4.5 stars.
Based on real-life testimonies of women held in Bosnian death camps, this single testimonial is unflinching in its "authenticity."
--Dedi Felman

In the book opens, " S.," the protagonist of the story, has just had a baby who is the product of a gang rape. She hates this baby.
"She feels nothing but animosity toward this creature. The first thought that came to her mind when she realized that she was pregnant was death. This child was condemned to death from the start. It lived only because by that time it was already too late for an abortion. She had to carry through her pregnancy to the bitter end, with a swelling stomach that deformed her beyond recognition and made her hate her own body."

S. is filling in for a friend of hers, a teacher on maternity leave, in a little village in bosnia. She and her parents are from Sarajevo. The Serb army swarms into her town, and kidnap all the occupants. The women and children are put on a bus for they do not know where. They end up in a prisoner camp.
Prison conditions here are horrific enough, but after a few weeks S. is taken to the "women's room," where the prettiest and youngest women and girls are kept, to be at the service of soldiers. They never know when they're going to be taken out of their room and gangraped, sometimes tortured. Sometimes they die, sometimes they disappear.
But months into her stay, the Captain of the camp has her brought before him. This is where S. gets lucky. He wants her companionship and her service in bed, but she gets to enjoy Real meals in his quarters, and the luxury of being able to take baths and showers.
"The advantage of being with the Captain becomes more and more obvious to her with each passing day. To survive. To sip wine, eat, sleep in clean sheets, to be safe. The Captain may be her chance of survival. She does not even contemplate freedom, that naive she is not. She simply wants to take advantage of this unexpected opportunity to improve her situation. At this moment, she is not even asking herself whether she is right; good and bad make little sense when it comes to camp life. What is useful to you is good, what is of no use or of direct harm to someone else is bad. S. is certain that her actions are not hurting anyone."

Another woman in the camp, a character named E., kills herself after her daughter is killed by being gangraped. Shortly after S. came to the prison camp, her little box containing her jewelry went missing. Not knowing who stole it, she complained to E. about it being stolen.
The morning of their liberation from the camp, E. is found dead by her own hand. She leaves a note behind for S., asking for her forgiveness for taking her jewelry. She used it to bribe the soldiers to leave her daughter alone.
"... Of course S. would have given her the gold jewelry, if only she had told her, had explained why. Remembering how bitter she was when she discovered the theft, she is now overwhelmed by embarrassment at her own selfishness. How shortsighted she had been. When she had bemoaned the theft, E. had looked down and S., well she remembers, had taken that as a sign of indifference on E.'s part, as a sign that she had reconciled herself to fate. If only E. had given S. some indication, perhaps it would have made it easier for them both. Perhaps they could have helped each other. these thoughts run through as S.'s mind as she sits on the bed next to the dead E."

S. travels to Sweden, where she is granted refugee status.
"S. knows that she is now a refugee but she still does not know what that means exactly. How many other people's shoes and coats, how much more waiting. She still does not know that this waiting is what keeps her going, but there is no other thread connecting the moments and holding them together than this waiting for lunch, for dinner, for their documents, for approval, for news of their families, for the bus, for their departure, for their return. That is why even this camp, while not surrounded by barbed wire, is terrible. They are all waiting for something and that is what their life consists of. A refugee is someone who has been expelled from somewhere but does not go anywhere because they have nowhere to go. It feels that she is now actually existing between two places, in a state of anticipation, in transit between the one and the other. Neither of these places is home. S. is only now becoming accustomed to the fact that this feeling of the transitory is her new situation."

