History's Secret Heroes: Series 3: The Salon Albahari

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If you were a woman in Sarajevo in the 1940s, looking for a new outfit, there was one boutique you simply had to visit.

The salon of Al-Bahari on 19 Ferhadia Street, which is the very posh pedestrian walkway. A beautiful street with the latest fancy shops, cafes, beautiful restaurants.

Customers climbed a flight of stairs to the second floor of the building and took a seat in the waiting room. They were served Turkish coffee while they waited, as well as Turkish delight.

When it was your turn, you could choose a suit or gown made to measure.

They would look through pattern books and they would look through magazines magazines to see what kind of styles that they wanted. There were rolls of silk and

woollens and lots of young women sitting around sewing machines. Also large tables with

chalk with cut-out patterns. Hovering in the background was the salon's owner, a quiet gentleman by the name of Mordo Albahari, who had been a tailor his whole life, very fine tailor.

The salon al-Bahari was a family business. His niece, Gracia, worked with him.
Gracia Kami, age 20, was an apprentice. She sat next to two more young apprentices, Zakira Beshirovich and Rosa Soba.

Together, these three young women worked on every aspect of creating an outfit. They were trained to be very fine seamstresses, but also trained in fine embroidery as well.
And

they learned to be be masters at their craft. Then they would duplicate all of the high styles in the Paris couture houses at the time.
Zekira and Rosa had been best friends since childhood.

They were both unapologetic chain smokers, both brunettes, very slim and very attractive. Often they would both be dispatched to model the finished garments.

They loved their work, the salon and its customers. But it was April 1941, and for the people of Sarajevo, everything was about to change.

Soon, the war would come, the bombs would fall, and these young women would be tested in ways they could hardly predict.

I'm Helena Bonnencarter, and for BBC Radio 4, this is History's Secret Heroes. True stories of deception, acts of resistance, and courage from World War II.

The Salon al-Bahari.

So we are in the Balkans. Sarajevo, the capital city of Bosnia.
Bosnia is a very mountainous country. It's just green hills, hills covered with trees.
I mean, it's like a hiker's paradise.

And Sarajevo is this lovely sort of jewel of a city. Isabel Vincent is a reporter for the New York Post.

She was looking through the archives of Yad Vashem, the memorial to the Holocaust in Jerusalem, which honors all of the righteous Gentiles who risked their lives to save Jews.

When she came across a story from the Second World War, it happened in Sarajevo.

Vincent had reported on the Bosnian War in the 1990s and knew the Balkans well, yet she had never heard anything about this. I thought, oh my god, like I

knew almost nothing about this history. This is incredibly fascinating.
It concerned Zekira Betsyrovich and Rosa Sober, two apprentices at the Salon Al-Bahari. I was struck by these two young women.

I mean, they were 19. They were apprentice dressmakers at this very lovely shop.
Vincent traveled to Sarajevo to meet their surviving family members.

Alma says that Auntie Rosa

made a better baklava than her own mother. Alma Muikic is Zekira Bechirevich's daughter.
She's speaking in Bosnian.

Her friend Amir Tukul is translating for her.

Alma knew Rosa Sober as a close friend of her mother's. They called her Teta Rosa, Aunt Rosa.
She says they were as close, if not much closer, than two sisters could be.

Rosa and Zakira worked together at the Salon Al-Bahari by day and played together in their free time.

Rosa was much more the leader, but both of them were these fun, loving 19-year-olds who, after work, liked to hang out, liked to have coffee with their friends.

With its colorful array of mosques, churches and synagogues, Sarajevo was sometimes called the Jerusalem of Europe. Rosa and Zakira grew up in the same neighborhood.

Rosa's family was Catholic, Zakira's Muslim. They were in and out of each other's homes and grew up with the various traditions of each of them.

So Zakira would celebrate Christmas and Rosa would celebrate Aid with Zakira's family. At the salon, Rosa and Zakira worked alongside their friend Grazia, who was Jewish.

The Al-Bahari shop was definitely a microcosm for Sarajevo.

It was owned by Al-Bahari, who was Jewish, a Sephardic Jew, whose family had a long tradition in Sarajevo.

He was a philanthropist within the Jewish community, but not a very outspoken person, a very well-to-do tailor who did his job very well.

At the beginning of April 1941, there were as many as 12,000 Jewish people living in Sarajevo. The community there dated back hundreds of years.

So the Jews of Sarajevo arrived in the 15th century from Spain, the 15th and the 16th century after

the Spanish government issued an edict banning Jews from essentially from the Iberian Peninsula.

So these Jews go to Venice and then from Venice they end up in Sarajevo where the Ottoman Empire welcomes them. Sarajevo had seen plenty of history.

In 1914 though, it came to the attention of the whole world.

