Nongovernmental and nonprofit organization Garden of the Righteous Worldwide – GA.RI.WO is registered at the beginning of September 2001 in Sarajevo, as the branch office of Gardens of the Righteous Worldwide - GA.RI.WO head office in Milan, whose founder is Gabriele Nissim, historian and essayist (see www.gariwo.net).

This organisation has been founded with intention to establish Garden of the Righteous in Sarajevo, which represents the symbol of the latest sufferings of people in Europe. That would be the monument and the memento dedicated to all those fighters against killing, menace and humiliation of innocent people, which would resemble to the park ''Yad Vashem'' in Jerusalem, Israel, and which is devoted to all those who have helped and protected the victims of holocaust.

The aim of designing such a Garden is to pay tribute to all those people, who have especially bravely and resolutely rejected legalized non-human treatment and helped all those innocent, weak and fragile who lived during last wars on the territory of former Yugoslavia. Each planted tree will bear the name of each Righteous Man, who has scorned all dangers, who has risked his life or lives of members of his family, and stood bravely to defend those who were unfairly persecuted. This Garden will bring out of oblivion to all those who have refused, as steady and responsible individuals, to accept massive euphoria that led into a crime.

The goal of creating the Garden should be very high and should represent a kind of reconciliation among nations and should, therefore, be the monument of individual decision that were the means of resistance against the manipulation of the majority.

The Garden will be the largest classroom for studying ethics. Further generations have to have consiousness that such kind of people existed and they are among us.

The bloody wars raged in the former Yugoslavia, the ethnic cleansing and genocide being their aim and the political doctrine behind it.

Good people as well as those who in the most terrible times found some strength to talk about other peoples’ goodness as well as those who, without thinking of the cost had the courage to do a good deed are the most impressive pledge of the rightness of such a decision.

I spent a good many years exploring books in order to find whether there is some lowest border of human dignity and how to recognize it. After having read thousands and thousands of pages of testimonies from people who had survived the hell of mass slaughter, I found what I was looking for in the book by Victor Frankl, psychiatrist, who survived Auschwitz.

He says: We, who returned home, managed to do so because of some happy circumstances or miracle, but whatever we call that, deep in our hearts we know very well that the best of us did not come home."

I think I learned from this that the lowest border of human dignity does exists, and the best of us would draw it boldly with our own blood and death, refusing to accept living life at any cost, because that would mean living in our own insanity. The best of us would choose death to preserve dignity. Some, like Dr Frankl, survive the atrocities of camp life and remain to testify that the brave people really did exist, and vanished because of their bravery. If there have been people who even in the worst times, sometimes at the cost of their own lives, refused to act inhumanly themselves, and if there are people able to testify to this, those having been lucky to escape death, have we the right to ignore them? Isn’t it an imperative of the first order to talk about, to write and publish through any kind of media, to let everybody know of extraordinarily moral people who really have lived?

In the former Yugoslavia, especially in Bosnia and Herzegovina, are living today thousands of those people who do not forget experienced goodness in an evil time. Many of them, even nowadays, wishing to add more to their testimony, to the remembrance mosaic, people whom one of my conversant was thinking of when he said: ''This war has shown that those who were humane stayed that way, and it is always hardest to be humane''.

Sarajevo is the town-symbol of suffering during last wars. At the same time it is the town-symbol of preserved multiethnic and multicultural life. In this town witnesses and anonymous righteous lived and still live today.

According to all that Sarajevo deserves and has moral obligation to mark names of all those who have consolidated hope that a human being can remain human even in the hardest time.

In the last year of the twentieth century simultaneously appeared idea, both in Europe and in the USA, about commemoration of world righteous. That is one of the ways to mark tragedies and the righteous of the twentieth century, so that conditions will be created for permanent peace in the Third Millennium.

United Humanitarian Mission (UHM), nonprofit organization from San Francisco has the project for twenty-first century "The Righteous of the World in Former Yugoslavia". They offered to Sarajevo universal monument for Righteous with the same goal to commemorate those whose experience future generations could be educated on.

UHM has planned to offer to build the same monument to all countries in which the genocide happened in the twentieth century. Sarajevo is the first town in Europe that was given such opportunity. In this monument will be the Museum of the Righteous with all data about righteous. All testimonies of survivors, who righteous has protected, will be kept in this Museum.

Garden of the Righteous and the Monument will be the complementary entirety.

The significance of such kind of project is still known in experience of other countries. The most famous is Yad Vashem (www.yadvashem.org.il) in Jerusalem. Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Authority, was established in 1953 by an act of the Israeli Knesset in order to commemorate the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis and their collaborators, the Jewish communities which were destroyed in an attempt to eradicate the name and culture of Israel as well as the heroism and fortitude of the Jews and the Righteous Among the Nations.

The Avenue and Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations honor the non-Jews who acted according to the noblest principles of humanity and risked their lives to help Jews during the Holocaust. 2000 trees, symbolic of the renewal of life, have been planted in and around the avenue. Plaques adjacent to each tree give the names of those being honored along with their country of residence during the war. A further 15000 names of non-Jews recognized to date by Yad Vashem as Righteous Among the Nations, are engraved on walls according to country, in the Garden of the Righteous Among the Nations.

The second country that made the similar memorial is Armenia. April 24 has been set aside each year to commemorate the genocide. The ashes of witnesses or of the Righteous for the Armenians, or a fistful of earth from their consecrated tombs, are taken to Yerevan. So far, six ashes of Righteous have been transferred to Armenia. The names of James Brice, Anatole France, Johannes Lepsius, Henry Morgenthau, Armin T. Wegner and Franz Werfel are on the wall of the Memorial of Genocide in Metz Yeghem.

The remembrance of those non-Armenians who helped the Armenian people before, during, and after the 1915 Genocide ensures that the narrative written about mass murder and deportations will not be only that constructed by the aggressors or re-invented by current apologists. The voices of non-Armenians who witnessed the tragic events of 1915-1923 save from oblivion the memory of the first Genocide of twentieth century.

According to the fact that there were million and half victims of Armenians, one can suppose that there were more righteous than it can be establishes today, regarding the years that passed and inexorable biology disappearance of potential witnesses.

Those experiences of Yad Vashem and Metz Yeghem lead to conclusion that it is very important to pass the shorter time between tragedy and collecting testimonies about righteous.

Svetlana Broz

Director General

Garden of the Righteous Worldwide – GA.RI.WO

Branch Office in Sarajevo

Address: Tinohovska 27

71240 Hadzici

Bosnia and Herzegovina

Phone: + 387 33 421 928

Mobile: + 387 66 170 897

E-mail: parkpravednika@yahoo.com

web site: http://gariwo.net/