Customer Reviews

The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia (A New Republic Book)

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I am no learned professional. I am no literary master. I am an average guy, with average intelligence, average imagination - just an average joe. I have however taken an interest in the history of humanity's crimes against itself and it fills me with dread.

And so I read this book. If anyone ever wondered if humanity has learnt its lessons from the horrors of WW1 and WW2, then they are sorely mistaken. We haven't even learnt from the brutalities of the dark ages yet. The crimes committed against completely innocent people by these Serb monsters draw back to the times of Ivan the Terrible and his Oprichnia. It is barbaric and horrific to its most base level. The sufferings of these innocent people are like nothing you would witness from the most vile horror movie - in fact, many of these Serb paramilitaries (ie average joes with guns, imaginations and complete & total immunity from justice) waltzed around like the Rambos and Terminators of our film world.

Back to the book. Mr Hukanovic's story tells of a civilian, caught up in onslaught of enemy forces, captured and taken to concentration camps to 'suffer their fate'. The fact this hero to humanity survived when his family and friends were butchered is a testament to his strength. I wonder if many other people would have the strength to relive their nightmares and put their stories to print. I hope for humanity's sake, they can.

Now there is a school of thought that suggests that personal memoirs can be tainted by the writers emotions, could be exaggerated and distorted. And when witness to such horrors, one could see how easily someone could be emotive on this subject. However, Rezak, as much as he can, keeps his levelheadedness thoughout this book. He doesn't stray into emotive hyperbole, he doesn't try to stir the heart strings, he just tells it how it was. The fantastic thing is that unlike most memoirists, he describes each detail as it occured. Similar to 'Man is Wolf to Man' by Joseph Bardach, he explains it matter of factly. Obviously, there will be emotion, there has to be, but it is tempered with excellence by his journalistic reporting intuition.

Rezak Hukanovic lived through the most horrific torture any human being could live through. He has written a book so shattering to humanity that it must be read, it must be consumed by EVERYBODY.

These events, if we do not learn from them, will happen again. And don't give me this rubbish that 'certain' ethnicities are 'fated' to brutalise each other. That is just an excuse for us to turn a blind eye. Please, let us not repeat the ineptitude of the UN security forces in Bosnia, please let us not give up repairing Iraq and Afghanistan after our 'intrusions'.

Like respondants have said before, we should not turn our back on the suffering of innocents. Our governments SHOULD be doing something valid and worthwhile, but they must tell us so. If we have to send troops to foreign nations for humanitarian reasons, to stop genocidal murder, then tell us so. Humanity cannot stand idley by while murderous governments stir up their populations with unbridled hatred of their neighbours.

Mr Hukanovic is a hero. Let his book be never forgotten. Let the slaughter of Bosnia never be forgotton. I do not care what religion anyone adhere's to, every SINGLE human being has a right NOT to be subjected to these horrors.

I would urge others to read this short yet insightful book.

The shorter books on the Balkans conflicts such as Slavenka Drakulic's "The Balkans Express" or even books aimed towards pre-teens such as Eric Black's book on Bosnia are very helpful in seeking and obtaining an understanding of the region.

But Rezak Hukanovic's book is more than that, it helps one understand the very evils present that was in the Bosnian War, even if in this case, it is mainly that of the prison camps. As he writes in the closing part of the book, after Djemo, the subject of the book (and Rezak himself I believe) finally is freed as a prisoner and makes it back to his hometown with his family "He took a deep breath, wiped the tears from his cheek, raised his head, and clinching his hands in supplication, cried out: `Lord, may you never forgive them!'" We come to feel a lot for Djemo and his fellow prisoners, people we seemingly can empathize with, coming from such backgrounds as being soccer players, singers, businessmen, hairdressers, not criminal backgrounds, not even necessarily being involved in politics either, but being the victim of prejudices and that of the horrible "ethnic cleansing."

Hukanovic's book, is not only cross collaborated by other accounts and descriptions of these camps such as is found in likewise important books on the Balkans such as Ed Vulliamy's "Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War," "Love Thy Neighbor" by Peter Maas and from Court TV's programming and websites, it is also backed up with trials that have taken place in the International Tribunal on War Crimes in Yugoslavia.

Mr. Rezak Hukanovic's account of the concentration "death" camps of Omarska and to a lesser extent Manjaca compare to other accounts of oppressive prison systems such as described in Armando Valladares' "Against All Hope", where he was a prisoner in Cuba for over 20 years under Fidel Castro, I am sure there are others too.

