Thirty years ago, during the longest siege in European history, Jews and Bosniak Muslims, Serbian Orthodox, and Croatian Catholics came together in the city’s last synagogue so they could give to their neighbor's food, medicine, and hope. In this short film, six of those volunteers have a message for Ukrainians today: “They tried to kill me. They didn’t. I survived. And so will you.”

Edward Serotta was born in Savannah, Georgia in 1949, received a degree in marketing from the University of Tennessee in 1972 and began working as a writer and photographer in Central and Eastern Europe in 1984. Between 1988 and 1991 he lived in Budapest and covered the revolutions of 1989 for Time Magazine, The Washington Post, The Observer, New York Newsday and Jerusalem Report. He then photographed and wrote about the siege of Sarajevo for German newspapers, The Guardian, The Independent and TIME Magazine. Between 1991 and 1996, when he lived in Berlin, he published a trilogy of books on Jewish life in Central and Eastern Europe: Out of the Shadows, Survival in Sarajevo, and Jews, Germany, Memory, which were also published in German. Exhibitions from these books traveled to 59 museums and galleries in 12 countries. His photographs are now in the permanent collections of eight museums in four countries. Between 1996 and 1999 he produced four documentary reports for ABC News Nightline including stories on searching for the Sarajevo Haggadah, the Theresienstadt concentration camp and a Jewish soup kitchen in Arad, Romania. After moving to Vienna, Edward Serotta founded Centropa in 2000, a Jewish historical institute that combines oral histories with digitized family pictures. Centropa now works in Holocaust education in more than 700 schools in the lands where the Holocaust took place, as well as in American public schools.