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The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia
On May 13 1992, the Bosnian civil war finally came to Prijedo, a once-peaceful city where Muslims, Croats and Serbs had lived side by side for centuries. The Serb occupation of Prijedor was an exercise in what the victors called 'ethnic cleansing' whereby the town's Muslim and Croat citizens were rounded up and sent to concentration camps. Among those who lived though the nightmare was the journalist Rewak Hukanovic, whose riveting memoir chronicles the crimes against humanity that were committed by the Bosnian Serbs in the death camps of Omarska and Manjaca. Through the summer and fall of that endless year, Hukanovic and his friends, colleagues, relatives and neighbours were subjected to terror , torture, and grisly death. Through his unbelieving eyes we see the patina of civilization stripped away from aggressor and victim alike, revealing a brutality that calls into question all our notions of human decency.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1993
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Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews
May 3, 2021
Suddenly uprooted from your home due to your race in a war, and moved for your own safety only to be put in one hell of a concentration camp.
The atrocities told by one survivor are horrendous. The story is told from the perspective of the third person as the truth was too horrible to admit to himself as his neighbours got him into this mess.
It is so sad to read about the terrible things that happened in Bosnia during the war in the 1990’s. What’s also sad is trying to understand why anyone would want to inflict such sadness on others just because of their race.
The story was told with much dignity and integrity.
The atrocities told by one survivor are horrendous. The story is told from the perspective of the third person as the truth was too horrible to admit to himself as his neighbours got him into this mess.
It is so sad to read about the terrible things that happened in Bosnia during the war in the 1990’s. What’s also sad is trying to understand why anyone would want to inflict such sadness on others just because of their race.
The story was told with much dignity and integrity.
August 20, 2010
An amazing memoir from a survivor of the Death Camps during the Bosnian. If you don't walk away from this book having shed tears, sick inside and angered at the lack of humanitarianism shown by the West...something's wrong.
June 8, 2019
'The Tenth Circle of Hell' by Rezak Hukanovic is an eye-witness account of life in the death camps of Bosnia, where Serbs locked up Croats and Muslims and subjected them to the most unimaginable atrocities. It was first published in 1993, the year after most of the events that it describes took place and it has since been translated many times into many languages. It’s one of the most shocking books I’ve ever read but one I feel compelled to recommend and advise others to read. We should not forget that things like this happened in Europe, in a place where western Europeans took cheap package summer holidays and where the people killing each other looked like us, ate like us, sang like us, lived in houses like ours and got up in the morning to go to jobs like those we did.
There’s a scene in the film ‘Shooting Dogs’ about the killings in Rwanda where a woman news reporter says she was horrified in Bosnia that the people killing each other looked like her, her parents and her friends. Sadly the same woman then reveals that she’s not horrified by the events in Rwanda, dismissing them as just black people killing each other – so clearly people don’t always learn the lessons we expect them to.
On May 30th 1992 in the town of Prijedor, local people could hear the sounds of gunfire in the distance as the conflict of the Bosnian Civil War crept closer to their city. It was a town in which different ethnic groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslims – had lived together for centuries but it soon became clear that all would change. Neighbours became enemies and the Serb victors rounded up Croat and Muslim men, took them away to camps and set to work on their famous and horrific policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’. One of those men was Rezak Hukanovic, a poet, journalist and radio presenter before his incarceration. 'The Tenth Circle of Hell' is his story and takes it title from Dante’s classic description of Hell as a place with nine circles. The Tenth Circle, we are told, is not in hell but in this world.
The book is told in the third person and Hukanovic is represented by a character called Djemo who is one of the men rounded up by the Serbs and taken to the camps at Omarska and Manjaca. He describes the horrors of the abuse, torture and murder, listing the names of those he knew who ‘never came back’ and those who sat beside him through his experience. The brutality of the blood-thirsty men who beat, kicked, stabbed, mutilated and shot other men for no greater crime than religion and ethnic origin and for no better reason than their own sick enjoyment or to meet the orders of the men they followed is something that will stay with the reader long after this slim volume is finished. There are so many examples I could offer of how shocking this book is, but I don’t want to reveal too much – I’d prefer you read it for yourself. A couple of examples might give you a small insight into what to expect. In one scene, the Serb soldiers refuse to give the prisoners clean water and march them to the banks of a filthy lake to fill their water bottles. One guard stands beside the lake and urinates into the water and laughs as the men fill their bottles. In another, an old man is told he must have sex with a girl captive in front of his captors and his fellow prisoners. When he tells them he won’t do it because she’s young enough to be his granddaughter they laugh at him, asking why she was good enough for all of them but not good enough for the old man. He’s beaten, sent outside and left to die.
