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We don’t get to learn her name - As If I Am Not There is the original title, and it is true. Throughout the story she remains just S., the lack of name fitting the dehumanization in the brutality of the war in the 1992 Bosnia - a recent war, just three decades ago now, a senseless war with neighbor turning against neighbor, so surreal and and coldly brutal.

“Her picture of reality is shattering, as if the television screen had exploded that day and the war had simply spilled into her apartment. Now she herself is caught up in this rushing torrent. If she wants to survive, she will have to obey those who have the weapons. Her life, like her death, is no longer a matter of choice.��

Her crime - the one that earned her the sentence in the camp, brutal treatment, torture, rape - was simple. Wrong ethnicity. That’s enough to make you the “other��, subhuman, a thing.

“The moment the armed men appeared in their village, each one of them had ceased to be a person. Now they are even less so, they have been reduced to a collection of similar beings of the female gender, of the same blood. Blood alone is important, the right blood of the soldiers versus the wrong blood of the women.��

This is a horrifying book, and yet never gratuitous, never becoming focused on depravity and violence for the sake of shock. More than anything, it’s somber in its almost detached narration through the eyes of a woman who sees her reality become something unreal, something that should not be happening in a world that purports to be sane. "Is it good to remember or is it easier to survive if you forget you ever lived a normal life?"

"Perhaps that happens to people in wartime, words suddenly become superfluous because they can no longer express reality. Reality escapes the words we know, and we simply lack new words to encapsulate this new experience."

What is it about people that allows them to commit dehumanizing atrocities to others? To blindly follow orders and not stopping even when those on the other side are neighbors, friends, little sisters of childhood friends? To go to lengths to inflict pain and torture on others? To willingly and gleefully become monsters?

"Only now does S. understand that a woman's body never really belongs to the woman. It belongs to others—to the man, the children, the family. And in wartime to soldiers."

"Now, however, she sees that for her war began the moment others started dividing and labelling her, when nobody asked her anything any more."

For women in this book - a young teacher S. and peasant women around her in the camp - the war takes a path familiar over millenia for women. The weapons of war for them end up being violence, subjugation, brutal rape, the voiced intent to force the women to bear the offspring of the enemy, and murder at the whim of the soldiers. These women are things to be used and discarded when broken.

"In the meantime, her life has become something different, unrecognizable. Or perhaps unimaginable. Lying in her hospital bed in Stockholm she still does not know what to call it, although she knows that the word is: war. But for her, war is merely a general term, a collective noun for so many individual stories. War is every individual, it is what happened to that individual, how it happened to that individual, how it happened, how it changed that person's life. For her, war is this child she had to give birth to."

It’s a difficult book to read. And even the rescue from the camp does not end the horror for S. Now she is living the life of a refugee, carrying a child of her rapists, and faced with people in her new country who do not - cannot - understand what she has been through, who are barely aware that a war rages on not that far away from their safe haven. How can you recover yourself from the horror you’ve been through? How do you even know whether there’s even “you�� left in there? “How can you talk about war when you know that the person you are talking to cannot even conceive of such horror?��

“That was the only time she heard the women talk about rape. They did not talk about it later, they did not mention it again. If word got around that they had been defiled they would not be able to go back home to their villages, their husbands or parents. So they hold their tongues, they really believe they will go back home, S. thinks to herself.��

Drakulić in her narration manages to achieve both the uncomfortable intimacy of seeing through the horror as it is happening and still keeping a bit of a dissociative-like distance, conveying the numbness resulting from being part of something so atrocious that it verges on surreal. It’s that illusory distance that allows S. to bear what is happening to her and around her, and yet reminds you of how fragile our defenses actually are. And any little bit of kindness that manages to survive in the horror of war is like a stab to the heart.

Devastating.