Lara showed the sheet music to her professor, an old man named Dr. Kovač who had studied in Vienna before the war. He adjusted his glasses, stared at the manuscript for a long time, and then turned pale.
He explained: during the Nazi occupation of Yugoslavia, a Jewish pianist named Elias Stern had been hiding in the basement of a printing press. He had no piano, only a charcoal stick and scavenged paper. According to oral histories, Stern composed a single piece in those months — a piece he called Ostavi Trag — and then vanished. The rumor was that he had encoded the location of a hidden cache of forged identity papers and food ration cards into the music itself. Papers that could have saved dozens of lives. But no one had ever found the manuscript. ostavi trag sheet music
Lara fled Sarajevo with her family in a convoy of rattling buses. She took only two things: her mother’s wool coat and the sheet music. In a refugee camp outside Split, she found a broken harmonium in a church basement. She played Ostavi Trag for the other refugees — tired men, hollow-eyed women, children who had forgotten how to laugh. And something happened. Lara showed the sheet music to her professor,