One of the workers helping the refugees in sweden, turns out to be a person that s went to school with. She lived in the same building that S. and her sister and parents lived in in Sarajevo, so now she tells S. some of what happened in the bombing of Sarajevo.
"F. tells her with a smile: imagine, nobody in our building fell ill, even when temperatures dropped to minus 10! Cold and hunger are not the hardest things to bear. The worst thing is that there is no water in the bathroom, then the whole apartment stinks. A stench from which there is no escape, that is the most humiliating thing. S. does not know what to say. She laughs, as if she finds the comment about the bathroom funny, as if one can laugh at such suffering. She remembers the unbearable stench of burning corpses in the wheelie bin. She would like to tell F. a bit about her own experience of humiliation, about the types and degrees of humiliation in the camp, but she abandons the idea. Horrors should not, cannot be compared. They should not even be described. There is little hope that anyone will understand them anyway."

This book is very difficult to read. But it's a very important book, and I commend the author for what must have been a very difficult book to write. ( )

Maybe it's because I've read several books about war back-to-back, but now after finishing the last pages of this story, I am completely drained. I know that this book is a novel so the story is fiction. Yet it is not fiction. What happened to S. in this novel did happen to Muslim women during the war in Bosnia. The way the author writes about S., her imprisonment, and her physical and psychological trauma, it is impossible to believe that she was not a real person and that she did not fully experience everything in this story.

The story is of S., a young woman who is a victim of rape and other brutality during the Bosnian war. Oddly, both she and all of the characters in this novel are referred to only by the first initial of their names. The story is so bleak and depressing that it's almost a relief not to know the real name of the main character as well as the others in the novel. This technique of writing emphasizes the loss of humanity and individuality experienced by many people who suffer deep trauma during wartime. This horrifying exploration of one aspect of war should be read by everyone if only to try to understand more of what wartime victims experience but can no longer express. ( )

When your country is at war with another, or perhaps many others, you are aware of the risk to human life. You know soldiers will die, you know that some of these may be people you know or even your loved ones. But, though the civilians at home worry about those who are away fighting for their country, they rarely see themselves as part of the war. The threat to them seems far away, almost unreal. So when the occupying forces marched into the Bosnian village where S. lived, her immediate reaction is not of panic. She is mildly annoyed for having been woken up, but she still has faith in the human capacity for reason and she believes that if she surrenders her jewellry and valuables without making a fuss, then no one will do her any harm. In other words, she is naive.

The civilians are captured and taken away to work camps, one for men and one for women. But deep within the female camp is the room that every prisoner dreads - the women's room. A room where women become objects to be used by the soldiers, a room of pain and despair where all hope dies and a person is forced to become empty. Being empty in your mind, abandoning your body at will, this is the only way to survive. Drakulic shows the extent of human depravity in one of the most disturbing accounts of captivity during wartime. Her use of the first letter in place of the women's names is important in understanding the ability to dehumanize the enemy, they become things and not people. It is repulsive, scary and sad.

But the author, in my opinion, never slips over into the gratuitous because her focus is on S.'s inner turmoil. It is not just about the sexual abuse, the beatings and cruelty, it's about the effect this has on the victims, how they retreat inside themselves and the lengths they go to in order to keep their sanity in a world gone mad. Not only that, but she even looks at what it's like to be a soldier blindly following orders, dehumanizing yourself to find the ability to commit atrocities during war. It's easy to have enemies and it's easy to hate, but what does it take to make you someone who can torture another human being? What must they become in your mind? What must you become?

When showing the crimes men commit towards women, when showing a group of male soldiers laughing at a woman's pain, it becomes so easy to delve into misandry. You hate the Serbian soldiers, you hate the things they do to the women. But this is only partly a gender issue. Drakulic wants to tell the many untold stories of women during the Bosnian war (there are an estimated 60,000 rape victims), she wants us to know about the suffering they faced because of their gender. But, for the author, humanity has one common enemy regardless of your race, religion or gender... and that is war. War makes us all something other than human, it allows those with the power to become monstrous and it allows those without it to be seen as vermin.

Though the author chose to focus on the Bosnian war and particularly the way women were treated during this war, the backbone of this story is universally applicable. She expertly tells a story about some of the vilest, most horrific things that can happen to a human being, she captures humanity at it's best and worst, showing exactly what we are capable of - both the good and the bad. ( )

This is probably the most harrowing book I've read this year, but one that I found hard to put down, so eager was I to reach the light at the end of the tunnel.

