Recommended Books and Film

The Cellist of Sarajevo tells the stories of four men and women trying to survive in Sarajevo during the siege. After witnessing a group of people killed by mortar shells while waiting in line for bread, one man decides to play his cello at the site of their deaths for 22 days. Another woman - a sniper - is tasked with protecting the cellist from sniper fire while he plays. This book, which was inspired by true events, gives the reader a sense of daily life during the conflict and how maintaining normalcy in the face of chaos and terror is not only a way to survive but also to resist. 

Bosnia’s Million Bones details how the International Commission on Missing Persons developed the technology and processes to exhume mass graves and identify the remains of the victims of the Srebrenica massacre. These efforts were crucial to building the criminal case against the perpetrators and to bringing closure to the victims’ families. This technology has since been used around the world to identify victims of conflict and natural disasters. This book is real-life CSI on a massive scale. 

Ironic and tragic, No Man’s Land depicts the absurdity of war through the story of a Bosnian Serb and a Bosnian Croat who end up stuck in the same trench together. It explores the futility of the international community’s involvement and war reporters who treated the conflict as a spectacle. 

No Man’s Land won an Oscar for best foreign film.

The Trigger tells the true story of Gavrilo Princip who assassinated Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo and set off the events that led to WWI. The author walks in Princip’s footsteps through Bosnia, tracing his family roots, and ultimately ending in Sarajevo. The books focuses on the history of ethnic identity in Bosnia, how nationalism influenced Princip’s actions, and then relates it all to the 1990s conflict, during which the author was a war reporter. This book reads like a novel and is as exciting as a crime documentary. 

The United Nations International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia created a series of documentary films about its prosecution of certain crimes. These films detail the impact the court has had on the development on international criminal law, the successes and challenges of prosecution, and the collection of evidence to create a record of what happened during the conflict. The videos can be accessed through the court’s website.