Transcription
Picture this: Sarajevo, late March 1992. A fourth-floor apartment in Marijin Dvor, two blocks from the river, eight blocks from the parliament building. His name is Edin. He is 44, an engineer at Energoinvest, the big state-owned firm with the twin towers down the boulevard. Her name is Ana. She's 43, a primary school teacher at the school across the park. They have a son, 12, and a daughter, nine. Edin is Bosniak. Ana is Serb. They've been married for 15 years. Nobody asked them about it when they married. In Sarajevo in 1977, nobody had to.
Their building is a typical Yugoslav block, six stories, 12 apartments. The neighbors include a Croat pediatrician, a Bosniak retired postman, two Serb sisters in their 70s who have lived there since the building went up. A Jewish family on the second floor whose grandmother survived 1941. The hallway smells of coffee in the mornings and of the postman's geraniums in the summer. Their salaries together are about 2,000 Deutschmarks a month. They have 8,000 Deutschmarks in savings at Privredna Banka. Their apartment is theirs, paid off two years ago. They own a car, a Yugo. They have a small weekend house, a vikendica, 40 km outside the city where Edin's father grew vegetables. They take it for granted.
There has been trouble. They know there has been trouble. The Slovenian war was last summer. Croatia has been burning for nine months. There are checkpoints on the Belgrade road. But Sarajevo is different. Sarajevo is mixed. Sarajevo had the Olympics eight years ago. Their mayor said on the radio last week that war in Sarajevo was impossible because the city would not allow it.
On the 1st of March, a wedding party leaves the old Orthodox Church in Baščaršija. A man named Ramiz Delalić attacks the groom's father, Nikola Gardović, in the street. The older man does not survive. Edin reads about it in Oslobođenje the next morning. He folds the paper. He looks at Ana. Neither of them says anything.
Now, watch what happens. In 3 years, Ana will have lost 12 kg. Edin will have burned every book in their apartment, then the parquet floor, then the kitchen cabinets. Their son will not have been outside in daylight for 6 months. Their daughter will have lost her ability to flinch at the sound of mortar fire. Their savings at Privredna Banka will be a number on a piece of paper that no one will honor. Their building will still be standing, but with seven of its 12 apartments empty. The two Serb sisters will have died, one to illness, one to a sniper at the brewery line.
This is the story of Edin and Ana. And it is the story of what happens when the state collapses underneath the city you live in, and there is nowhere else to go. Stay with me.
On the 5th of April, 1992, about 100,000 people march for peace in Sarajevo. Ana and her sister are there. They sing. They wave. A young woman named Suada Dilberović, a medical student from Dubrovnik, loses her life on the Vrbanja Bridge. Beside her, a Croat woman named Olga Sučić, mother of two, dies the same way. "A drop of my blood flowed." The plaque on the bridge will read, "And Bosnia did not run dry."
The next morning, the European Community recognizes Bosnia. The shelling starts that afternoon. For the first 3 weeks, Edin and Ana believe what almost everyone in the city believes. This will not last. The Europeans will stop it. The Americans will stop it. The Yugoslav National Army will be called back. The mayor will arrange something. They sleep in their bedroom. They go to work. The school where Ana teaches is still open in late April, though the windows are taped.
On the 2nd of May, the water stops, then the electricity, then the gas, all in the same week. Edin walks downstairs to talk to the neighbors. The Croat pediatrician, Dr. Markovich, has a battery-powered radio. The 76-year-old retired postman has a kerosene lamp. The two Serb sisters have a Primus stove from before the war. The Jewish family on the second floor has nothing, but they have a son in Tel Aviv who's been calling. For a week, the building shares what it has. Then a shell hits the apartment block on the next street, killing four people on the staircase. After that, nobody talks about going back to normal.
Anna stops going to her school, then her school stops existing. The roof comes off in late May. By June, the children of the building are meeting in the basement of building number 11, two floors underground, with three teachers from three different former schools running shifts. Anna is one of them. She teaches Bosnian language and literature in two-hour blocks. She has no books. The children share three notebooks among nine of them. They pass the pencil.
On the 27th of May, three mortar rounds land on a bread line on Vase Meskina Street, 10 minutes from the apartment. 22 people die. The next morning, a man in tails sets up a chair in the crater and plays Albinoni's Adagio in G minor. His name is Vedran Smailović. He is the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera. People will later say he played for 22 days at 4:00 in the afternoon. Smailović himself will say, "No. He played all his life in Sarajevo. For the 2 years of the siege, he played every day. He varied the time and the place because he was not stupid and did not want to be shot. My weapon was my cello," he will say. "You ask me, am I crazy for playing the cello? Why do you not ask if they are not crazy for shelling Sarajevo?" Anna hears him play once, on a Tuesday in June, in the courtyard of a building near the National Theater. She walks home crying.
