Yechiel Bar Chaim

"The JDC told the evacuees: ´Look, if you´re elderly, we assume your care for the duration. If you´re of working age, however, we give you a certain amount of time and we expect you to move on.´ There were also people who were not Jewish, who were friends of the community, who were given what were called ´Jewish papers´ at the beginning, so they could come out. And there were other people who were able to come out because in order to get the approval of the different Serb and Muslim and Croat authorities, you know, you had to put someone´s brother-in-law on the bus too. So those people came out promising they would take care of themselves. The Jews who were working age were told ´You know, you´ve got a few weeks and then you have to move on.´ But then we had these elderly living in a hotel in Makarska. There was one woman - Lenka Bilelatić - I don´t know if she was even fifty. I was telling her ´You know, you´re in the category to move on.´ She said ´Look, I have my son somewhere in Germany, but I have no place to go. I do handicrafts, I do artwork. Let me work with the elderly as an activities person, and let me stay.´ I had an entrepreneurial bent, and we had the elderly crocheting kipot - jarmulka - these skullcaps that male Jews wear during prayer. And we sold them. They were shipped to the US, or shipped to London, and the money from the sales went to these elderly people. And one of them said ´You know, you saved my life twice. Once coming out of Sarajevo, and secondly by letting me earn something in dignity.´"

The question was: do we attempt to evacuate by air the women and children and elderly of the Jewish community of Sarajevo? Because it wasn´t their war. You know? They weren´t on any side. At first, Ivica was saying ´No no no, we will be exposed to danger just like everyone else.´ But the bombing increased, and I believe it was on Wednesday morning, he said ´Get us out. Get the vulnerable among us out.´ We had reported to the New York headquarters the day before “No evacuation”. And so, not me, but my colleague and one of the local Jewish leaders in Zagreb arranged that a plane that was already at the airport in Sarajevo would take out the vulnerable Jews. But that plane fled on its own during the night. So there we were on Thursday… In short, through cooperation between this group in Zagreb, and the JDC, and the Federation in Belgrade, a sum of money was given to the Yugoslav air force to rent a plane from the same air force, or the same army, that was bombing Sarajevo, to take Jews out. And that happened on Friday. I was in Belgrade to receive them, with the community. However, it wasn´t as easy as that, because stuck in Sarajevo as well were the families of these officers of the Yugoslav army. Essentially Serbian officers. And those family members came to the airport and stormed the plane. Ivica made a big protest, because he had been busy organizing bringing the Jews to the airport. Which is not so simple, you just couldn´t gather everyone up and go to the airport, they had to come by different routes. He said ´This is our plane. We paid for it´ and found himself threatened by the co-pilot, who had a pistol. There was a man, a friend of mine, by the name of Guss Contures, who had been in Sarajevo and I think worked for the international rescue comity, he calmed things down. But in the meantime, vociferous efforts were made to get additional planes. Another two planes came in and we ended up evacuating between four and five hundred people, in the first evacuation from Sarajevo during the war. A part of the people on those planes were from the Jewish community, another part were their friends, and a third part were these families of the Serbian officers. (- Where were they evacuated?) The planes went to Belgrade, the first plane. The community in Belgrade had organized places in hotels, with the JDC and its partners in the Jewish world paying the bills. Later on, when more refugees came and hotel prices in Belgrade went far up, we shifted really a community of evacuees to Pancevo, to the hotel Tamis. There were another two air evacuations between the middle of April and early May, when the siege of Sarajevo began. From then on, there were another series of evacuations by bus, from Sarajevo to the Dalmatian cost. I should add that it wasn’t a matter of just finding some transport, loading people up and taking off. If I talk about the buses for example, there were 36 checkpoints between Sarajevo and the coast. You couldn´t evacuate people in the middle of a shooting war. So between the local Jewish community, and the JDC, and the leaders in Zagreb, a temporary cease-fire had to be arranged in the war in order for these Jewish buses to come out of Sarajevo. All the checkpoints had to be informed by their authorities - Muslim, Serb, Croat, that these people are authorized to go on through. This happened at a time when Croatia had closed the border. So how do you send a convoy into a country that has closed the border? Well, that meant a negotiation with the Croatian government, saying that the people we bring out will not be a burden on the Croatian state. We will take care of them.

“Under communist rule, people who attended the synagogues exposed themselves to risk – professionally, politically and so on. It was well known that the StB had informers, and even had its own representative planted in the synagogue every Friday night to see who was coming and who wasn´t. The JDC, over the decades, provided some funds to make it less risky - I mean they weren´t large amounts – so there wouldn´t be so much of a financial penalty for coming to services. Leo Pavlát told me this story, he said ´We all knew who was the StB representative on Fridays nights the synagogue. The agitation leading up to the Velvet Revolution was already in full swing. We were the first to know that the revolution had succeeded, because one Friday night, the StB agent wasn´t there.”