Yes, once again, the book does talk about the indomitable human spirit, but likewise, it is about common men and their families. It is a book about heroes!

I have read books about the holocaust of the Jews and been totally amazed at the depravity of man. However, this book renewed the incredulity which I felt: Bosnians suffered fates equally as horrifying as the Jews in WWII. No one can read this book and not be alarmed at the fact that these concentration camps existed in 1992-1995. One is utterly floored by the atrocities committed against Bosnian Muslims. Not for the faint of heart, this book tells it all.

Journalist Rezak Hukanovic's very short book about his experiences in the captivity of the Serbs is a harrowing reminder of how cruel people can be, even in this day and age when educated people tend to think such inhumanity is behind us. How, in the shadow of the Holocaust, can people convince themselves it's okay to act this way? Hukanovic does not know and does not pretend to know -- he simply reports the facts of his captivity and the monstrous depravities he witnessed and suffered.

The book stumbles into near-banality whenever Hukanovic does anything other than straightforward reporting of the facts. Perhaps this is due to difficulty of translation; perhaps it is just because any philosophical musing or attempts at poetry seem ludicrously flimsy in the face of the events reported. But almost all of the book is simple reporting of true occurrences. Technique is beside the point when the events themselves have the power of a waking nightmare.

There are still people who believe things like what happened to Hukanovic are impossible -- that no one could behave so reprehensibly towards other humans. Those people should read this book. Perhaps the knowledge that this sort of thing was happening in 1992 will awaken them and they will join the ranks of those, like the International Red Cross monitors Hukanovic lauds for mitigating his own plight, who try to ameliorate such horrors rather than ignore them.

In his foreword to this book, attempting to clarify where the tragedies at Omarska and other Serbian concentration camps stand in the canon of human suffering, Elie Wiesel says that "Nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz." When I closed 'The Tenth Circle of Hell' - a third person account, though clearly a memoir of Hukanovic's own experience - I wondered not how, but why, Wiesel would choose to make such a distinction.

In this corner of existence, when "right" and "wrong" become meaningless and survival becomes not so much an act of defiance but a grinding and hopeless routine, there is no grayscale. In this corner of existence, the whole world becomes black, and the suggestion that any one concentration/internment/death camp can be compared to another becomes moot.

In clear-eyed and painful prose, Rezak Hukanovic gives voice to the thousands of interned Muslim and Croat civilians whose lives were destroyed by the next-door neighbors they once knew as friends. Too often, the atrocities detailed in this book become so horrible, so surreally depraved, that Hukanovic is brave simply in his willingness to recount them. How anyone lived through them, and how the rest of the world looked on in such a willfully Orwellian stupor, is an entirely more difficult discussion.

In this slender book, probably the most powerful single document to come out of the Bosnian conflict, Hukanovic makes few attempts at understanding how these horrors happened. The logic in that choice is clear - there is no understanding.

No, nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz. Nor can anything, anywhere, compare to Omarska.

This book was on my highschool reading list, so I picked it up and began reading it immediatly. Hukanovic's tales of the camps he was in were so chilling and gripping, that I read the entire book in one sitting. It had me crying from the very beginning. I had learned very briefly about the war in Bosnia two years ago, but I had never heard about anything like this. I definatly recommend this book to readers - but be aware that this makes for very grim reading. I think it was well worth the grusomness. I learned a lot from this book.

Hukanovic's memoir is a first hand account of the war in Bosnia--focusing mostly on the brutal concentration camps where many Croats and Muslims died. Hukanovic is a journalist from Prijedor who spent six months in two different concentration camps. When written in 1993, it seems that his main goal was to end all doubt that atrocities were being committed necessitating the call for international intervention.

The memoir had two significant omissions used for the purpose historical commentary. First was the omission of the commonly used first person. He stated that this omission was intended partly out of disbelief and partly out of a purposeful detachment to the graphic and sometimes creative atrocities he witnessed. Also, the ethnicity of Hukanovic was mysteriously never mentioned as a way to further emphasizing the unity of the different ethnicities of Bosnia. As a whole, a reader can fuse the accounts in this memoir in order to shed more light on the history of the Bosnian War.

