Surviving the Bosnian Genocide

June 20, 2011
In July 1995, the Serbian army murdered about 8,100 Bosnian men and boys in Srebrenicaâa town that had been designated a "safe area" by the U.N. and was ostensibly under the protection of Dutch soldiers. That the Dutchâoutnumbered and unpreparedâdid nothing to stop the killings only added to the survivors' trauma and feelings of abandonment. With sensitivity and compassion, Leydesdorff (We Lived with Dignity) interviews about 50 female survivors of the Srebrenica massacre, many of whom still live in refugee camps, in this valuable oral history. Many of the women still exhibit signs of severe trauma, and though they survived, most have not found a new reason to live; others feel relentless guilt they could not do more to save their families. Exploring the war-torn years from 1992 to 1995 that led to the genocide, Leydesdorff puts her interviews in a broader, scholarly context by relating the women's experiences to survival stories of WWII and to prior research on trauma and rape victims. One of her main conclusions is that too little effort has been made to listen to these women's concerns, which she addresses by giving readers a valuable perspective on these survivors, encouraging them to tell their own stories.