It tells the story of S., a Bosnian schoolteacher, taken one day in the summer of 1992 from her village to a Serbian prison camp. Before long, she is moved to the "women's room", where a group of women prisoners are placed at the mercy of the Serb soldiers' "needs". Since the novel begins with S. looking back on her horrific and somehow unreal experiences, we know that she is, in some sense, one of the "lucky" ones, and yet it is a far from conventional definition of "lucky". I read several of the pages with my hand over my mouth in horror, but the prose is spare and matter-of-fact, reflecting the fact that rape, murder, torture and humiliation had become normality in the context of the war in Yugoslavia.

This is a far from pleasant read, but it is an extremely important reminder of how easily we can descend into inhumanity and that we must guard against it at all costs.

I found this book browsing a used store. It looked interesting and the subject was certainly meaty. It looks at the inhumanity of war, from the POV of a non-combatant and victim. The inability of one person to make a difference in the determined chaos of an almost matter of fact hatred. How life and routines crumble in the face of a stronger reality when enforced by violence.

The story is set in Yugoslavia I think, ( in one of the splintered parts, Bosnia). It is set during the war and told from the POV, of S., a Muslim woman who was a prisoner of war.

It is the story of her capture and internment in a camp. She is an educated woman from the capital, working in a peasant village as a substitute teacher at their school. Because she is young and pretty she ends up in the camp's Women's Room. Where they keep woman the guards want to have sex with. And not just sex, because they are disposable women not protected by law, some are beaten, tortured, mutilated and even killed.

S. talks about what happens around her, how the men and older boys are taken out and shot, both at the collection point, and later from the men's camp. How the women react to the situation. They are herded into a large empty space with a concrete pad: no beds, no bathrooms, no heat, little food. Some come together to help each other and some begin to prey on each other especially the weak. Through it all the guards and prison officials are
shadowy menaces. There seems to be very little actual hate, and in fact that is for me the biggest problem with the book. Its rather limp.

All the names of Bosnians are just initials; Others are listed by their profession - there is very little humanity in any of the characters, even the victims. The hate from the Serbs (?) is muted, the pain, fear and horror from the victims is muted. They just seem bland and confused. The author is more concerned about the class differences between the educated, classy S. and the ignorant, coarse, peasant woman from the village. Religion is not really explored, and no one in the book seems particularly religious.

Not that I want to read graphic descriptions, and wallow in it, but with such a powerful subject, I should have a much more emotional reaction.

There is also little attempt to explain or understand why neighbors are suddenly turning on neighbors. So the author doesn't do a good job with the emotional content, and s/he doesn't handle the reasons for the war and the hatred.

The women in S.'s camp are exchanged for prisoners the Bosnians had, and they end up in a Bosnian refugee camp, waiting to be resettled. They can't return to their homes because they have been taken by the Serbs, or destroyed. People are waiting for relatives to take them in (though many like S. have had their families killed) or for foreigners to take them in.

The result of the rapes is that a lot of the woman are pregnant, and so is S. The pregnancy is a visible sign of their abuse, and a death sentence for either the women or their attempt to return to their community and have a normal life. The women are blamed for their dishonor, and the author doesn't really deal with that either. S. finds out too late for an abortion, and so she must deal with the alien life in her body. She comes to hate it and wants it gone as soon as it is born.

She applies to go to Sweden as a refugee and is accepted. She meets a former classmate there, who eases her into a quick settlement from the Swedish refugee camp. The story follows her life in Sweden until the birth of her child. Of course there is a redemptive ending, which I found bogus in terms of real life.

I found the depiction of S. to be good and probably accurate for a survivor of such a horror: she is numb and muted. The problem is, it makes for a pale story. It isn't a bad book, in fact its quite good, but it seemed it could have been so much more. ( )