The translator of his book explains in a foreword to book that Hukanovic told his story in the third person through the character of Djemo because what he saw and what he lived through was so horrific that he felt as if it must be happening to somebody else. This, I guess, is a technique some people can use in order to deal with the horrors they have lived through. Sadly, it wasn’t happening to someone else and as we read through this book we realise how remarkable it is that Djemo/Hukanovic lived to tell the tale and how important that we as outsiders should read his words and remember what happened to him and those who died in the camps. If the men who killed in Omarska had been given the luxury of a little more time, we can only imagine that perhaps today there would be nobody left to tell us about what happened in these places. On that basis, we owe it to those who didn’t survive to read books like this.
The Tenth Circle of Hell is remarkable for its brevity. My hardback copy stretches to just 164 pages and each of these is generous with the white space around the text. Some writers create small books because they don’t have much to say. Hukanovic’s book is short not through lack of story, but because every page is dipped in pain and must have taken great courage to write. For the reader, it need not be any longer – if you haven’t got the ‘point’ in the first few chapters, then you really don’t need a few hundred more pages to convey the message.
My husband and I agree on most things but one area where we don’t align is on the treatment of war criminals like Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic or John Demyanyuk, the 90-something-year-old Ukrainian who worked in the Nazi death camps. He’s of the opinion that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and other similar setups are just an expensive ‘talking shop’ and that these men are scum-bags who deserve nothing more than a bullet in the head. I agree with his analysis of their characters but think that their day in court is an expensive but necessary part of the process of reminding the world of the atrocities committed and that to skip this stage, does an injustice to the victims of their crimes. It’s all too easy to simply say ‘Past is Past’ and just move on, and in most things, I would agree. However, whilst the families of victims need to have their suffering (and that of the victims themselves) highlighted and recognised, I think they deserve the much debated ‘day in court’. I want the men who told others that killing and torture were fine and patriotic to be faced with what they did and who they did it to.
I am no expert on the Balkan Conflict and am the first to confess that a lot of the war kind of slipped past me when I wasn’t paying attention. When the trouble started, I tried to keep up but soon found it became so incredibly complicated that I was struggling to follow what was going on. I took my eye off the ball and like a complex television drama, I missed a few ‘episodes’ and soon found I couldn’t really understand the intricacies of who hated whom, who was living in the wrong place and who worshipped Jesus and who preferred Allah. There was nothing ‘easy’ about the Balkans for the casual onlooker who hadn’t made a commitment to paying full attention. I’m ashamed of not trying harder and of perhaps falling into the majority of observers who couldn’t quite believe that stuff like that could happen in Europe at the end of the 20th Century.
If you look to the list of 153 men indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia you will find names from all the groups in the conflict – Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Bosniaks, Macedonians and Montenegrans. However it’s very apparent that the vast majority of those named are Serbs (94 out of 153). I’m sure that for all the atrocities reported in this book which were perpetrated by Serbs on Croats and Muslims, there were others carried out in return. I have no intention to say who were the good guys and who the baddies in this terrifyingly complex war, but only to report on this one book by just one man who survived and can deliver in just 164 pages a message we should all read and of which we should take notice.
There’s a scene in the film ‘Shooting Dogs’ about the killings in Rwanda where a woman news reporter says she was horrified in Bosnia that the people killing each other looked like her, her parents and her friends. Sadly the same woman then reveals that she’s not horrified by the events in Rwanda, dismissing them as just black people killing each other – so clearly people don’t always learn the lessons we expect them to.
On May 30th 1992 in the town of Prijedor, local people could hear the sounds of gunfire in the distance as the conflict of the Bosnian Civil War crept closer to their city. It was a town in which different ethnic groups – Serbs, Croats and Muslims – had lived together for centuries but it soon became clear that all would change. Neighbours became enemies and the Serb victors rounded up Croat and Muslim men, took them away to camps and set to work on their famous and horrific policy of ‘Ethnic Cleansing’. One of those men was Rezak Hukanovic, a poet, journalist and radio presenter before his incarceration. 'The Tenth Circle of Hell' is his story and takes it title from Dante’s classic description of Hell as a place with nine circles. The Tenth Circle, we are told, is not in hell but in this world.