The heir to the throne of Austria-Hungary, Archduke Franz Ferdinand, was driving through Sarajevo in an open-topped car, his wife Sophie, by his side. They were attacked by Bosnian Serb assassins.

Both royals were shot and killed. This shocking event triggered the start of the First World War.
The Balkans are complicated for a reason.

We use the word Balkanized to describe very complicated socio-economic, historic situations.

These days, if you look at a map, you will see the region divided up into many nations: Slovenia, Croatia, Bosnia, and Herzegovina, Serbia, Montenegro, Kosovo and North Macedonia.

At the beginning of the Second World War though, much of this land was united as the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. On the 25th of March 1941, the Yugoslav government signed a pact with Nazi Germany.

It joined the Axis powers in the war.

This provoked outrage. Two days later, a military coup in Belgrade overthrew the Yugoslav government.
The new prime minister refused to ratify the pact with Germany.

Instead, he opened negotiations with Allied powers, Britain and the Soviet Union.

Adolf Hitler was furious. In response, he ordered the invasion of Yugoslavia.
On the morning of Sunday, the 6th of April, Yugoslavia was invaded by Germany, Italy and Hungary.

Warplanes flew over Sarajevo. They bombed the airport, the law courts, the post office.
90 people were killed and several hundred were injured. All of this was during the Jewish festival of Passover.

The fighting lasted for a little over 10 days before the Royal Yugoslav Army surrendered. The victorious Axis powers carved up the kingdom between themselves.

A large portion of the north of Yugoslavia was reclaimed the independent state of of Croatia.

The Nazis preferred to install a government that would look independent from their influence, but most Croat politicians refused to collaborate with them.

Eventually, the Nazis backed the ultra-nationalist and fascist Croat Ustasa regime under the leadership of Benito Mussolini's ally, Ante Pavelic.

The fascist Croats allied themselves with the Axis power, so with the Nazis, and that sort of gave them carte blanche to go after everybody.

The Salon al-Bahari and its employees in Sarajevo were now under the rule of one of the most brutal Nazi-aligned states.

From the start, the Ustasi stamped down on the city's complex mosaic of religions and ethnicities. One of the first things they did was enact the edict of the Nazis concerning Jews.

In the days following the bombing, Jewish people were forced to endure daily humiliations at the hands of the Ustashi. They used the synagogues as stables for their horses.

They took over everything they could. Jewish people were forbidden from entering restaurants or taking public transport.
They were forced to buy yellow bands and then lapel pins.

These had to be worn at all times.

Gracia Kami, Mordau Al-Bahari's niece and apprentice, was picked up by forces when she was walking in the street. She was forced to mop the floors of an Ustashi storage room.

The Al-Bahari family, who owned one of the finest dress shops in downtown Sarajevo, suddenly realized, you know, the writing was on the wall for them.

And then a few weeks later, they started rounding up Jews and sending them to concentration camps. In October, the Ustasha authorities arrived at the Al-Bahari's family home.

Gracia's mother managed to warn her.

Leave, hide, go away, I'll be fine. Gracia and her uncle Mordor Al-Bahari, who happened to be in the apartment that day, hid in a very small room between two doors.

One door was hidden by the wardrobe, the other by a wall carpet. The Eustasha simply did not spot that there was a room there.

Instead, they ransacked the rest of the apartment. Gracia's mother, grandmother, and 10-year-old brother were all found and arrested.

As news spread that Jews were being rounded up, Zakira and Rosa rushed to Gracia's apartment. They arrived just in time to see Gracia's mother outside.

It was strictly forbidden for them to speak to her, but she kissed them goodbye before she was taken away. Gracia's mother whispered to them, They are upstairs.

The two young women circled around the apartment and waited until the Ustashi left. The apartment was sealed, but they knew they needed to do something.

It's been ingrained in the Bosnian mentalities that relationships with neighbors

are as important,

if not more important, than relationships with family. It didn't take them a split second to figure out, we're just going to hide them.

At dusk, Gracia and Mordo climbed out of a first floor window, clutching a few of their belongings. Rosa and Zakira took them somewhere they could be safe, at least for now.

And what they did was they hid them in the dress shop. Gracia and Mordo took refuge in the Salon Al-Bahari.
There were three hiding places within that shop.

There were like three false closets where you could hide people.

They are only allowed to leave under cover of darkness, but they spend their days locked in a closet and with the young women bringing them food.

For several weeks, Zakira and Rosa kept the business running while protecting the secret.

So while Mordo Albahari was hiding to save his life in a hidden recess of his own dress shop, Rosa continued, as she always did, cutting up fabric, chain smoking, sewing suits together, making gowns for the elite in Sarajevo.

While they had fittings, Mordo had to hide in one of the wardrobes together with other sewing materials.

