cover image The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia

The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia

Rezak Hukanovic. Basic Books, $20 (163pp) ISBN 978-0-465-08408-1

The horrors undergone by narrator Djemo (actually journalist Hukanovic, who inexplicably chooses to write in the third person here), a Muslim resident of Prijedor, in the death camps of Omarska and Manjaca, where Serbians carried out part of their ""ethnic cleansing"" of Bosnia, make for harrowing reading. But the sadism was the more unbearable for the victims, he writes, because it came at the hands of those they knew, people with whom they had worked and played soccer, drunk at neighborhood bars and in wedding parties. Even more depressing to Hukanovic was the realization that the torturers and murderers enjoyed their work. After almost a year, Hukanovic was released, went to Norway and now is headquartered in Germany. He sums up his experiences thus: ""Oh Lord, may you never forgive them!"" (Oct.)