The book is told in the third person and Hukanovic is represented by a character called Djemo who is one of the men rounded up by the Serbs and taken to the camps at Omarska and Manjaca. He describes the horrors of the abuse, torture and murder, listing the names of those he knew who ‘never came back’ and those who sat beside him through his experience. The brutality of the blood-thirsty men who beat, kicked, stabbed, mutilated and shot other men for no greater crime than religion and ethnic origin and for no better reason than their own sick enjoyment or to meet the orders of the men they followed is something that will stay with the reader long after this slim volume is finished. There are so many examples I could offer of how shocking this book is, but I don’t want to reveal too much – I’d prefer you read it for yourself. A couple of examples might give you a small insight into what to expect. In one scene, the Serb soldiers refuse to give the prisoners clean water and march them to the banks of a filthy lake to fill their water bottles. One guard stands beside the lake and urinates into the water and laughs as the men fill their bottles. In another, an old man is told he must have sex with a girl captive in front of his captors and his fellow prisoners. When he tells them he won’t do it because she’s young enough to be his granddaughter they laugh at him, asking why she was good enough for all of them but not good enough for the old man. He’s beaten, sent outside and left to die.
The translator of his book explains in a foreword to book that Hukanovic told his story in the third person through the character of Djemo because what he saw and what he lived through was so horrific that he felt as if it must be happening to somebody else. This, I guess, is a technique some people can use in order to deal with the horrors they have lived through. Sadly, it wasn’t happening to someone else and as we read through this book we realise how remarkable it is that Djemo/Hukanovic lived to tell the tale and how important that we as outsiders should read his words and remember what happened to him and those who died in the camps. If the men who killed in Omarska had been given the luxury of a little more time, we can only imagine that perhaps today there would be nobody left to tell us about what happened in these places. On that basis, we owe it to those who didn’t survive to read books like this.
The Tenth Circle of Hell is remarkable for its brevity. My hardback copy stretches to just 164 pages and each of these is generous with the white space around the text. Some writers create small books because they don’t have much to say. Hukanovic’s book is short not through lack of story, but because every page is dipped in pain and must have taken great courage to write. For the reader, it need not be any longer – if you haven’t got the ‘point’ in the first few chapters, then you really don’t need a few hundred more pages to convey the message.
My husband and I agree on most things but one area where we don’t align is on the treatment of war criminals like Ratko Mladic and Radovan Karadzic or John Demyanyuk, the 90-something-year-old Ukrainian who worked in the Nazi death camps. He’s of the opinion that the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia and other similar setups are just an expensive ‘talking shop’ and that these men are scum-bags who deserve nothing more than a bullet in the head. I agree with his analysis of their characters but think that their day in court is an expensive but necessary part of the process of reminding the world of the atrocities committed and that to skip this stage, does an injustice to the victims of their crimes. It’s all too easy to simply say ‘Past is Past’ and just move on, and in most things, I would agree. However, whilst the families of victims need to have their suffering (and that of the victims themselves) highlighted and recognised, I think they deserve the much debated ‘day in court’. I want the men who told others that killing and torture were fine and patriotic to be faced with what they did and who they did it to.
I am no expert on the Balkan Conflict and am the first to confess that a lot of the war kind of slipped past me when I wasn’t paying attention. When the trouble started, I tried to keep up but soon found it became so incredibly complicated that I was struggling to follow what was going on. I took my eye off the ball and like a complex television drama, I missed a few ‘episodes’ and soon found I couldn’t really understand the intricacies of who hated whom, who was living in the wrong place and who worshipped Jesus and who preferred Allah. There was nothing ‘easy’ about the Balkans for the casual onlooker who hadn’t made a commitment to paying full attention. I’m ashamed of not trying harder and of perhaps falling into the majority of observers who couldn’t quite believe that stuff like that could happen in Europe at the end of the 20th Century.
If you look to the list of 153 men indicted by the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia you will find names from all the groups in the conflict – Serbs, Croats, Albanians, Bosniaks, Macedonians and Montenegrans. However it’s very apparent that the vast majority of those named are Serbs (94 out of 153). I’m sure that for all the atrocities reported in this book which were perpetrated by Serbs on Croats and Muslims, there were others carried out in return. I have no intention to say who were the good guys and who the baddies in this terrifyingly complex war, but only to report on this one book by just one man who survived and can deliver in just 164 pages a message we should all read and of which we should take notice.