The food in the apartment runs out in early July. The shops are empty by by UNHCR begins the airlift on the 2nd of that month. For the next 3 and 1/2 years, the city will eat what fits inside an aircraft. American crackers from older wars, Vietnamese wafer cookies six per child, Dutch processed cheese in tins, cans of beef so disliked that after the war, the city will erect a satirical monument to it dedicated to the international community by the grateful citizens of Sarajevo.
Edin loses 8 kg in the first 3 months. Ana loses six. Their son grows 2 cm and weighs the same as the spring. Their daughter develops a strange relationship to bread. She rations herself even when there is enough. On the 25th of August, the national library catches fire. Edin stands at the window of the apartment and watches the smoke. The library is across the river, but the smoke comes for everyone. For 3 days, the air is full of burned paper. A librarian named Aida Buturović, 32, fluent in five languages, dies of shrapnel walking home from the rescue. The deputy director, Kemal Bakaršić, will say later that the smoke of books darkened the sun. All over the city, sheets of burned paper fell from the sky. Fragile pages of gray ashes floated down like a dirty black snow. 2 million volumes, including everything Ana taught from for 17 years.
Winter comes in November. The temperature in their apartment drops to minus 8°. Edin builds a stove out of a 5-liter humanitarian aid tin, three flat metal strips and a length of pipe scavenged from a bombed shop on the next block. The neighbors call it the Sarajevska konzerva. Edin sells two of them. Each one earns him seven packets of Drina cigarettes, the city's working currency. The wood comes from the parks first, then from the trees in the cemeteries, then from the apartment itself. Edin starts with the books he can bear to lose. Encyclopedias, old engineering manuals, then his university textbooks. Anna cries the night he burns the collection of Ivo Andrić her father gave her for her 30th birthday. He does not burn her copy of Andrić's Bridge on the Drina. He burns his. The parquet goes in January. The kitchen cabinet doors go in February. The dining table will go in October.
By the spring of 1993, Edin and Anna have a system. They wake at 4:00 in the morning. Edin walks to the Sarajevska Pivara, the brewery on Franjevačka Street, with two 20-liter canisters on an iron rod across his shoulders. The brewery sits over an underground spring. An engineering professor named Arif Halimović has converted the industrial waterworks into a public supply. People come from 10 km away. Some never come home. Edin walks back before dawn through neighborhoods he no longer recognizes. Anna cooks on the Končar stove. She uses the foraged plants Edin's mother taught her to recognize as a girl. Nettles, dandelions, wild garlic from the slope behind the cemetery, when nobody was shooting that particular afternoon. She makes coffee from roasted ground rice. She makes cake from flour, powdered milk, and the citric acid that the shop sold for cleaning before the war. There are cookbooks circulating in the city. One is called the Sarajevo Survival Guide. People copy out the recipes by hand and pass them between buildings.
Their savings at Privredna Banka are gone, not stolen. Inflation has eaten them. The dinar, then the new dinar, then the second new dinar. The book is still in the drawer with their wedding photographs. Edin keeps it for the same reason he keeps the wedding photographs. The apartment becomes a workshop. Anna teaches in the basement of building number 11. Edin fixes generators, water pumps, anything mechanical. He takes payment in cigarettes, in coffee, in a half liter of cooking oil. The unit of value in the city becomes 1 liter of oil equal to 10 packets of cigarettes equal to 1 Deutschmark. He sometimes works for nothing because the man asking has nothing.
In May of 1993, a young woman named Inela Nogic wins a beauty pageant in the Bosanski Kulturni Centar. The contestants hold a banner across the stage. It reads in English, "Don't let them kill us." A British filmmaker named Bill Carter takes the footage to U2 and in 2 years it will become a song. In July, the tunnel opens under the airport runway. 800 m long, 1 and 1/2 m high, 1 m wide. Hand dug from both ends, the diggers earned one packet of cigarettes a day. 3 to 4,000 people pass through it daily often through waist-deep water. Within a year, it will carry an oil pipeline, a power cable, telephone lines, all running beside the people walking.
Edin's brother in Munich offers to get the family out through the tunnel. Edin says no. Anna would not survive Munich. The children would, he and Anna would not. In August, an American writer named Susan Sontag comes to Sarajevo and directs Waiting for Godot at the Youth Theater by candlelight, only act one. The mayor makes her an honorary citizen. She gives a speech in which she says she could not imagine spending the war anywhere else.
