run Sarajevo and provide basic services, the city's various charities and cultural societies filled the gap, providing vital and lifesaving assistance. The workers and volunteers of Napredak, Prosvjeta, and Merhamet did their best for their communities, often in the face of overwhelming difficulties, often in the face of official discouragement and even opposition, and it was not unusual for the charities' supplies or properties to be commandeered by the occupying forces. Although the city was stretched to the breaking point, the complex web that bound the different communities together frayed but did not break.

Exactly how many Sarajevans died during the war is unknown. The closest estimates come from the findings of a commission formed in 1981 by the city's veterans. It established that some 10,900 Sarajevans had died as a direct result of the war, the overwhelming majority of whom were Jews. As one Yugoslav historian wrote, they were hemmed into a city in which they could not live and that they could not leave. Thus cornered, and subject to every sadistic and nonsensical whim and vagary that legislation or fascist imagination could come up with, some seven thousand Jews perished during the four-year occupation of the city. This figure is made all the more sobering when one considers that it accounts for more than two-thirds of all Sarajevans the commission found were killed during the war, and for three-quarters of the city's prewar Jewish population. The abject conditions to which they were subjected were documented in detail after the war by a judge,
Bujas, who was appointed as one of the trustees of the Jewish community by the Ustaše. Horrified by what he saw happening, Bujas did his best for Sarajevo's Jews. Motivated by his humanity, an agile and persistent negotiator, Bujas was personally able to save many among the city's Jewish population.

Of the other Sarajevans killed in the war, the majority were Serbs. Some 1,420 Serbs died or were killed, as well as more than four hundred Muslims and more than one hundred Croats. In addition, several thousand Sarajevans died serving in the ranks of the Partisans or operating within the city clandestinely as part of the Communist Party's resistance network. Serb and Bosnian Muslim refugees flooded into the city over the course of the war, to the extent that despite the years of conflict and deaths, Sarajevo's prewar population of some ninety thousand people had actually grown to something over one hundred thousand when it ended.

Of course, the deaths in the city do not include the deaths in the countryside, where the exactions of the Ustaše upon Bosnia's Serbs reached genocidal proportions, and from which tens of thousands of Bosnian Muslims fled at times equally bloody depradations of the
. Furthermore, the war was not confined to Bosnia-Herzegovina but involved the whole of prewar Yugoslavia. By the end of the war, some 1.7 million Yugoslavs were dead, and the majority—approximately one million people—had been killed by their fellow compatriots in an internecine and fratricidal conflict, by Croat Ustaše killing Jews, Muslims, Serbs,
, and Partisans; or by Partisans killing
and Ustaše; or by
killing Ustaše, Muslims, and Partisans.

—

Under the command of Vladimir
, known as Valter, the Communist Party in Sarajevo was the only organization to offer effective—if often only clandestine—armed resistance.
was an able organizer of urban resistance despite being in his very early twenties when he took over the Communist Party's networks in 1943. Notably, the Communist Party was the only organization that was able to bridge the ethnic and sectarian cleavages that the Ustaše and
would not, or could not, cross. Added to strong links to the countryside in which the Partisans operated, the Communist Party also overcame the rural-urban divide that had been such a distinct characteristic of Sarajevo's history. Communist Party cells made up of five people—known as “fivesomes” or
petorke
—were active and instrumental in the final days of the occupation, disrupting German and Ustaše movements, defending key installations and cultural sites from damage, and liaising with the advancing Partisans.

It was during these operations that
was killed, under circumstances that are still shrouded in mystery, on the very last day of the city's occupation. This event added both to his myth and to the mythology of the Partisans' and Communist Party's activities, with his legend inspiring the classic film
Valter Brani Sarajevo (Valter Defends Sarajevo)
. Given the obscurity around
death, I have exercised a touch of artistic license in order to involve Reinhardt in it.