August 14, 2022
As a testimony, this book is excellent. It provides excruciating detail about the atrocities suffered in this particular place at this particular time, and is careful to mention names whenever possible -- it's impossible to forget that if not for these recollections, these named people might have been entirely forgotten about or remained unknown. It's an important book because testimony like this is always important, and therefore it's worth reading.
Despite this, technically it is not overly impressive. There's a lot of emotion here, but very little context and the writing often seems rushed. I don't know if this is a translation thing, but the sentences are also very simplistic and short, and therefore adopt a rhythm that can be a little grating. I also think that perhaps I'm missing out on the other great strength of the book: looking at the absolutely insane situation that arises from neighbours suddenly turning on one another. This book provides a good look at what that looks like, and for those who haven't experienced it, it's worth reading to get an idea of just how unbelievable that situation can be -- people you worked with and shared coffee with one day suddenly trying to kill you the very next. However, while I haven't experienced this on such a level, I did grow up in a country at civil war myself, so I already understood just how crazy that situation is. It allowed me to empathise with that aspect, but as a lot of the book emphasised the shock and insanity of it, some of the impact was a little lost as it was something I already understood (as much as one can understand these things). For those without this experience, though, I imagine it would pack a punch.
Overall absolutely worth reading, and a brave and necessary testimony. The book is not overly challenging, but it is absolutely devastating, and unflinching in the events it records.
Despite this, technically it is not overly impressive. There's a lot of emotion here, but very little context and the writing often seems rushed. I don't know if this is a translation thing, but the sentences are also very simplistic and short, and therefore adopt a rhythm that can be a little grating. I also think that perhaps I'm missing out on the other great strength of the book: looking at the absolutely insane situation that arises from neighbours suddenly turning on one another. This book provides a good look at what that looks like, and for those who haven't experienced it, it's worth reading to get an idea of just how unbelievable that situation can be -- people you worked with and shared coffee with one day suddenly trying to kill you the very next. However, while I haven't experienced this on such a level, I did grow up in a country at civil war myself, so I already understood just how crazy that situation is. It allowed me to empathise with that aspect, but as a lot of the book emphasised the shock and insanity of it, some of the impact was a little lost as it was something I already understood (as much as one can understand these things). For those without this experience, though, I imagine it would pack a punch.
Overall absolutely worth reading, and a brave and necessary testimony. The book is not overly challenging, but it is absolutely devastating, and unflinching in the events it records.
November 21, 2022
Haunting.
May 17, 2021
In combination with other influences, it was this book that added to my understanding of the devastation that the concentration camps wrought against non-Serbs by Serb nationalists in the early 1990s, which led me to write my own novel (to be out in the fall of 2021). Though told in the third person, it is clearly a memoir from the author, and he pulls no punches. One has to wonder how he survived the torture, especially in Omarska, a brutal camp in Prijedor, Bosnia. it is aa critical read that takes the reader into the destructive nature of persecution.
November 14, 2021
A horrifying deep-dive into the deindividualism it would take to inflict these horrors on another. Once neighbors and brothers, turned executioner and martyred. This recanting of events over the matter of race shows how little the world was ready to open their eyes to the atrocities happening over borders. A good read to get the uncensored story of a surviver.
May 18, 2018
Riveting and absolutely moving.
February 6, 2020
One of the most horrific eye witness stories I’ve ever read. I’m not soft on horror, but with this book I sometimes had difficulties to continue reading...
April 10, 2020
I dont like the fact it is written in the third person when it is a first hand account, other than that it gives a good insight into what atrocities they had to endure during the Bosnian war
March 29, 2021
What is wrong with our world, that people can act this way? And is there any way to stop such evil?
January 24, 2023
the writing is a bit off, but i can only assume that's due to the translation. a very short, but powerful read outlining the serbian nationalist genocide against bosniaks.
March 8, 2007
Didn't really like this.
January 23, 2010
A stark, beautifully written memoir. An interesting choice, to write from the third person.
December 7, 2010
This was a very descriptive memoir about the Bosnian War. It is very graphic and moving. I highly recommend it.
December 8, 2012
This book gives you front row seating to what happened during the Bosnian Genocide war with Serbia in the 90's. I read this book in one day, just couldn't put it down.
July 29, 2014
Chilling. This generation's "Night."
July 17, 2022
Amazing account of the war in Bosnia in the 90s.
July 3, 2012
Tragic and haunting look inside the Bosnian death camps.
September 25, 2012
Harrowing but essential reading about the war in Bosnia. Highly recommended!
November 27, 2013
To this day one of the most haunting and memorable books I have ever read.
Displaying 1 - 21 of 21 reviews