The memoir described the three ethnic groups living in complete harmony before the war that would eventually disrupt this ethnic symbiosis. Hukanovic gave one account of a Serb named Mrdja who was about to kill a Muslim prisoner named Dado. In this account, right before Mrdja pulled the trigger he heard another Serbian soldier yell "not him, please!" This soldier, who was not named, and Dado worked together in a café before the war (104). This story, and many others presented in the memoir, discredits the myth that Balkan conflicts are inevitable ethnic hostilities stemming from a long history of intolerance and hate.

Overall, the book was insightful and written well. Hukanovic has a way with writing making the book enjoyable despite being difficult to hear at times. I would recommend this book to those interested in knowing more about the Bosnian War.

The author Rezak Hukanovic is a Bosnian Muslim living in a small city of Prijedor. As the country Yugoslavia breaks apart, an independent republic Bosnia emerges. The Serbs act on this and take over some cities such as Prijedor. The Serbs round up the Muslim and Croat males and put them in concentration camps. Even though Rezak has some friends who are Serbs and he is apolitical, he is put in the same camp as all the others.
First the Serbs rob them of their possessions. Then they rob them of their humanity. The Serbs torture and execute their victims, even though they knew them in a prior life. Rezak details all these dispictable crimes committed on the Muslims and Croats. Even though humanity stated never again after the killing of the Jews in WWII, Rezak details that most of humanity just stood and watched what happened in Bosnia to the Muslims and Croats. This is a good short read.

Wow, what a read, one of the most horrifying accounts of the truth behind the walls of a DEATH camp. My heart melts for those whom lived to tell of the camps from modern day hell.

Dear Friends, imagine for one minute if you wake up one morning and find out that your childhood friends,your neighbours have turned into beasts and that you're the haunted one. Imagine for one minute that you have been a professor to a stupid student and now this stupid student has your life in his hands; imagine that you have been a judge who convicted a criminal and this very same criminal is a guard of yours and is your judge now!
Imagine the worst hell yet there'll be nothing as scary and terrifying than the memoirs of this remarkable man who has been at one of tens (if not hundreds) of death camps of Bosnia.

Prijedor,may 30 1992, a sunny day. D is having his morning coffee as usual but the unexpected is soon to happen and D is taken away by serb terrorists, once his neighbours and friends.
Soon,D's son, a teenager, and lots of D's cousin and friends join him in the place where they were gathering the peaceful enemies of terror. After they get maltreated in so many ways, the serb terrorists decide to send them to an administrative building in Omarska, in which place thousands join D's fate.
They are to see a living hell with their own eyes, and even though their imagination in regards of their fate was quite rich, the unexpectable kept coming from serb terrorists, the runners of this death camp.
The introduction :

1. The prisoners in the hands of terrorists, are left without food for four days then...

2. Later, when they were fed, they were allowed to eat not longer
than two minutes as they were beaten at the meantime...

3. The serb terrorists, called out the names of prisoners, chose them like if they were soccer balls, and played and kicked them all over without any mercy...

4. The prisoners were so thirsty and the serb terrorists refused to give them water to drink so the solution to this was : ......
(Goodness me)....People wetted their lips with their urine, some even drank it.

5. The serb students (now terrorists) called out the names of prisoner teachers and... The serb convicted criminals called out the names of presidents of justice and judges...then....

6. One of the favorite "game" serb terrorists enjoyed was getting an old man have sexual intercourse with a much younger lady. As a honourable man, he refused but died with dignity. Then the serb terrorists chose two man to bite two other men's genitals and they did...

And so so many horrible stories that will make you shiver just by reading it.
We Albanians have a saying "A human being is as strong as steel yet as weak as glass". In this case, the author of this very important book must be as strong as steel to go through all that hell and still remain a normal person. I mean what would you do, if you were him??? I am terrified at the thought.
Anyways, even though serbs are very familiar to me for the crimes they did in my country Kosova who is safe thanks to U.S.A.
now - I found one more reason to despise them for as long as I live, and I'll make sure my descendants will despise them too forever. I mean, the serbs horrible crimes in Croatia,Bosnia and Kosova, must have made them immortal beasts and they will always remain like that in all our minds. "We will never forget and I hope the world will never forget either" - because what can you really expect from a lifetime neigbour and friend who has the ability to turn into a beast to you in a matter of minutes, and refuses to see you like a neighbour or a friend, let alone a fellow human being like they were supposed to be!