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978-1-56145-943-8 $19.95

Flowers

for

Sarajevo

Young Drasko is happy selling

flowers with his father in the Sarajevo

marketplace, where people from

every neighborhood and background

have mingled for generations. Yet

when war encroaches on their

beloved city, everything changes.

Suddenly Drasko must run the

family flower stand alone.

The violence finds even this small

corner of the city and Drasko feels

the full weight of the war. But he

also finds he feels something more

when he witnesses an unlikely act of

heroism, an act that helps Drasco…

and the world…understand the

power of beauty and kindness in the

face of violence.

John McCutcheon is highly regarded as a singer, songwriter,

master musician, legendary performer, and producer. His thirty-eight albums have garnered six Grammy nominations. He is also the author of the award-winning picture book Christmas in the Trenches. His original song, on which the book is based, was recently named one of the 100 Essential Folksongs by Folk Alley. John lives in Smoke Rise, GA.

Kristy Caldwell grew up in Louisiana and moved to NYC, where

she received her MFA in Illustration as Visual Essay from the School of Visual Arts. She has illustrated posters and video projections for professional theater in New York. She now lives in Astoria, a multigenerational, multicultural community whose residents have roots in every part of the world, including Bosnia, the Middle East, and Israel. This is her first picture book.

MC

CU

TC

HEO

N / C

ALD

WELL

Flowers for Sarajevo

Children’s / historical fictionwww.peachtree-online.com

A heroic act comes alive

when it inspires bravery in us.

978-1-56145-943-8 $19.95

Printed and bound in Malaysia

Illustrations by

Kristy Caldwell

John McCutcheon

Flowers for Sarajevo_cover_9.21.indd 5 10/11/16 6:02 PM

Flowers for Sarajevo_int_production.indd 2-3 10/13/16 6:28 PM

Flowers

for

Sarajevo

Flowers for Sarajevo_int_production.indd 5 10/13/16 6:28 PM

Peachtree Publishers1700 Chattahoochee Avenue NWAtlanta GA 30318-2112www.peachtree-online.com

Text © 2017 John McCutcheonIllustrations © 2017 Kristy Caldwell

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Edited by Margaret Quinlin and Vicky HolifieldDesign and composition by Nicola Simmonds Carmack

The illustrations for this book were rendered in ink, charcoal, graphite pencil, and Adobe Photoshop.

Printed in November 2016 by Tien Wah Press in MalaysiaFirst edition

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1ISBN 978-1-56145-943-8

Also available in on compact disc: ISBN 978-1-68263-000-6

Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress

John McCutcheonIllustrated by Kristy Caldwell

Flowers

for

Sarajevo

To Vedran Smailovic—and to all those artists who, with their talent and their courage, continue to inform us,

inspire us, and call us to action—J. M.

To Judy Caldwell, my mother, who loves this book.—K. C.


I’m Drasko.

I am his son.

See that man in the floppy hat? That’s Milo. He’s my father.

He can sniff out the best roses in all of Sarajevo.

Many kinds of people come together here in our marketplace,

looking for spices, meats, and bread. Sometimes they buy, sometimes

they don’t. But almost everyone leaves with flowers.

Milo’s flowers.


“Believe it, Drasko! Underneath that thorny hide, there beats a

beautiful heart!” My father slips one of his prized roses into Goran’s

apron. The old man snorts.

I understand giving flowers to little Gertie or poor Mrs. Novak,

but to the meanest man in the market?

My father is a mystery to me.

“The Serb and the Croat, the Muslim and the Christian—we have

plenty to argue about,” my father says. “But, like these flowers, we

manage to live side by side. Even old Goran, there.” He nods toward

the cranky spice merchant in the next stall.

I give my father a doubtful look.


Many things are a mystery to me.

I wonder how so much can change so quickly. Overnight, it seems,

we are at war. My country is tearing apart.

Every day, men are leaving for the battlefield. Even my father.

Now it’s my job to keep the flowers fresh and our family fed.

But I am only a boy.

The merchants who were our friends are tired and bad-tempered. They

have pushed me to the worst corner of the square. No shade. No water for the

flowers. Now I’m even too far from the bakery to enjoy the smell of fresh bread.

Where once they had kind words and treats for me, now it’s

“Move on, Drasko!”

“Not here, Drasko!”

“Out of my way, Drasko!”


Still, there is one good thing about

this spot. Behind my stall stands the

building where the orchestra practices.

Thanks to the window they leave open

to the warm May breezes, I hear every

note. I have the best seat in the square.


Today, I close my eyes and let the music carry

me far away from this crowded, lonely place…

This morning the orchestra plays

music I remember from when I was

small. Every evening my father would

put a record on his old phonograph.

Some nights he would dance me around

the house, laughing.


I hear the wail of a siren.

Everyone around me runs away.

I run, too.

A mortar has hit the bakery where people were

lined up for bread. I can hear the shouting, the cries.

The door beside me flies open. Orchestra

musicians burst from the rehearsal hall and race

toward the bakery.

