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

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During the Bosnian war there were many concentration caps set up where prisoners were tortured. One of them was called Omarska. In his memoir The Tenth Circle of Hell, Rezak Hukanovic-a Muslim who was a journalist in Prijedor before he was taken to Omarska describes how guards responded when a prisoner rejected the order to strip and stood immobile amid the cowering naked inmates:

The guard...fired several shots in the air. The man stood stubbornly in place without making the slightest movement. While bluish smoke still rose from the rifle barrel, the guard struck the clothed man in the middle of the head with the rifle butt, once and then again, until the man fell. Then the guard...moved his hand to his belt. A knife flashed in his hand, a long army knife.

He bent down, grabbing hold of the poor guy's hair.... Another guard joined in, continuously cursing. He, too, had a flashing knife in his hand.... The guards [used] them to tear away the man's clothes. After only a few seconds, they stood up, their own clothes covered with blood....

...The poor man stood up a little, or rather tried to, letting out excruciating screams. He was covered with blood. One guard took a water hose from a nearby hydrant and directed a strong jet at [him]. A mixture of blood and water flowed down his...gaunt, naked body as he bent down repeatedly, like a wounded Cyclops...; his cries were of someone driven to insanity by pain. And then Djemo and everyone else saw clearly what had happened: the guards had cut off the man's sexual organ and half of his behind.

The torture in Bosnian camps was very personalized. The guards would call the inmates by name and escort them to the beatings. Most deaths in Bosnian camps were caused by sever beatings.  Beatings usually took place in rooms or buildings set up for just that purpose. In Omarska, the prisoners called such building "White House".

As Hukanovic makes clear in his account of the first time his name was called out, this torture is exceedingly, undeniably intimate-not simply because force is administered by hand but also because it comes very often from someone you know:

"In front of me," the [bearded, red-faced] guard ordered, pointing to the White House.... He ranted and raved, cursing and occasionally pounding Djemo on the back with his truncheon....

...The next second, something heavy was let loose from above, from the sky, and knocked Djemo over the head. He fell.

...Half conscious, sensing that he had to fight to survive, he wiped the blood from his eyes and forehead and raised his head. He saw four creatures, completely drunk, like a pack of starving wolves, with clubs in their hands and unadorned hatred in their eyes. Among them was the frenzied leader, Zoran Zigic, the infamous Ziga.... He was said to have killed over two hundred people, including many children, in the "cleansing" operations around Prijedor.... Scrawny and long-legged, with a big black scar on his face, Ziga seemed like an ancient devil come to visit a time as cruel as his own....

"Now then, let me show you how Ziga does it," he said, ordering Djemo to kneel down in the corner by the radiator, "on all fours, just like a dog." The maniac grinned. Djemo knelt down and leaned forward on his hands, feeling humiliated and as helpless as a newborn....

Ziga began hitting Hukanovic on his back and head with a club that had a metal ball on the end. Hukanovic curled up trying to protect his head. Zigic kept hitting him, steadily, methodically, cursing all the while.

The drops of blood on the tiles under Djemo's head [became] denser and denser until they formed a thick, dark red puddle. Ziga kept at it; he stopped only every now and then...to fan himself, waving his shirt tail in front of his contorted face.

At some point a man in fatigues appeared.... It was Saponja, a member of the famous Bosna-montaza soccer club from Prijedor; Djemo had once known him quite well.... "Well, well, my old pal Djemo. While I was fighting..., you were pouring down the cold ones in Prijedor." He kicked Djemo right in the face with his combat boot. Then he kicked him again in the chest, so badly that Djemo felt like his ribs had been shattered...Ziga laughed like a maniac...and started hitting Djemo again with his weird club....

Djemo received another, even stronger kick to the face. He clutched himself in pain, bent a little to one side, and collapsed, his head sinking into the now-sizable pool of blood beneath him. Ziga grabbed him by the hair...and looked into Djemo's completely disfigured face: "Get up, you scum...."

Then Ziga and the other guards forced Djemo to smear his bloody face in a filthy puddle of water.

..."The boys have been eating strawberries and got themselves a little red," said Ziga, laughing like a madman.... Another prisoner, Slavko Ecimovic,...was kneeling, all curled up, by the radiator. When he lifted his head, where his face should have been was nothing but the bloody, spongy tissue under the skin that had just been ripped off.

Instead of eyes, two hollow sockets were filled with black, coagulated blood. "You'll all end up like this, you and your families," Ziga said. "We killed his father and mother. And his wife. We'll get his kids. And yours, we'll kill you all." And with a wide swing of his leg, he kicked Djemo right in the face....

The Tenth Circle of Hell: A Memoir of Life in the Death Camps of Bosnia
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In The Tenth Circle of Hell, Rezak Hukanovic takes us inside the Bosnian prison camps to document the hell of war in the former Yugoslavia. Although he writes in the third person, Hukanovic's knowledge of the camps is firsthand; a radio announcer and journalist, he was taken from his home at gunpoint and placed in the Omarska and Manjaca camps, places where people were beaten solely because of their ethnic background. What's so chilling about this book is not only the brutality of the camps, but also that such a situation occurred so very recently.

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