He was so close that if he had even made a sound or coughed, all of them would have been arrested.

Since the invasion, the wives of the Ustasha officers were now among the salon's elite customers. If any of them discovered Rosa and Zakira were hiding two Jews, the consequences could be devastating.

They were constantly fearful of being arrested. Many of their friends were taken to the concentration camp Yastanovats and that most of them never came back.

Yet Zakira and Rosa were determined to do everything in their power to protect their colleagues and friends. These women were driven by just

a deep-seated humanity that came from living in a city

with so many different

people with different values,

but all worshiping this Abrahamic God.

There was unity in that. They really focused on the humanity in all of those religions.
And that's what came through.

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after a few weeks of sheltering Racia and Mordo in the shop, it became clear that they could not stay in cupboards forever. It was only a matter of time before the Ostachi would find them.

Zakira and Rosa decided to get them out to Sarajevo and to the relative safety of the city of Mostar.

Over 100 kilometers away on the coast of the Adriatic, Mosta was then under Italian rule.

It's not that they could live freely there, but it was a little bit better than living in Sarajevo at that time. But leaving Sarajevo was not easy.
Gracia and Mordo needed disguises.

Zakira had an idea. Muslims were not directly targeted by the Ustasha regime.

So if you were wearing a fez, if you were wearing a hijab and walking down the street, you were pretty much okay. Ustasha troops would not lift a woman's veil.

Some men even escaped by dressing as veiled women. What was more, if your face was covered, you could carry identification documents that bore no resemblance to your real appearance.

Zikira and Rosa dressed their friends in dark caftans. Gracia wore a niqab covering her chest and head, while Mordo wore a fez.

They managed to escape under cover of darkness, dressed as Muslims. And while they were escorting him, one Ustasha officer came towards them and asked them where they were headed at that time.

And Rosa was very brave and she cursed at the Ustasha officer. And then she pulled Zakira and then they hid into the crowds.
And then they put Mordo on a train.

Zakira and Rosa Rosa had no idea when they would see their colleagues again.

For now, they had a boutique to run. Before they helped Gracia and Mordo escape Sarajevo, they made one more arrangement.
Jews were accused of controlling the banks, of controlling all of the wealth.

One of the first things that the Nazis did in Austrian Germany were to take over Jewish businesses and a process that was called Aryanization and send Jews out of the country if they had enough money to sort of leave behind and leave.

Similarly, all of Sarajevo's Jewish businesses were either liquidated or Aryanized, requisitioned and handed over to non-Jewish citizens.

Before Mordo left for Mostar, Zakira and Rosa promised him they would not let the Salon al-Bahari, or the family's fortune, fall into the hands of the Ustashi.

Zakira applied to become a commissioner, a position that allowed Gentiles to take control of Jewish property. She hoped to hold Mordeaux's business in trust until he could return.

And so Zakira and Rosa applied to Ustasha authorities to take ownership of the Salon al-Bahari. The request was approved.
The apprentices became the shop's new manager and deputy manager.

Rosa was always the more dominant of the friends, so Rosa took charge naturally. She appointed herself the trustee.
The salon remained open, the fittings continued.

The wives of Ustasha officers were kept in the finest gowns in Sarajevo. Rosa and Zakira worked hard.
I mean with all sorts of food shortages and medicine shortages.

It wasn't an easy place to be living in wartime, but they continued as best as as they could.

Meanwhile, in Mostar, Mordau Albahari and Gracia found work together in a tailor shop. It was a far cry from Salon Albahari.
They were paid a pittance and had to live in a cramped, single room.

The concentration camps were full. Back in Sarajevo, Gracia's mother, brother and great-grandmother had been taken to a gathering centre.

While they were there, an uncle of Gracia, who'd been a judge before the war, managed to pull strings to get them out.

Mordau and Gracia sent false papers back to Sarajevo to allow Gracia's mother and brother to travel to Mostar, but Gracia's great-grandmother was unable to make the journey. She died in the Holocaust.

When Italian troops arrived in Mostar, they began to round up Jews. Mordo and Gracia were arrested and imprisoned in a makeshift prison on the island of Var.

Months later, in May 1943, they were moved to a drafty army barracks on another island, Rab.

Food was scarce, and it was often cold.

Gracia and her uncle decide that they're going to go into the underground and they're going to be partisans and they're going to fight wherever necessary to get rid of the Ustashis.

By this time, Mussolini himself was ill and his government was reeling from defeats in North Africa. The Italian fascist regime fell in July.
Mussolini was arrested.

The new Italian government made peace with the Allies.

Gracia had already forged strong links with Yugoslav partisans. Now she threw herself into the guerrilla war against the Nazis and the Ustashi.
Being in the partisans was not an easy undertaking.

