In the mid-1990s, with the war over, Brkic volunteers to go to Bosnia to excavate mass grave sites and try to establish the identities of the bodies buried there. The work is hard and gruesome, emotionally and physically draining, and Brkic is the youngest, least experienced member of her group. Her ability to speak Croatian helps her to record the evidence of survivors and the stories of those looking for loved ones lost for many years.

Working briefly in Serbia Brkic finds herself hiding her identity tags from some Serbian men who have been employed to help excavate bodies; her safety is at risk if they find out her origins. She complains to the authorities that the men helping to excavate the burial sites could quite feasibly have been responsible for putting the bodies there in the first place but the intricacies of the disintegration of Yugoslavia is beyond many of the UN-led administrators.

Brkic writes the chapters about her grandmother like a novel and this approach works well. Andelka married at 16 in order to escape her home life with her four sisters. She endured several miscarriages and babies who died shortly after birth but finally she gave birth to two weak and sickly sons who nevertheless survived. By 19, Andelka's husband had died and she alone was responsible for her sons.

Andelka moved to Sarajevo and carved out a decent life for herself and her children. She met Josef, a Jew, and fell in love. When the Second World War started and the Jews in Yugoslavia were being shipped to concentration camps, Andelka took her own life in her hands by hiding Josef from the authorities. Eventually someone informed on Josef and he was arrested. Andelka too was arrested leaving her two sons, Brkic's father and his young brother, alone to await the fate of their mother.

Andelka was released and reunited with her sons. When the war was over she waited and waited for Josef to return home but he never did. Andelka was heartbroken. As Communism overtook Yugoslavia, Andelka devoted herself to her sons, desperate that they should escape to better lives.

Brkic's account of the excavations in Bosnia and Serbia is harrowing and incredibly sad. It is amazing to realise what cruelty and suffering former neighbours inflicted on each other during the Balkan war. The horrors still scar the land and the people and will not easily be forgotten. This story dovetails nicely with the tale of Andelka and another war where man's inhumanity to man was beyond belief. That such atrocities could have been repeated, and surpassed, in such a beautiful land less than fifty years later is utterly shameful. That the world stood by and let such mass slaughter happen is a crime in itself. Brkic's book is deeply disturbing but essential reading about what happens when we ignore the lesson of the past.

Shirley Whiteside is a Glasgow-based freelance writer who has contributed to The Herald, Herald Magazine, The List and the Scottish Daily Mail. She has also worked as a film/tv publicist on a variety of projects including Orphans, Mrs Brown, The Crow Road, Cardiac Arrest, Takin' Over The Asylum, Small Faces, Ex-S and Bookmark. She is currently working on short screenplays and short stories.

© 2006 Laura Hird All rights reserved.