Bosnia’s Heroes

In his new book Eli Tauber tells the tales of the Serbs, Croats and Muslims who helped Bosnia’s Jews during the holocaust. “In 1941, when Sarajevo’s Jews were being rounded up and sent to concentration camps, Dr. Muhamed Kundurovic, a Bosnian Muslim, reported to a military camp where Jewish women and children were being held and declared they were carriers of an infectious disease. It was a lie, but a well-intentioned one, intended to get the prisoners out of the camp so he could help them escape,” he writes. “In a nation whose painful recent history gave birth to the term ‘ethnic cleansing,’ Tauber wants Bosnians to remember that even in the darkest of times, many risked their own lives to protect others from the forces of ethnic and religious hatred.”