Цитаты из книг — Славенка Дракулич

Our children believed that we, their parents, would sort out the political mess. But we did not. When the war broke out, they did not understand that they, born in the late sixties or early seventies, were expected to fight in it. But who else could? This was a paradox: this generation, in a way, had to fight the war of…

But what exactly happened in his mind before that, before Jelisić raised his arm and fired the bullet that decided not only the future of the prisoner in the photo but his own as well? For after that shot, there was no way back for Jelisić. On that day in May, he started out on a road that six years later brought him to…

We grew up with many such images, gathered from movies, literature, and family stories. On the one hand we had memory, but on the other hand we had our history textbooks, which shaped history to suit the Communist Party ideology. It was not that we were sheltered from the past; on the contrary, we may have had too much of…

One can hardly defend oneself against such propaganda if there is no common history that everybody can believe in. Under the pressure of emotions, a thin layer of rationality easily falls away. The history that we learned—which was not in fact history—made it easier for us to abandon reason in favor of pure emotions.

For my generation, living in a Communist country, jeans were a product of the Western bourgeois society and a sign of decadence; my father would never have allowed me to wear them. But communism meant little to my daughter’s generation, and Tito even less. They were young children when he died in 1980 and hardly remembered…

More likely, the war itself turned ordinary men—a driver, a waiter, and a salesman, the three accused were—into criminals because of opportunism, fear, and, not least, belief. Hundreds of thousands had to have believed that they were right in what they were doing. Otherwise, such large numbers of rapes and murders simply…

S. does not condemn the woman. She learned in the camp that people are weak and that it is not good for them to be confronted with temptation. The tiny dead body in the black head-scarf is the saddest sight S. can remember. That cold night in the ruins of the house, the image enters her dream and she knows that she will…

He was a good and loyal friend. In the late eighties he did not take Serbian nationalism seriously. He did not pay much attention to the idea that Serbs should all live in one state, and, anyway, politics was for politicians. It had nothing to do with his life, with his friends and fishing. But he turned out to be wrong.

Public opinion is not an abstract concept. It is about us, what we the citizens of Croatia stand for. The failure of public opinion is therefore our failure. We did not react; we have nobody but ourselves to blame. Our personal paranoia, petty theft, and sealed lips all contributed to the bomb that killed Levar.

The task of propaganda is to shape this difference so that it creates a feeling that there is a threat from the other side and strengthens the urge for homogenization. Most important is the method of introducing hatred: it is most effective if people get used to it slowly, step by step, until they have absorbed it into…

When I see Karremans standing there in front of Mladić, so frightened that he is probably thinking, this is it, this is my end, I understand that he could not have defended anybody, not even himself. It is clear that Karremans will obey Mladić, whatever he demands. Karremans is defeated, the UN troops are defeated,…

There were many other men in Bosnia doing even worse things to women. Why them, why were only the three of them being so severely punished? Looking at these three men, I could tell that they would serve their sentences regretting only that they were stupid enough to be caught or tricked into surrendering.

In a way, the children of the late sixties are the first “normal” generation. Their grandparents fought in World War II. Their parents grew up in poverty. They grew up in a time of security and abundance. I had to eat all the food on the plate, but my daughter did not. War for them was something they learned about in…

We tend to believe that good-looking people are good, as we tend to see ugly people as mean. It doesn’t have much to do with reality, of course. But I had never seen such a compellingly naïve, boyish face belonging to a killer, and I must say that I was overcome with surprise.

Yet it was not so long ago that his name was a synonym for fear to thousands of Muslims in Bosnia, so powerful was this man. Mladić was the person who kept Sarajevo besieged for three years, a city where he had a house and where his mother and his friends used to live, a city that he knew well. Twelve thousand people were…

There is an air of tragedy about this couple. They have not met with the same violent end as the Ceausescus, but they suffer from the same affliction. They have no conception of the idea that people have to pay for their deeds in one way or another. They refuse—or are perhaps unable—to understand why all this is happening…

Milošević and Mira’s world is far removed from the outside world and impervious to reality. The Serbian journalist Slavoljub Djukić, in his biography entitled On, ona i mi (Him, Her and Us), writes that for Milošević and his wife “reality has no importance at all.” Because they had power, they created their own reality;…

She was Milošević’s main, if not his only, political adviser. For a man who liked to decide everything single-handedly, as if state institutions did not exist, he depended heavily on her opinions. His biographers agree that she had such a hold on her husband that some of his political opponents used to whisper that he was…

But written by Slobodan Milošević’s wife, such words are sheer cynicism because she deliberately chooses not to acknowledge her husband’s role in what she calls “bloody orgies.” This was the time when Sarajevo was still under the siege and snipers were killing people lining up for water or bread.

Mira and Slobodan are completely devoted to each other and to their children, and nobody outside their little autistic haven can touch or move them. Only she could turn this cold, calculating man into a caring and tender person.