It is a story of surprising loops, loops of light and darkness, the story of how the bracelet with which the Nazis marked their victims has reached our days without us even noticing
“Let the freshness of the recently harvested white Grenache burst with every sip”, says the label on the bottle.
Edin Ramulic places the glass of Ètim L'Antull wine on the table, takes the photograph from my hand and looks at it carefully. The image was taken thirty years before he was born.
It is one of the most beautiful photographs I have ever seen. It was shot in 1941 in Sarajevo, with Nazi troops in control of the Bosnian capital.
On the right, wearing an Islamic veil, a woman named Zejneba Hardaga walks arm in arm with her friend Rifka Kabiljo, wearing a hat.
It is the immensity of a gesture: Zejneba walks covering with her Islamic veil the Star of David that Rifka – to be marked as Jewish – had to carry on her arm.
Edin looks at the photograph. It is another city, another time, another family. But it is the mold of history of him. In loop. On May 31, 1992, when he was 21 years old, the Serb power in Prijedor, in northern Bosnia, ordered the entire non-Serb population of the region by radio to hang a white sheet in each of their houses. And, in the urban area of Prijedor, two vehicles with loudspeakers ordered the non-Serb population to wear white arm bands.
–On the landings, non-Serbs also had to tie a white cloth to their doorknob. At first we thought it was for protection, Edin recalls.
To mark the others, the Serbs chose white. The same color, explains Edin, of the bracelets that the Croatian ustachas – allies of the Nazis – forced the Serbs to wear during World War II.
Edin lived in a village five kilometers from Prijedor. They put the white sheet in a window of the house. And, one day, the Serbian paramilitaries knocked on the door.
- They separated my older brother and my father. I was 21 years old, but I looked younger. One of the militiamen whispered to me to go to my mother and say that I was 17 years old.
– Goodness among evil? So is there hope? I ask Edin. And his answer is the brutal range of grays that cross the soul of the same person without anesthesia.
"Yes and no," he answers. The same armed man who took pity on me did not take pity on my father, who was sick and needed treatment. And that man knew exactly where they would be taken and what was going to happen to my father and my brother.
Edin has not seen them since. He recovered the father's body from him. He still doesn't know where his brother's is.
Twenty years later, in 2012, Edin and a group of people tried to remember in the urban space of Prijedor. As the local power did not allow it, they started the movement of the white armbands: to wear a white armband every May 31st. And every year they insist on remembering the 102 children of Prijedor who died in the war. To all. "Not only Muslims died," Edin stresses.
But the memory collides with the politicians, who usually turn it into a rally. On July 19, the White Armbands movement erected a temporary memorial to the 102 children designed by a Serbian artist. "Don't write his name in the diary, he's been singled out," Edin asks me. They could not install it in the center of Prijedor. The power denied him. Politics is fascinating: even a Muslim politician whose brother is one of the 102 dead children opposed it. The reason? Stay in local power: he is allied with a Serbian party.
The new Serbian owner of Kertaterm did give permission, the factory from which Edin's father was fired at the outbreak of the war, the factory where the Serbs installed the concentration camp in 1992 in which he died and from where, in the Second War World Cup, the Ustachas sent the Serbs to the Jasenovac concentration camp. The memorial has been erected at the gates of the factory and is still there.
Four decades after the photograph that illustrates this page, Zejneba Hardaga was the first Muslim woman to be declared Righteous Among the Nations by Israel. And her story would take a spectacular turn in the last Bosnian war: the Kabiljo family, helped by the Jews, helped the Muslim Zejneba half a century later. They located her in a basement in Sarajevo and took her to Jerusalem.
Loops and more loops. For three years, the person in charge of organizing the white armband movement is a Serb, the Serb who organizes the Gay Pride Parade in Sarajevo.
–His father died on the side I was fighting against. Now we are the same army – says Edin.
It is strange to hear such intensity with the freshly harvested Grenache bursting on the palate. But life is so. Strange.
“So far we have wanted to get there. From now on, your adventure begins”, I read on the label of the Montsant bottle.
The adventure, I think, of knowing whether or not each of us would cover Stars of David with our veil.
