In our recent classes, we learned about Joe Sacco’s work Safe Area Gorazde, which records stories that interviewed by the author during the Bosnian War. As a comic book, Safe Area Gorazde does not like other comic books we usually have that provide the readers with entertainment, but documents the experience of people in Gorazde and catastrophic trauma that left on this land during the Bosnian War.
War is always a cruel thing to talk about. Before learning this book, I am not really familiar with this part of history. Reading Safe Area Gorazde is the first time I get a chance to study the history of Bosnian war in such a detail. Joe Sacco, as a journalist, uses his own style, which was concluded as realistic and not abstract in my group’s discussion in class, records all the stories that were told by those victims and what he saw in Gorazde. For some extent, his style of portraying makes me feel a little bit scare. While reading the chapters like Around Gorazde(109) and Death and Deliverance(196), I felt so hard to keep on it. In Around Gorazde, the repetition of unimaginable massacre is the one of the reasons that stopped me from reading. I see people were taken away again, and they were killed in the same way and thrown into the river again and again. It is so unbelievable that such brutal killing happened for so many times.
Another thing that shocked me is in the chapter Death and Deliverance. On page 203, I see people with their eyes covered were shot by the Serbs, then they fell and died in the gully. That’s exactly the same as what I saw in The Memorial Hall of The Victims in Nan Jing Massacre by Japanese Invaders. People were shot by the soldiers or buried with soil even when they were still alive. Those kind of brutal events have already taken place several years ago in World War 2. Everyone feels inconceivable about those from happening, and the criminal ones apologize to their action after doing so, but the history repeats again and again. It is just as ironic as the fact that people know war is bad, but wars take place all the time.
