Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Bosnia and the Lessons of the Past In 1991 I moved to Berlin, where I began working on what was meant to be a second book, on Germans and Jews. But after I had invested two years in the project, something happened in 1993 that changed everything. I was having coffee with a friend, Tom Gjelten of National Public Radio. Tom had told me something he had just seen while covering the siege of Sarajevo: that the tiny Jewish community had turned itself into a humanitarian aid agency and it was staffed by Jews and Muslims, Serbian Orthodox and Catholic Croats. Hadn’t I been to Sarajevo before the siege and didn’t I know people in the Jewish community? I did indeed, but never, I told him, would I go into a war zone. Two weeks later, I was riding in the back of an armored personnel carrier through the streets of Sarajevo and stepped out and walked with wobbly knees into the community center, which I had visited in 1988 and 1989. I met my old friends who were running its humanitarian aid agency, started making notes and pulled out a camera. They slid the slivovitz across the table. I made four trips to Sarajevo between November 1993 and February 1994 and spent a total of forty-four days under fire (which was nothing compared to other journalists and that was nothing compared to the poor souls trapped there) and then I followed the story to Israel, where I photographed and wrote about Sarajevans trying to set up new lives for themselves. I would return to Sarajevo twice more during the siege but by this point, I had enough pictures and stories to produce a book, which I did in late 1994. Survival in Sarajevo: Jews, Bosnia, and the Lessons of the Past was published by Brandstaetter and DAP (Distributed Art Publishers) and sold over 15,000 copies in English and 5,000 in German. The photographs from this project are the strongest and most compelling I ever made as I wanted to capture what it was like to live in a war zone. Photographs from this collection were purchased by the Touro Museum in New Orleans, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Cincinnati Art Museum, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the (late) Corcoran Museum in Washington. www.edwardserotta.org
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