Set Up Like A Deck Of Cards

'Remember Sarajevo' by Roger Richards

A collection of photographs and stories from Roger Richards’ time inside the city during the Siege of Sarajevo, including this heartbreaker:

They are beautiful kids, delighting in their conspiracy of fearlessness, grinning, flashing the two-fingered victory sign, jostling to be center-frame. They live nearby. They tell me, in gestures, that they have something to show me, and I follow them into the apartment house in which they live, a modern, half-ruined building that is under almost constant artillery barrage.

Two of them, a pretty dark-haired 12-year-old named Lana and an 11-year-old named Sanja, speak understandable English. They said they had learned the language from their parents, and from television.

Tugging at my hand, Lana leads me into the dank basement of this building that is a target for Serb sharpshooters and mortar teams. The basement is black, but the children negotiate its passageways expertly, pulling me along. Candle wax is scarce and must be conserved. Finally, when we are at our destination, someone puts a match to a wick, and by its tentative flicker I see four small shelves on the wall, each about two feet long.

“Our library,” says Lana proudly.

Arranged in neat rows, lovingly kept, are children’s books, mostly in Serbo-Croatian, some in English. I recognize “Heidi,” and “Little Women,” and “Alice in Wonderland” and a small collection of Doctor Seuss. On the wall above this cache of happy literature is a crude sign, little-kid style, in crayon letters of alternating color.

It says, in Serbo-Croatian, “Children’s War Library.”

And around me stand the librarians, ages 4 to 14, smiling proudly, their smudged faces barely visible in the light of a single tin candle in a bleak bunker beneath a besieged building in a place gone mad. They are the slender hope of Sarajevo.