Not My Turn to Die

Not My Turn to Die: Memoirs of a Broken Childhood in Bosnia ($22.00, Amacom) addresses a greater theme of the brutal ethnic war between Muslims and the Eastern Orthodox Christian Serbs that followed the breakup of Yugoslavia. In 1992, when Savo Heleta was just 13 years of age, his world fell apart too when the ethnic fighting raging all over Bosnia arrived at Gorazde, his home.  

Despite friendships with Muslim boys, neighbors soon became enemies willing to fight and kill each other. What followed was a two-year nightmare of living with terror, starvation, and humiliation. This is his story as he went from seeking revenge to being an activist for reconciliation. Told in vivid, unflinching detail. As Serbs, he and his family discovered just how intolerant and brutal Muslims could be in the name of Islam. How he survived is a miracle.

Despite his desire for reconciliation, the book is a warning to those who believe one can be anything other than a second-class citizen, an infidel, when the chips are down. This is a hard book to read if only for the way it tells once again an all too common story of inhumanity.

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