[In the following review, Drew praises Drakulic's portrayal of the effects of war on the individual in The Balkan Express.]

These powerful essays [in The Balkan Express which are] about the war in the former Yugoslavia … should be required reading for … anyone concerned about the barbarity being practiced in the Balkans. Pictures of life amid “the most horrible thing a human being can experience,” they go beyond the numbing photographs and the political complexities that allow those distant from the conflict to turn the newspaper page.

“A war snaps your life in half,” writes Slavenka Drakulic, a Croatian journalist and novelist who recently has reported on the systematic mass rapes and deliberate impregnations of Muslim women in the name of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia. “Yet you have to go on living as if you are a whole person. But … you are not—and never will be—a whole person again.”

The Balkan Express chronicles the approach, arrival and reality of war from the spring of 1991 until May 1992. It is well known that the communist state kept a lid on centuries-old ethnic animosities. But at the same time, it reinforced the Yugoslav tendency to see World War II as heroic and meaningful, worth more than its million victims, and it discouraged citizens from becoming active, self-aware political beings.

When the Yugoslav state crumbled, it left behind no established democratic institutions to resolve conflicts. “Continuing to live with the same kind of totalitarian governments, ideology and yet untransformed minds,” Drakulic writes, “it seems the people were unable to shoulder the responsibility for what was coming—or to stop it. War therefore came upon us like some sort of natural calamity, like the plague or a flood, inevitable, our destiny.”

In her war-torn land, Drakulic is constantly struck by death in the midst of life: still-wet washing hanging outside a house destroyed by bombs, a roofless house whose exposed bedroom reveals blankets and pillowcases neatly in order, a puppy wandering the charred remains of a village. At a town at the front she is guided by a soldier who must confess to her the precise way in which the war made him a murderer. She listens to her mother's fears that they will tear down her father's gravestone because, though once a communist hero, even a dead member of the Federal Army is an enemy.

As the book progresses, it becomes fiercer, more relentless. In the essay “If I Had a Son,” Drakulic interviews a teenage soldier, imagining he is her son, listening to him tell her he will fight not for an ideal but simply because “they're killing my friends. They're killing them like dogs in the street and then dogs eat them because we can't get to them to bury them. How can I sit here and pretend that none of this is my business?”

Drakulic weaves into these essays her own reactions to the disintegration of her country: first, attempts at denial, then efforts to carry on normal routines, then flight to a peaceful village—but once there, church bells bring to mind the smoldering, broken church towers in some 60 villages in Croatia alone. Even Paris offers no escape: “a glimpse of shop window and then instantly a feeling of futility, remoteness, not belonging.”

Perhaps most profoundly The Balkan Express shows how war erases individuals and reduces all people to a side, a nationality, a group. “Before, I was defined by my education, my job, my ideas, my character—and yes, my nationality too,” Drakulic observes. “Now I feel stripped of all that. I am nobody because I am not a person any more. I am one of 4.5 million Croats.”

Drakulic's collection of pre-war essays about Eastern Europe, How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed, was marked by a guarded optimism and even humor. Those qualities are gone in The Balkan Express because the writer herself has changed, and she knows it. Death has not been the worst that could happen in the war but rather “the separation of self from the body, the numbness of the inner being, extinction before death, pain before pain.”

Once the idea of “otherness” takes hold, the unspeakable is possible, she painfully discovers when analyzing her anger at her daughter for giving their refugee friend Drazena a pair of high-heeled shoes. “The moment I thought Drazena ought not wear make-up or patent high-heeled shoes was the very moment when I myself pushed her into the group ‘refugee’. … [T]hat she disappointed me by trying to keep her face together with her make-up and her life together with a pair of shoes, made me aware of my own collaboration with this war.”

And so Drakulic comes to understand how Polish villagers near Nazi concentration camps got used to the screams from across the field. We are the war, she believes, for we carry within us the germ of the illness that reduces us to savages.

Buyers should ignore the insensitivity of commercial publishing in placing an attractive picture of Drakulic on the front cover, homage to the belief that a pretty woman can sell not only cars but even war. The Balkan Express is about the effects of war on peoples' souls. It is passionate defense of the individual, an important and timely book that deserves the widest possible audience.