They expected you to fight. They expected you to figure out how to use a weapon.
You were mainly in the forests. You were mainly doing guerrilla warfare.

A lot of people died around you and you had enemies everywhere. Back in Sarajevo, Gracia had a boyfriend.
Rosa hid him for several days and he was able to escape to the Italian zone.

Once he was there, he too joined the partisans. He was reunited with Gracia.
The couple were married. But their happiness was short.
He was killed in the course of action.

In 1944, Ustasha forces widened their scope of persecutions to target Muslims. This put Zakira at risk.
She was saved by Rosa, who lied to the Ustashi that her friend had converted.

Rosa said I witnessed her convert to Catholicism, so she's just like us. But the remaining Axis forces were now on the back foot, while a tremendous energy built among the Yugoslav partisans.

Allied forces joined the fight on their side. Once again, Sarajevo was bombed, this time by American warplanes.

Miraculously, the Salon Al-Bahari survived all of this turmoil. At the end of the war, when Al-Bahari came back to Sarajevo, Rosa handed him the keys and said, here it is.

It's in the shape that you left it. We're giving it back to you.
This never belonged to us. We're just grateful you're alive.

Though Zakira and Rosa's tireless work had kept the salon afloat, the memories of what had happened there were too painful for Mordo.

After the war, Yugoslav property was collectivised, so he could not take back ownership of the salon.

Mordo never made women's clothes again. He worked as a humble tailor, repairing men's clothes.
He never said a word about the war.

It was deeply traumatizing. He died in 1975.

When Gracia returned to Sarajevo wearing her partisan uniform, she found her old community in ruins. Her mother and brother had survived the war, but their old apartment had been looted.

All their belongings were gone. She was now a young widow.
Life could never be the same as before. Didn't want to live in Sarajevo.
She came back defeated. Gracia moved to Zagreb.

Though she always remained profoundly grateful for Zakira and Rosa taking such risks to save her life, she lost touch with them.

And they only saw Zakira and Rosa in Sarajevo during the celebration of 400 years since the Sephardic Jews arrived to Sarajevo, which would have been in 1965.

Zakira and Rosa remained the closest of friends, supporting each other through births, deaths and years of political upheaval. At the end of the 1980s, communism collapsed in Eastern Europe.

Yugoslavia broke into constituent nations and tensions soon spilled over into war.

In 1992, the Bosnian war brought conflict back to Sarajevo.

During the siege of the town, Zakira's apartment was bombed. She was evacuated to Croatia.

The women saw much less of each other during the war. At last, in 1994, they were reunited.
Zakira decides she wants to go back and spend her last

few weeks.

She was dying of lung cancer. She wants to walk the streets of her beloved Sarajevo again and she wants to see her friend, Rosa, again.

With the help of the United Nations, Zakira was flown back to Sarajevo in an air ambulance. She was very sick and she obviously asked to see her best friend Rosa

and she soon after that passed away. Zakira died in 1994.
Rosa died in 1999.

In 2000, they were both honored by the World Holocaust Remembrance Center.

Yad Vashem decided that there was enough evidence to make both Rosa and Zakira righteous among the nations and planted a tree in their honor in 2000.

The history of relations between different ethnic and religious groups in Sarajevo is checkered, but Zakira and Rosa's story is part of a positive strand in which some groups have looked out for each other.

When Isabel Vincent traveled to Sarajevo to research this story in the summer of 2024, she found little trace of the salon Al-Bahari.

Its former rooms are now an office for another company, and she was not allowed in.

As a consequence of the Bosnian war, many documents and other artefacts that would have helped tell Rosa and Zakira's story were lost.

That was the sad part of this, is that, you know, they did have photos, they did have family photos, they did have letters, but

they don't have them, they've disappeared. Yet by speaking to their descendants, including Zakira's daughter Alma, Vincent unearthed their tale of resistance.

For me, this is one of the most hopeful stories that I've ever come across. So this is a great example of kind of the sacred nature of close female friendship.

One can only hope for a friendship like that.

Next time, on history's secret heroes, in Prague, two men set out to assassinate one of Hitler's most high-ranking officers.

They are desperate for a spectacular success story, and killing the head of the Nazi security services is precisely that. Operation Anthropoid.

One winter's night in 1974, a crime took place that would obsess the nation. We're still looking for Lucan all over the world.

Lord Lucan is said to have killed the family nanny and to have attacked his wife before disappearing. Why has this, of all crimes, captured our imagination? It's partly that the evidence is so murky.

As I try to get to the bottom of the case, my preconceptions are blown apart. I mean, this is a pretty weird stuff to have in a box, isn't it? What on earth is this for?

The Lucan Obsession with me, Alex von Tunselman, from BBC Radio 4. Listen now on BBC Sounds.

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