“We were only 10 metres away from the Germans and hiding the Kabiljos right under their noses.” Salih Hardaga whose parents sheltered a Jewish family from the Nazis

At the height of the Bosnian War, Sara Pecanac and her family lived for weeks at a time on soup made with grass foraged from a nearby park.

Serbian troops were surrounding Sarajevo. Snipers targeted people leaving their houses.

“We watched people dying in the street outside our home, shot to death, and watched houses burn,” Pecanac said. “You just wondered if it would be you or your home the next night.”

Bosnia was a mix of Muslim Bosniaks, Orthodox Serbs and Roman Catholic Croats. Following the breakup of the former Yugoslavia in 1992, racial and religious divisions that had been suppressed for decades under communism finally boiled over.

Slobodan Milosevic whipped up nationalistic sentiments for a “greater Serbia,” a deadly call to action that culminated in the worst atrocities in Europe since the Second World War. As many as three million people were forced to flee and more than 100,000 were killed.

Pecanac’s Muslim family — her daughter Sacha, husband Branimir and her mother Zejneba Hardaga — often hid from the long civil war in their basement.

“My daughter was 9 years old at the time,” Pecanac said in an interview. “You can’t know what it’s like to not know when you might be able to give your child food or water next.”

Distraught, desperate and isolated from the outside world, they had all but lost hope when they received a message from an Israeli journalist covering the war.

A Jewish family from Jerusalem was trying to find out if Pecanac and her mother were still alive. Fifty years earlier, during the Holocaust, Zejneba had helped them. That act of kindness was about to be repaid.

Nazi occupation

During the Second World War, the Germans invaded Yugoslavia. After they seized Sarajevo in 1941, the Gestapo opened an office across the street from the home of Pecanac’s father, Mustafa Hardaga, a local furniture salesman.

The Nazi occupation was vicious. The city’s old synagogue was looted, 400-year-old Torah scrolls were burned. At night, the Hardagas could hear the screams of prisoners being tortured in Gestapo jail cells.

Amid the brutality, Hardaga and his wife Zejneba agreed to take in Hardaga’s friend and business partner Yosef Kabiljo, whose own home had been destroyed during a Nazi bombing raid. Kabiljo, his wife and daughter were Jewish. They hid behind clothes in the back of a walk-in closet when the Gestapo came to the Hardaga home to check documents.

“We were only 10 metres away from the Germans and hiding the Kabiljo s right under their noses,” said Salih Hardaga, Sara’s brother, who was born a year before the Germans invaded Yugoslavia.

The Hardagas were conservative Muslims, with the women covering their faces with a veil in the presence of strangers.

“Never before had a strange man stayed with them,” Yosef Kabiljo testified later to Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial authority. “They welcomed us with the words: ‘Josef, you are our brother, and your children are like our children. Feel at home and whatever we own is yours.’”

The Hardaga women never again wore veils in front of Kabiljo.

“When I was growing up, my mother Zejneba always said, ‘You can’t control how rich you will be, or how smart or successful you will be,’” Pecanac said. “But she said you can control how good you will be.”

The Kabiljos stayed with the Hardagas until Josef Kabiljo was able to move his wife and children to Mostar, a Bosnian city that was under Italian rule.

Kabiljo stayed behind to liquidate his business but he could not escape detection forever. He was eventually imprisoned and forced into slave labour. But Zejneba Hardaga discovered where Kabiljo was working and brought him food. When Kabiljo escaped, he again returned to his hiding place in the Hardaga home.

Their saviours paid a steep price for helping Jews. Pecanac’s grandfather, Ahmed Sadik, was executed by the Nazis because he helped to forge documents with Christian names for Jewish families like the Kabiljos.

A message from Israel

Fast forward half a century.

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In 1992, shattered Bosnia was on fire. The phone lines to Sarajevo were down, leaving friends and family worried about their loved ones. Salih Hardaga, who had moved to Mexico in 1974, watched TV news programs, hoping for a glimpse of his sister or mother in Sarajevo.

In Jerusalem, too, the Kabiljos tuned in to the evening newscasts, unsure whether the Hardagas were still alive. While Mustafa Hardaga had died during the 1960s, the Kabiljos had stayed in touch with Zejneba and Pecanac, who was born in 1957.

They contacted an Israeli journalist who was heading to cover the war. The journalist passed on a message to a local community organization in Sarajevo that the Kabiljo family was searching for Zejneba.

A message was sent back to Israel that Zejneba, then 76, and her youngest daughter Sara were still in Sarajevo.

“There was no talk about leaving Sarajevo because there was no time,” Pecanac said. “One day things were OK. The next, soldiers were surrounding the city, the city was split into sections, and there were UN troops and snipers and bombings.

“It happened this fast,” Pecanac said, snapping her fingers.

Pecanac was stunned to hear the Kabiljos were trying to help.

She had heard the full family story only in 1984, when the Kabiljo family asked Yad Vashem to recognize the Hardagas and Ahmed Sadik as Righteous Among the Nations, an honour given to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews during the Holocaust. “My dad had died and my mother didn’t talk about it very much,” Pecanac said of the family’s heroism.

After learning that Zejneba was still alive, the Kabiljos again contacted Yad Vashem and officials agreed to help organize a rescue.

In early 1994, Pecanac, Branimir, Sacha and Zejneba joined 300 other refugees on a convoy of six buses that streaked through the shattered streets of Sarajevo.

“I remember we passed 34 checkpoints, and all the soldiers at the checkpoints wanted were U.S. dollars,” Pecanac said. “But without the help of the Kabiljos, we would not have been on the bus. When Yad Vashem wrote a letter to the president of Bosnia, asking that we be allowed to leave, he said no. It only happened after the Kabiljos managed to get the case all the way to (Israeli Prime Minister) Yitzhak Rabin.”

The Hardaga family was given its choice of destinations. Pecanac and her mother picked Jerusalem.

The rescue was extraordinary — one family saving another from genocide, only to see the favour returned half a century later.

“Imagine that you are in such a state and need help and you get it from the same family your family saved 50 years earlier,” said Pecanac, who converted to Judaism and now works for Yad Vashem. “It is an amazing story.”

A few months after Zejneba and her family arrived in Jerusalem, they were asked to meet Rabin.

“We went in and talked for a bit and my mother turned to Rabin and said, ‘Can I offer you some advice?’” Pecanac said. “The whole place went quiet. Who was this old woman to give advice to the prime minister of Israel?

“He said OK, and she said, ‘Please, try to make peace in the Middle East. Don’t let Jerusalem become Sarajevo.’”

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