Merry Christmas, Sarajevo.

In my exploration of Christmas this year, the following has been profound and telling.

"For as long as I can remember, my family has celebrated Christmas. It was a social rather than religious event that we always looked forward to, especially as children. A few days before Christmas, my mother would have a big party, inviting her friends over and serving eggnog and shortbread cookies. On Christmas Eve, we would read 'Twas the night before Christmas' and, before going to sleep, hang empty socks next to the fireplace and leave, for Santa, a plate of cookies and a glass of milk. The next morning we got up early and opened stockings full of trinkets that our mother-turned-Santa had substituted for the empty socks. The glass of milk would be depleted, and most of the cookies would be gone, proof that Santa had come and nourished himself in our home. Our mother would remind us during breakfast to save room for the big turkey lunch we would eat in a few hours, and after rushing upstairs to brush our teeth and wash our faces, we opened the presents piled under the Christmas tree. We made a few concessions to the fact that we were Jews celebrating a Christian holiday; the tree was topped with a non-denominational star rather than a replica of Jesus, and we did not go to any church services. Otherwise, it was a typical American Christmas, down to the three-log fire in the fireplace even if the weather was warm, as it usually was in Los Angeles. If necessary, we would turn on the air conditioner.
I think of Christmases past, and of my Christmas in Sarajevo, and I am tempted to classify them as poles apart. In one, there is abundance and peace and love, and in the other, hunger and warfare and hatred. But the more I think about it, the more I find that the Christmases are similar, and that if I had to select one in which the spirit of the occasion reached its fullest expression, I would select my Christmas in Sarajevo, because that's where I found miracles.
The parishioners of St. Anthony's Church were deprived of the right to attend midnight mass on Christmas Eve, because the wartime curfew meant they had to be home before ten o'clock, and at any time of day a packed church would be an inviting target for the Serbs in the hills, like a red cape waved in front of a bull. So they made do. At four in the afternoon, they crammed into the church's basement chapel, winter coat to winter coat, standing because there was no room for sitting, and as the temperature quickly rose, and the room took on the heavy smell of damp wool, everyone started to perspire, but nobody cared, for this was far preferable to the cold outside. A choir sang hymns from the back of the basement, and everyone joined in when it was time, creating harmony beyond music.
The main defense mechanism of the people in Sarajevo was to stand together, helping one another out, because no one else would. Suffering does much to bring people together and coax out the good in them, making a hero out of an office worker who, in normal times, would not help an old woman cross the street, but in wartime runs into a street at the risk of his own life to save her from sniper fire. The man might be a Muslim, the woman a Croat. It no longer mattered, for they were in it together, just as they were in the basement chapel together, Muslims, Croats, Serbs, Jews. If you wanted to find the Christmas spirit on Christmas Eve in 1992, you could do no better than to visit St. Anthony's Church in Sarajevo.
The priest's name was Ljubo Lucic. He had no altar to stand on, so only a lucky few in the front rows could see him and the sickly Christmas tree behind him; it had been scavenged from the forests at the front line, and it looked every bit as malnourished as the parishioners to whom it was supposed to deliver good cheer. Father Lucic told his flock that they were getting an insight into Jesus that few others had; the terror in their lives was like the terror of Jesus' life; their poverty was no different from Jesus'; and Jesus was a refugee, cast from one town to another. I could see people wiping tears from their eyes, out of sadness or happiness. Perhaps Father Lucic heard the soft sobs and worried about them, for he suddenly said, almost in desperation, "The Christmas message in our situation is that life is worth living, no matter what."
There is a tradition in Sarajevo that people of different religions visit one another on religious holidays. On Christmas, the Pelzls' Muslim and Serb friends would come by for a visit. In turn, the Pelzls would visit their Muslim friends on the first day of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month, and visit their Serb friends on Orthodox Christmas, which falls in January. Kevin, Dzemal and I were part of the parade of visitors who stopped by the Pelzl household on Christmas Day. After shedding our flak jackets at their doorstep, we sat down at their dining table and were served a platter of sweets, which were unimaginable delicacies under the circumstances.
The Pelzls lived in a building not far from the Holiday Inn, within shouting distance of the front line, and they kept count of the number of direct mortar hits on their building, which was nine, if I recall correctly. Several people had been injured. The Pelzls were untouched, although bits of shrapnel and a sniper bullet or two had crashed through their windows and and struck the living room, leaving the sort of holes you get when you try to drive a nail into a wall and succeed only in making a mess of chipped plaster. A small statue of the Virgin Mary stood on a table in a corner, presided over by one such shrapnel hole, an ironic halo of sorts. Mary's serene smile seemed a bit mischievous.
The Christmas preparations had been under way for three months, with military precision, as though the family was planning an ambush rather than a meal. Food had been salted away since August, when they collected nuts for the baklava. Smoked ham that a friend gave them in November had been put aside in a kitchen cabinet, the only meat in the house, delectable and untouchable. Wood was stocked up to ensure that there would be enough fuel for baking, and money was saved so that, a few days before Christmas, Janja could buy eggs on the black market for her sweets. She had been able to buy four. Traditionally, the family's big Christmas Eve dinner was centred around fresh fish from Janja's hometown of Bodanski Brod, along the Sava River, but it had been captured by Serbs early in the war, and in any event fresh fish was a laughable impossibility in Sarajevo, so the family made do with canned tuna fish.
On Christmas morning, Karlo and Janja went to mass at separate churches. It had nothing to do with a marital spat or preferences for different priests. They were afraid that if they went to the same church, and if it was bombed, their children would be left without parents. They lessened the odds of this happening by splitting up; one of them might get killed but probably not both. This passed as normal behaviour in Sarajevo. Parents rarely went outdoors together. If, by chance, they had to leave home at the same time but for different destination, perhaps one going to work, the other searching for food, they would not step outside at the same time. One would stay behind and wait until the other was far enough ahead so that a single shell could not kill both of them.
The discussion turned to faith. Times of tragedy test a believer's faith in God, and the worst tragedy of all was being inflicted in Bosnia, so I put a blunt question to my hosts. How can you believe in a God who permits such things to happen? Karlo and Janja smiled with self-confidence, as though they expected the question and knew it was not rhetorical but came from my heart. I was not interested in starting a theological debate, for that ground has been plowed many times before by people far more learned than any of us in that apartment, and no one had yet come up with a bullet-proof answer, and never would. But I wanted to know their answer.
Janja, who had been quiet, spoke up, and as she did so, she looked at the statue of the Virgin Mary.
"I believe more strongly than before," she said. "I can't explain why, but I have more faith now. I pray more, I believe more, and I believe that this is God's will."
Even now, after a long time has passed, I can't decide whether her answer was touching or insane."

-Peter Maass, in "Love Thy Neighbor, a Story of War."

Sorry for the excessive length.