The church bells ring and wake me from my memories.

It is ten o’clock.

Over the bells, over the music, comes a whistling sound,

like fireworks shooting into the sky. Then, an explosion.

In an instant, everything is madness.


The next day the square is strangely still.

Twenty-two people were killed. They were

just waiting to buy bread.

The church bells ring ten o’clock

again. I cringe, remembering that

terrible moment.

Then the door to the rehearsal hall

opens. But this time only one man

steps out.


He steps carefully through the

rubble and stops near the crater in

front of the bakery.

I’ve seen him before, this man

with his extraordinary mustache.

Today he is dressed in a tuxedo,

as if he is going to a concert. In

one hand he carries a chair and

in the other a cello.


The music stops.

No one applauds.

No one moves.

He sits and places his bow to the strings.

The people who have gathered look on

in silence. He plays the most beautiful and

heartbreaking music anyone could ever

imagine. All of us—Serb and Croat, Muslim

and Christian—stand side by side, listening

to a language we all understand.


I return to my stall, where an old woman has stopped to

buy roses. “Please take them,” I say. “Today they are free.”

But I know that there are not enough flowers in all of

Sarajevo to fill the hole that mortar left in our hearts.

Without a word, the

cellist picks up his chair

and disappears into the

rehearsal hall.


Every night I say twenty-two prayers.

And one more for my father.

The following day, at exactly ten o’clock,

the cellist plays again.

The day after that is the same.

And the next.

For twenty-two days he plays.

One day for each person lost at the bakery.

One day for each family without a loved one.


I slip my best rose beneath his

apron strings.

“Just like your father,” he huffs.

“Giving away what you should sell.”

The war is not over, but people have come back to the

square. The bakery has opened its doors, and again music

floats down from the window above my flower stall.

Still, every once in a while, something takes me by

surprise. Just yesterday old Goran brought a man to my

stall to buy lilies. “He has his father’s nose for flowers,

this one,” Goran says, almost smiling.

Almost.


I take one home to set beside my father’s place at our table,

as I wait for his return.

And tomorrow—like my father, like the cellist—I’ll do my

own small part to make Sarajevo beautiful once again.

At the end of the day, I clean up my stall. I gather the

flowers I have left and make my rounds of the square.

I leave a few in front of the bakery, and some at the

orchestra’s door.


Author's Note

On the morning of May 27, 1992, at the height of the Balkan War, a mortar attack targeted one of the last working bakeries in the Bosnian city of Sarajevo. Twenty-two people waiting in a

breadline were killed. It was yet one more act of senseless ethnic violence in a war rife with sorrow heaped on sorrow.

The following morning, at the precise hour of the attack, a door opened across the square from the bakery. A cellist in the Sarajevo Opera Orchestra, Vedran Smailovic, stepped outside and into history. He was to become the man the world would call “The Cellist of Sarajevo.”

Thus began the events that inspired this book. For twenty-two consecutive days, Smailovic played a single tune: Albinoni’s Adagio in G Minor,

a gripping, unfinished composition—and, coincidentally, one of the few musical pieces from the Saxon State Library to survive the fire-bombing of Dresden during the Second World War.

His music was a eulogy, a prayer. But it was something more. It was a powerful voice of defiance and hope. After one of these performances, a nearby soldier asked him, “Why are you playing where there is bombing?” His response was a bewildered, “Why are you bombing where I am playing?”

I first wrote about Smailovic’s vigils in 1992, after learning about them in the New York Times. That resulting song, “Streets of Sarajevo,” is included in the accompanying CD to this book; my new friend, Smailovic, joins me on his cello. Also included is a solo recording of the Adagio in G Minor he played those twenty-two consecutive days in Sarajevo, a quarter century ago.

In writing this book I decided to focus not on Vedran, but on the effect his actions had on others. Heroism has many facets. Not everyone will brave the bullets of a war-torn street. But we are each capable of finding that beauty, that kindness within ourselves that violence and hatred seek to destroy. In a world in which fear has become the dominant weapon of the weak, it is precisely this kind of defiance that will deny victory to the forces of evil.

A quote from Leonard Bernstein hangs over my desk. He wrote these words in 1963, in response to the death of President John F. Kennedy. They were equally relevant that first spring day in 1992 when Smailovic strode through the wreckage to play his adagio. And they continue to be so today.

Sarajevo, the largest city in Bosnia and Herzegovina, is located in the heart of the Balkan Peninsula. This region

in southeastern Europe, named for the Balkan Mountains to the north, has for centuries been a crossroads of cultures. The Balkan Peninsula is home to a complicated mix of national groups and social and religious traditions. The area was long dominated by such neighboring powers as the Ottoman, Austro-Hungarian, Russian, and Soviet empires. Over the years, borders shifted and new nations formed and dissolved as national groups competed for land and authority and as other countries battled over the territory.