In October, the Bosnian government clears out the wartime gangsters who have been running their own checkpoints inside the besieged city. Musan Topalovic, called Caco, Ramiz Delalic, called Celo, Jusuf Prazina, called Juka, has already died in Belgium. After Operation Trebevic, Edin no longer has to pay tribute to a uniformed 19-year-old at the entrance to the marketplace. The state, after a year and a half of absence, partially returns to its own staircases. The pediatrician on the third floor, Dr. Markovic, treats the building's children for free, all of them, in his apartment by candlelight. He has lost his clinic. He has lost his nurse. He has not lost his stethoscope or his patience. When Anna's daughter develops a chest infection in February of 1994, Dr. Markovich walks down a flight of stairs and listens to her lungs for an hour.
That same week, on the 5th of February, a single mortar round lands on the Markale Market, 10 minutes from their apartment. 68 people die. 144 are wounded. That afternoon, the Sarajevo String Quartet performs its hundredth wartime concert, two streets away.
Here is what kept Edin and Anna alive through 1,425 days. There is no romance in any of it. There is only what worked. First, water and food organized at the building level, not the household level. The single most important fact about siege survival is that no individual family had the labor capacity to do all the work required to live. Edin walked to the brewery for the building, not for his family. He carried 40 L at a time. The Croat pediatrician on the third floor traded medical care for a share of that water. The two Serb sisters traded their Primus stove time for it. The Jewish family on the second floor traded their son's wire transfers from Tel Aviv for it. By the second winter, the building was eating, drinking, and washing as one organism with 12 cells.
Second, the skills the new economy actually valued. Edin was an engineer. Before the war, that meant a salary of about 1,000 Deutschmarks at Energoinvest. During the war, it meant he could fix a generator in 20 minutes for a pack of cigarettes. Anna was a teacher. Before the war, her job was to deliver the curriculum. During the war, her job was to keep nine children sane in a basement. Both jobs paid almost nothing in money. Both paid in social standing. The neighbors who did best were not the wealthiest before the war. They were the ones whose hands could solve a concrete problem. The doctor, the seamstress, the mechanic, the carpenter, the electrician, the midwife on the floor below. The man who had repaired radios as a hobby in the 1970s and who in the war became the electrical authority of three buildings.
Third, the mixed marriage and the multi-ethnic apartment block. Anna was a Serb in a city under siege by a Serb army. Outside the building this fact was sometimes dangerous. Inside the building it was a stabilizing presence. When Kaco's men came up the staircase in the summer of 1993 looking for trench digging conscripts, they did not take Eden. The building roster listed a Serb resident. Mixed apartments and mixed buildings made the city legible to itself. They reminded everyone, including the gangsters, that this was not a war between communities. It was a war on a city by an army outside the city. 60,000 to 90,000 Serbs remained inside besieged Sarajevo. Shells from their own ethnic side killed about 1,000 of them. The most senior Serb officer in the Bosnian army, General Jovan Divjak, said it plainly. It was natural to be with those who had no weapons and faced the guns.
Fourth, the cultural life that everyone outside the city dismissed as luxury. The Sarajevo String Quartet played its hundredth concert on the day of the worst single attack on the market. The Sarajevo War Theater staged its play about a shelter on the 6th of September 1992 and ran it 97 times. Oslobodjenje, the daily newspaper, missed one day of publication in 1,425 days. The editor, Kemal Kurspahic, ran a multi-ethnic staff out of a nuclear bomb shelter under the bombed twin towers of his own building. La Benevolencija, the Jewish welfare society founded in 1892, gave away 1 and 1/2 million prescriptions and 360 tons of food. They worked with equal employment of Jews, Muslims, Serbs, and Croats. Cardinal Vinko Puljic remained in Sarajevo. The Pope made him cardinal on the 26th of November, 1994, because he wanted everyone to notice. The first Sarajevo Film Festival opened on the 25th of October, 1995, while the war was still on. The director, Mirsad Purivatra, said it plainly, "After a few months, we figured out how to survive physically. Then we asked ourselves how we were going to survive mentally."
