Dutch historian, Selma Leydesdorff, brings together the testimonies of 60 women who survived the genocide in Srebrenica. Through the interviews, the author paints a picture of pre-war Bosnia, when the Bosniaks, Croats, and Serbs co-existed peacefully, through to the post-war period where many of them still live as refugees.
The stories of these women, and their courage highlight their humanity in what was a grotesquely inhumane situation. Women’s voices from the war in Bosnia are rarely heard. Most of the time they are presented as victims of rape and murder. This collection of interviews offers a deeper insight into their lives under the most testing of circumstances, where everything around them was literally falling away.
Apart from the extremes of violence and death, there was the daily grind of no food, water, electricity; an inability to go out to meet, to see, to even breath fresh air. The interviews also reveal the super-human efforts by the women to uncover the truth of how, why, and what happened during those fateful days. If the Dutch soldiers shamefully failed to protect the men folk of Srebrenica, at least one Dutch civilian has given the surviving women the opportunity for us to see the war through their eyes.
