During four years of war in Bosnia, over 100,000 people lost their lives. But it was months, even years, before the mass graves started to yield up their dead and the process of identification, burial and mourning could begin. For many, the waiting, the searching and the suspended grieving still continue. We travel through the ravaged post-war landscape in the company of some of those who survived, as they visit the scenes of their loss: a hall where the clothing of victims is displayed; an underground cave with its pale jumble of bones; a camp for homeless refugees; a city now abandoned to the ghosts of painful memories; a funeral service where a family finally says goodbye. These encounters are snapshots and memorials, capturing a community still flinching from its raw and recent past, not yet able to believe in the possibility of a peaceful future.
Author
Wojciech Tochman
Born in 1969 in Krakow, Wojciech Tochman is an award-winning reporter and writer. With Like Eating A Stone, Tochman became a finalist for the Nike Polish Literary Prize and for the Prix Témoin du Monde, awarded by Radio France International. He set up an organization looking for missing people in Poland. He is also an author of two previous books: One Doesn’t Burn the Stones and Daughter, both published by Znak.
Translator
Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Books
Like Eating a Stone
Ryszard Kapuściński: A Life
The Assassin from Apricot City
Kolyma Diaries
Antonia Lloyd-Jones is a freelance editor and translator. Her translations from Polish include works by Joanna Olczak-Ronikier, Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz and Paweł Huelle, of which the novels Who was David Weiser? and Mercedes-Benz were both short-listed for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award.
Published by
Portobello Books, 2008
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During four years of war in Bosnia, over 100,000 people lost their lives. But it was months, even years, before the mass graves started to yield up their dead and the process of identification, burial and mourning could begin. For many, the waiting, the searching and the suspended grieving still continue. We travel through the ravaged post-war landscape in the company of some of those who survived, as they visit the scenes of their loss: a hall where the clothing of victims is displayed; an underground cave with its pale jumble of bones; a camp for homeless refugees; a city now abandoned to the ghosts of painful memories; a funeral service where a family finally says goodbye. These encounters are snapshots and memorials, capturing a community still flinching from its raw and recent past, not yet able to believe in the possibility of a peaceful future.