Fifth, the Vikendica. Edin's father had built it 40 km outside Sarajevo in 1971. A small wooden house on a quarter hectare with apple trees, plum trees, a vegetable plot, and a chicken coop. During the siege, the Vikendica was on the wrong side of the lines, and Edin could not reach it. But twice in the second year, his cousin in Visoko sent a small parcel through the tunnel. Six potatoes, a jar of preserved plums, a length of dried sausage. Six potatoes from the family land tasted like a memory of an entire former life. The Vikendica did not save them. But the existence of the Vikendica, somewhere out there, intact, with its trees still bearing fruit for someone, kept Edin oriented to a future after the war. Land that produces food is a kind of patience. He knew this even when he could not eat it.
Notice what did not save them. Inflation ate the 8,000 Deutschmarks at Privredna Banka in the first six months. Their car, a Yugo, sat under a tarpaulin for 44 months, and almost lost its parts twice. Their gold was a single ring of Ana's mother's, which Edin refused to sell at any price, and which they ate around for 3 years. Their official salaries, which the Bosnian government continued to pay throughout the siege, bought a single packet of cigarettes per month by mid-1993. The The that should have protected their wealth could not. The institutions that protected them were the ones they had built without realizing it. The stairwell, the classroom in the basement, the pediatrician, the brewery line, the cellist on the corner.
Here is what Edin and Anna's story tells you about right now. You live in a city. Your apartment block is not just where you sleep. It is the unit of survival when systems fail. When the supermarket shelves were empty in March of 2020, the people who came through best were not the people with pantry. They were the people who knew their neighbors. Look at the staircase you live on. Who has tools? Who has medical training? Who has a vehicle that runs on diesel? Who has children that play with yours? Who has parents in the countryside with a vegetable plot? Who is the quiet older man who fixed the boiler last winter? You can answer maybe one or two of these questions. The rest stay blank. The mistake most preppers make is to imagine themselves alone in a bunker with a shotgun. Sarajevo proved that the unit of survival is not the family. It is the building. Your individual labor capacity is not enough. You need 12 apartments, not one. And they have to be already organized before the systems fail. Mixed, skilled, familiar with each other, trading already in small ways for small things. You build that infrastructure now, in peacetime, when it costs nothing.
There is one more thing. Edin and Anna's marriage was an asset before the war and a liability during it. Then it became an asset again. Mixed marriages, mixed buildings, mixed neighborhoods make a city resistant to the worst kind of breakdown. The pattern of state collapse in Yugoslavia was not chaos. It was sorting. Men with guns sorted people who had lived together as friends into ethnicities. The buildings that resisted were the ones where the sorting could not happen at all. Sarajevo did not survive because its army was strong. It survived because its mixed marriages, its multi-ethnic Bosnian army, its Serb general Jovan Divjak, its Jewish welfare society distributing aid to Muslims, its cardinal walking through the rubble, all made the sorting impossible. Look at your own city now. Where are the buildings where the sorting could not be done? Where are the ones where it could? Which side of that line is your building on?
Eden and Ana still live in the same apartment in Marijin Dvor. Their son lives in Vienna. Their daughter teaches at the same school where Ana taught, which reopened in 2003. Privredna banka closed. The 8,000 Deutschmarks never came back. The Vikendica sat on the wrong side of the lines for 44 months. Looters took what they could carry, but the tree survived. Eden's cousin in Visoko, who sent the potatoes, died in 2017. They went to the funeral together. When you ask Eden and Ana what saved them, they do not say the cellist or the tunnel or the Bosnian army or the airlift. They say their building. They say their staircase. They say Dr. Markovich on the third floor, who is now 88 and still lives there. The arithmetic of a siege is brutal and consistent. You cannot go it alone. You can do it in 12 apartments. The building is the unit. The neighbors are the wealth. The skills are the currency. Everything else is secondary.
Before I sign off, thank you, genuinely, for watching, for commenting, for sharing these videos with the people in your life who need to see them. The channel grows because you do that. I read every comment. I take every correction. You are the reason this work continues. If you want to go deeper on the question this video opened, I have a recommendation. My team and I just published our first book. It is an adaptation of the world's first book on economics, written by Xenophon of Athens in 362 BC. He was a soldier, a student of Socrates, a gentleman farmer. He wrote a dialogue about the same question this video is about. What is real wealth? His answer, 24 centuries old, holds up better than any survival manual on Earth. Wealth is not gold in a vault. Wealth is the ability to make things produce. A horse is wealth to a man who can ride it. Land is wealth to a man who can farm it. A neighbor is wealth to a man who knows him. The book is called The Economicus. Available as ebook, paperback, and audiobook. Links are in the description. It is the first book on economics ever produced. And reading it now, with what you just learned about Eden and Anna, you will understand something most economists have forgotten.