书籍之爱：一个萨拉热窝的故事

A wonderful documentary, by turns heartbreaking and heartwarming, about how during the Bosnian war a most unlikely group of heroes comprising academics, librarians, and other staff, including the nightwatchman and a cleaner risked their lives to rescue thousands of irreplaceable Islamic manuscripts – and preserve a nation's history. Amid bullets and bombs, this handful of passionate book-lovers safeguarded more than 10,000 unique, hand-written antique books and documents – the most important texts held by Sarajevo's Gazi Husrav Beg Library, founded in 1537.When Sarajevo fell under siege in 1992, Mustafa Jahic, director of the Gazi Husrav Beg Library, decided that the 10,000 manuscripts it held must be saved. 'Saving the documents of civilisation is in my opinion, equal to saving human lives,' Jahic says. 'Books are our past, our roots. Without the past, we don't have a present or a future'. Over 2 million books were destroyed during the siege. As with the Russians in Chechnya or the Salifists in Mali, the Bosnian Serbs knew the importance of destroying a nation’s culture, even though they shared so much of that culture.They transported the manuscripts across the city of Sarajevo from hiding place to hiding place, under sniper fire and shelling. There was no means of carrying the books, so old banana crates were used. The only way Mustafa Jahic could get from home to see the books was through here, at the mercy of enemy snipers. 'Muslim graves are not much use to hide behind when the snipers are shooting, they are too thin and white,' he says. 'So I would run towards the Orthodox and Catholic parts of the cemetery, those graves saved my life'At the height of the siege, staff of the Gazi Husrav Beg began a project to make microfilm copies of all 10,000 unique manuscripts. Not an easy task when there is no hot running water and only intermittent electricity. The microfiche machine had to be smuggled in through the Sarajevo Airport tunnel and then someone who knew how to use it found. I bet they would have been very glad of the Google Books Digitisation project.There is a sub-plot here relating to the translation of The History of Bosnia by Sallih Muvekkit, a unique manuscript, the earliest history of the nation dating from the late 19th century, and provides the documentary with a wonderful ending.I loved the nightwatchman, a refugee from the Congo who, when afforded the opportunity to leave, talks of how the people of Sarajevo gave him a home and he felt it was his duty to stay and protect the books. (One for the Daily Mail readers…)