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In a city that has been called home by Muslims, Eastern Orthodox, Roman Catholics, and Sephardic Jews, Sarajevo has a long and complicated legacy of interfaith relations.

On May 2, Princeton University's Program in Near Eastern Studies featured two personal stories dealing with that fractured legacy: Sara Pizatnich, the daughter of a Muslim "righteous gentile" and the subject of the 2007 Israeli documentary "The Woman from Sarajevo" and Jasha Levi, a native of Sarajevo and author of the recently released memoir "The Last Exile, A Tapestry of Life."

Before World War II, Sarajevo (today the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina) was home to approximately 12,000 Jews. Most of the city's Jews were killed in the Holocaust, with the majority of survivors resettling in Israel in order to escape the yoke of Soviet rule.

In the film "The Woman from Sarajevo," the narrator tells her own personal journey from "Aida the Muslim from Sarajevo to Sara the Jew from Jerusalem."

Sara Pizatnich, the subject and narrator of the 2007 documentary, is the daughter of Zineba Hardaga, the first Muslim woman to be honored by Israel as "Righteous among the Nations." During the war, the Hardaga family hid the Kabilio's, a Jewish family they counted as among their closest friends.

Fifty years later, as the Yugoslav War raged on in the early 1990's between the Serbs and the Bosnians and Croats, the descendents of Kabilio family (now living in Israel) helped to rescue the Hardaga family by securing their immigration to Israel.

Not long after arriving in Israel, Pizatnich and her husband Moshe and daughter Stella decided to convert and take on the lives of observant Jews.

Today, Pizatnich works at Yad Vashem, and she and her daughter, who served as an officer in the Israeli Air Force, have become fully absorbed into Israeli culture, speaking Hebrew with ease and comfort. Pizatnich's husband died just four months before the shooting of the documentary, at age 52.

Yet, despite her new life in Jerusalem, Pizatnich never completely moved on. She regularly meets with an Orthodox priest, an old friend who grew in the same apartment bloc as her and also now resides in Jerusalem; at their meeting, she revels in the opportunity to speak her native tongue.

The documentary details Pizatnich's first visit back to Sarajevo since leaving. Her sister Zerpa, an observant Muslim, still lives there and her brother, now a Christian residing in Mexico, also returned for the reunion. Though they now live in three separate lands, speak different languages, and each practice their own faiths, the siblings are united by their shared Sarajevan past.

Jasha Levi, 89, was unable to attend the event but his publicist was there to read his prepared remarks.

Levi, today a resident of Monmouth County, was born in Sarajevo in 1921, barely a mile from where seven years earlier the first shot of World War I was fired.

In a phone interview with The Jewish State, Levi described the Sarajevo of his youth as a tolerant, multicultural society.

"We must have grown up in a very unique Jewish population," Levi said. "We were not frightened of our existence, not ashamed of our existence, but we were ready to fight for it if we had to."

Levi, though respecting his Jewish ancestry, recalled that like many young Jews in Sarajevo, "saw ourselves as Yugoslavs first."

All this changed in the early 1940s with the Nazi onslaught and Yugoslav's acquiesce. During the war, Levi's family escaped to Italy, where he remained under civilian confinement for three years before returning to Yugoslav and fighting against the Germans in Dalmatia. After the war, Levi became a prominent journalist reporting from around the world including as the youngest reporter at the 1946 Paris Peace Conference. He also served as an editor for the Serbian communist newspaper Borba, reported on the 1951 Korean peace talks, and covered the United Nations from 1953-1956.

In 1956, while living in the United States, Levi decided to stay permanently after Tito's government refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Hungary.

The title of Levi's book is an allusion to his family's own history, a history bracketed by expulsion and exile, first from Spain in the 1490s and again from Europe in the mid-20th century.

Levi, who has worked on his memoir for decades, said that the title came about more recently when speaking to a group of 8th grade students, who were studying the Holocaust.

"Through all this discussion, I realized I had not been through the Holocaust. I was at the edges of it," he said. "There was an edge and lot of us passed through it, in a different way. It is not better or worse, just different."