City Hall (National Library)

“We were completely without water then. The Sarajevo Brewery had dried up and we had great difficulty in putting out fires. In addition, 2 or 4 of our firemen were wounded. It was about 9 o’clock when the Town Hall began to burn. That night about 200 shells had fallen all round it and on it. The only way we could try to control the fire was from the inside. But the whole building, from the roof, between floors, the fire spread with terrible speed wherever we couldn’t get to it from outside.”

- Huso Česko, Fireman

“In the middle of ‘94, when the war was going on strong, when you couldn’t pass because of the sniper fire, 20 or so women literally carried those 100,000 books across the Skenderija Bridge, moving them manually. True, we did receive a little bit of help from the Civil Defence, but those women evacuated and carried periodicals, sometimes 50 kilograms at a time. Large bound volumes of newspapers and so on and so forth. We had some wounded, and some were even killed, but that didn’t stop us from coming to work every day and being there to help the children, the students, and the scholars.”

- Hatidža Demirović, Director of the Sarajevo City Library

“Namely, during the siege of Sarajevo which was among the worst sieges in the history of mankind, the people had to burn everything they could lay their hands on, including books, in order to survive. In order to prevent it in some way we pointed out that books were the guardians of memory and that they should be saved and that they were friends who didn’t demand favours in return.”

- Enes Kujundžić, Director of the National and University Library