The first Balkan War began in 1912 when four Balkan states successfully rebelled against the Ottoman Empire. Further conflicts led to the assassination by a Serbian nationalist of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo, an act that

precipitated World War I. At the end of that war, the area was reorganized into the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, then renamed in 1929 as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. After World War II, Communist forces governed the region until 1989, when their rule collapsed and nationalism again stirred the Balkan states.

The Yugoslav wars of the 1990s began after 1991 when several of the Yugoslav republics declared their independence from Yugoslavia, actions that led to conflicts among Croatians, Bosnians, and Serbians. In early May of 1992, Bosnian Serb groups launched an offensive against Bosnia’s capital Sarajevo. The mortar attack on the marketplace in this story occurred during the siege of the city. Tragically, thousands more innocent people were killed before the long siege of Sarajevo came to an end.

GREECE

YUGOSLAVIA

ROMANIA

BULGARIA

ALBANIAITALY

AUSTRIA

HUNGARY

CZECHOSLOVAKIA SOVIET UNION

TURKEY

Sarajevo

1945

SERBIA BULGARIAMONTENEGRO

AUSTRIA-HUNGARY

ROMANIA

RUSSIA

ITALY ALBANIA

GREECEOTTOMAN

EMPIRE

Sarajevo

1913

AUSTRIA

SLOVAKIA UKRAINE

MOLDOVA

ROMANIA

BULGARIAYUGOSLAVIA

MACEDONIA

ALBANIA

GREECETURKEY

ITALY

BOSNIA-HERZEGOVINA

CROATIA

SLOVENIA

Sarajevo

HUNGARY

19951913The Balkan area just before

World War I…

1945…near the end of World War II…

1995…and after the Balkan wars of the 1990s

“This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before.”

—Leonard Bernstein

Further reading:

Books for young readers:Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Wartime Sarajevo by Zlata Filipovic. Penguin Books, 2006.My Childhood under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary by Nadja Halilbegovich. Kids Can Press, 2006.

Background for educators:www.voiceseducation.org/content/resources-war-bosniawww.history.com/topics/bosnian-genocidewww.hmh.org/la_Genocide_Bosnia.shtmlBosnia: A Short History by Noel Malcolm. NYU Press, 1994.


He was there one Sunday morning,At the corner of the squareIn a freshly pressed tuxedo,In a simple folding chair.Just after curfew liftedWhen everything was still,He played his celloIn the morning chill.

In the streets of Sarajevo,A place of flame and death,This music so surprising,The whole world held its breath.Each morning he’d returnTo that spot and he would playIn the streets of Sarajevo every day.

And every day he made me wonder,Where did he ever findThe music midst the madnessAnd the courage to be kind,The long-forgotten beautyWe thought was blown awayIn the streets of Sarajevo every day.

Many was the dayThe soldiers asked him who he was.Then they warned him of the dangerIn doing what he does.Many said that he was crazyTo risk his life in this wayIn the streets of Sarajevo every day.

Wish someone could tell meWho is crazy, who is sane,Those who stand in protestOr those who drop these bombs like rain.Those who fill our lives with deathIn this place where children playIn the streets of Sarajevo every day.

So I come here in defianceAnd to add a bit of grace,Try to ease the awful hatredAnd the horror of this place.To remember there is beautyNo matter what they sayIn the streets of Sarajevo every day.

Every day I see themThose who will not stand aside,Who refuse to be defeated,Who rage against the tide.They are the glimmer in the darkness,The rolling of the stone,Message in a bottleFrom the distant shores of home.

Every day he made me wonder,Where did he ever findThe music midst the madnessAnd the courage to be kind,The long-forgotten beautyWe thought was blown awayIn the streets of Sarajevo, Belfast and Riyad,In the streets of New York City,Bali and Baghdad,In the streets of every city every day.

Streets of Sarajevo

Words & music by John McCutcheon

©2001 John McCutcheon/Appalsongs (ASCAP)

In 1956, Vedran Smailovic was born in Sarajevo into a celebrated musical

family. His father Avdo was a composer and educator who believed that music was not just for the privileged, but was the right of all people. Along with his daughters and his son Vedran, Avdo formed an ensemble called “Musica Ad Hominem” (Music for the People). The family group frequently played concerts not only to listeners in prestigious concert halls but also to local audiences and school children in remote villages.

Leading up to 1992, Vedran was a cellist for the Sarajevo Opera, Sarajevo Philharmonic Orchestra, Symphony Orchestra RTV Sarajevo, and the National Theatre of Sarajevo.

After the notorious massacre in the marketplace in May of that year in which twenty-two people lost their lives, Vedran, who had inherited his father’s strong sense of civil justice and humanitarian commitment, decided to “daily offer a music prayer for peace.” In addition to playing for twenty-two days in the marketplace, he continued to play in ruins, bomb sites, and graveyards. He became an inspiration for civil resistance in Bosnia and around the world. In 1993, he left Sarajevo for Ireland, where he lives today, still carrying on his efforts to promote peace.

Vedran Smailovic

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