Hi! 

Today I'd like to recommend you a book I've recently got. It's The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning by Ed Vulliamy, a British journalist and writer, who was New York correspondent for The Observer for six years and Rome correspondent from The Guardian. It's a reportage which tells about many aspects of today's situation in Bosnia: about its political condition, about how is the life of the survivors 20 years after the outbreak of the Bosnian War (the book was published in 2012), about the needness of justice and punishment for the war criminals who are, partially, still free, and about a problem which is nowadays omnipresent in any kind of historical debate: the collective memory.

The famous slogan: 'Remembering Srebrenica' has a particular meaning and importance for the author. Although he didn't take part in the Srebrenica investigation, he was one of the journalist who discovered the concentration camps in Omarska and Trnpolje and informed the world about them, which was one of the most important and, at the same time, shocking news after the Second World War. 

But does anybody of you know anything about Omarska? About the details of the Srebrenica massacre, which was actually the biggest genocide in Europe after the Holocaust? About the trial of Ratko Mladić and Radovan Karadžić? If yes, you are in the tiny minority of the Europeans. This is also one of the aspects which Ed Vulliamy comments widely. It's unbelievable that Europe decided to leave unsaid the fact that in the very last years of the 20th century the areas of the Former Yugoslavia experienced such a huge cruelty, despite of the declarations of the leaders of the majority of the European countries who promised that the atrocities of the Second World War would never be back. 

Few days ago I wanted to recommend to one of my friends a documentary about the Srebrenica massacre which I'd watched a day before. He interrupted me after I'd told him what the film was about and asked me: 'Why are you watching this kind of films? What for? Come on, I don't want to know anything about it. How can you sleep calmly after watching it?'. OK, maybe I wouldn't recommend watching 'Shoah' by Claude Lanzmann to everybody (although I think it's the greatest film of our times). But I would rather ask how do you sleep calmly pretending that the Bosnian War never happened? 'Remembering Srebrenica' doesn't refer to the past. Neither to the present. It refers to the future - we have to remember that only two decades, only two-hours flight from Paris separate us from the biggest drama of the second half of the 20th century, which is still going on. We have to remember it so we won't let it happen again.

And one more thing. In the Polish preface to The War is Dead, Long Live the War: Bosnia: the Reckoning Ed Vulliamy wonders why the Polish translation of the book is the first one in Europe, even though Polish people don't seem to be very interested in this part of history. 

Think about it. And then - read it.