Beseiged
Life Under Fire on a Sarajevo Street
Barbara Demick
Having read it
★★★★☆
A seriously good document of stories about experiencing the many hardships involved in living through war in Sarajevo and all told with simplicity, directness and humanity.
A good passage
The brewery shelling left eight dead twenty wounded. Sarajevo’s daily newspaper Oslobođjenje branded the day ‘Black Friday’. It was not the first bloodbath in Sarajevo. Twenty people had been killed the previous 27 May [1992] on the Vase Miskina pedestrian mall as they queued for bread. Many Sarajevans described the horror of the breadline massacre as the moment they were forced to reckon with the reality of war.
A second good passage
Sarajevans were fed up with politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, relief agencies – indeed with everybody who had promised to help, then failed to deliver.