Courage under Fire

While flipping through some textbooks yesterday I came across a story that took place fifteen years ago. Some of you might have heard of Vedran Smailovic. He was a cellist with the Sarajevo Opera when the ethnic wars in Yugoslavia erupted. At 4 pm on May 27, as a long queue waited to buy bread in front of one of the last functional bakeries, a mortar shell fell, killing 22 of Smailovic's neighbors instantly. Everyday at 4 pm, for each of the next twenty-two days, Smailovic would walk to the middle of the street, dressed formally as for a performance, and play Albinoni's Adagio in G minor to honor his neighbors, as mortar shells and bullets flew all around him.

It brought to mind another story about a runner called Mirsada Buric, a Bosnian athlete then training for the Olympic Games. Defiant, she continued to train in the streets of Sarajevo under Serbian sniper fire, after being released from a Serb concentration camp where she had spent 13 days living on a slice of bread and a cup of water a day.

I’m not sure if their actions would be viewed as foolhardy in today's context, but there's something about their belief in what they were doing, and their determination to carry it out, that I found very moving.