The Cellist of Sarajevo

During the siege of Sarajevo in 1993, mortar shells had reduced the city's beloved National Library to a smoldering skeleton. Bread lines became killing fields. The marketplace where families once haggled over tomatoes became a crater. Vedran Smailovic, principal cellist of the Sarajevo Opera, had watched twenty-two of his neighbors die in a single shelling while they waited for bread.…