(Wine stains on the parchments of the Sarajevo Haggadah testify that this book, though lavishly designed, was read at such family feasts.) It is used at the table during the Passover Seder. A Haggadah, from the Hebrew root “HGD”-“to tell”-relates the story of the exodus from Egypt, which Jews are commanded to tell to their children. In early 1942, when Korkut heard that a Nazi commander, General Johann Fortner, had arrived at the museum to speak to its director, he immediately feared for the museum library’s greatest treasure, a masterpiece of medieval Judaica known as the Sarajevo Haggadah. A handsome, dapper man with a neatly trimmed mustache, he wore well-tailored three-piece suits complemented by a fez. The museum’s chief librarian, an Islamic scholar named Dervis Korkut, was an unlikely figure of resistance, but he had already made his anti-Fascist feelings clear, in an article defending the city’s beleaguered Jews. Fear of denunciation spread through the city, penetrating every workplace, even the imposing neo-Renaissance halls of the Bosnian National Museum. Jews, Gypsies, and Serb resisters turned frantically to sympathetic Muslim or Croat neighbors to hide them.
The Sarajevo pinkas, a complete record of the Jewish community from its earliest days, was confiscated and sent to Prague, never to be recovered. The terror began on April 16th, when the German Army entered Sarajevo and sacked the city’s eight synagogues. Hitler’s ally, Ante Pavelic, who had headed the Ustashe through the nineteen-thirties, proclaimed that his new state must be “cleansed” of Jews and Serbs: “Not a stone upon a stone will remain of what once belonged to them.” The city cradled by mountains that Rebecca West once described as like “an opening flower” suddenly found itself absorbed into the Nazi puppet state of Croatia, its tolerant, cosmopolitan culture crushed by the invading German Army and the Croatian Fascist Ustashe. When the Axis powers conquered and divided Yugoslavia, in the spring of 1941, Sarajevo did not fare well. In 1942, a Nazi officer tried to take the Bosnian National Museum’s great treasure, the richly illuminated Sarajevo Haggadah.
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