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You can live comfortably with the details once they have acquired academic relevance. (Krog, , p. 112)
Minja1 is 57 years old though she looks far older. She is a stout woman now, but in 1993 when she was released from the concentration camp she weighed barely 70 pounds. As the Bosnian Serb military attacked their town, Minja, her husband and their three children took refuge in the surrounding snow-covered woods. Soon after, she became separated from her husband and teen-aged son. Minja, her 12-year-old daughter and another son, he three years old, remained in the woods along with other women, children and old men from their town who also tried to hide from the attacking Serb forces. The snow provided little cover however. Many were killed during the firefight that night and the next, including the mother of the two young boys whom Minja grabbed to shelter along with her own children. It was not long before the Serbs captured Minja along with many of the others. They were taken to a women's prison. When she names the place she shivers and momentarily gasps for breath. It was there that nightly she was gang raped by soldiers, beaten with rifle butts and the steel-toed boots of her captors, and starved.
One night after being raped by four, five, maybe more men, she does not remember how many, and while she was being led back to her cell, the commander of the prison, pulled her by the hair, and sneering darkly into her face said: “Tell anyone and I will find you in five countries.” In fierce defiance of his threats made several years before, Minja told me her story of surviving, being found by a cousin in Western Europe who united her with her husband and son after four years. She testified before the International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia in The Hague, insisting to me that she had not been afraid to be in the courtroom with her attacker, nor to answer the questions of the lawyers and justices.
The assertion of her fearlessness is part of her defiance o