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Jan 25, 2005

"Everything can be taken from a man but ...the last of the human freedoms - to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way." --Victor Frankl

The Cellist of Sarajevo

On May 27,1992, a bakery in Sarajevo was making bread and distributing it to a long line of war-shattered people stretched out into the street. Suddenly a shell fell directly into the middle of the line, killing 22 people instantly. Not far away lived a 37-year old musician named Vedran Smailovic, who before the war he had been the principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera— But when he saw the carnage from the massacre outside his window, he was resolved to do the thing he could do best. He made music. Every day thereafter, Vedran Smailovic put on his full, formal concert attire, took up his cello, and walked out of his apartment into the midst of the battle raging around him. He placed a little camp stool in the middle of the crater that the shell had made, and he played a concert. He played to the abandoned streets, to the smashed trucks, and burning buildings, and to the terrified people who hid in the cellars while the bombs dropped and the bullets flew.