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4 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Good book ruined by the editor's bias and dodgy translation, 16 Jun 2004
Proceed with caution...The story of the original writer's experience is quite well told by him, but the "explanatory" "historical" footnotes, afterword and captions to the photos which the (American) editor has included are hopelessly inaccurate and biased and do no one any favours, least of all those who were in Jasenovac. The photographs themselves have been the subject of heated debate for years.... They sit very uneasily alongside the true experiences of Ilija Ivanovic and even border on contradicting them. I'm sure that 99.99% of Bosnian Muslims would not agree that they are some kind of lapsed part of the Serbian nation (just as they were not the lapsed Croats which the Pavelic regime wishes to make them), for example, and while Mr Ivanovic mentions people of all ethnic and religious groups who fought against fascism or who helped him, the editor attempts to talk up the Serbian role to the detriment of all others. The differences (or not) betwen the Serbian and Croatian languages are also cause for controversy, but to state simply that they are one and the same is just over-simplification again. Chetnik collaboration is barely mentioned by the editor, of course. Pathetic generalisations don't help anyone and do nothing to break down ethnic hatred. On a more literary level, the translation is apparently by a teenage girl and could have been greatly improved by some polishing by a native speaker of English. Ivanovic is from a simple rural background and so we cannot expect the style of writing to be on a level such as primo Levi's, but that's just a minor point. Read it, digest it and disregard anything not written by Ivanovic. The editor is as fanatically pro-Serb as the Ustasha movement was anti.
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