"Safe Area Goražde" is Joe Sacco's intelligent insight into the hell of what was the cruel Bosnian war

Joe Sacco's journalistic graphic novel, Safe Area Goražde, is a non-fictional account of events that took place in Eastern Bosnia between 1992 and 1995.  During the Bosnian War that unfolded at that time, Goražde was a small town on the Drina river, a place where Serbs, Bosniaks and Croats lived in harmony until the civil war devoured it, along with many of its citizens.  More than just a comic book-styled depiction of its survivors' stories, this is a strong documentation of a Hell-on-Earth, in which men turned on their neighbors, and a genocide of unspeakable evil unraveled, all the while most of the world was convinced that no harm ever came to Goražde.

Consisting of several accounts of Goražde's own citizens, Safe Area follows the testimonies of Edin - a friend of Sacco - as he tells the story of how the occupation of Bosnian Serb Army devastated and destroyed the town he grew up in as the UN forces remained unable to stop the slaughter and the shelling, for the sake of not appearing neutral in front of the international community.  There are also stories by Dr. Alija Begovic and Nurse Sadija Demir.  These two Bosnian medical professionals witnessed first-hand the horror and bloodshed that their own people endured, as they treated thousands of wounded, in many cases having to amputate infected limbs without the use of anesthesia - one of many detriments of carrying out the tasks of saviors in the middle of a fiery purgatory.  

Joe Sacco's artwork is part comical, part pragmatic, but entirely gripping.  The people he spent time and made friends with during his brief stay in Goražde appear tragically humanistic, displaying wide range of emotions, from fear, content, and eventually, relief, while their homes were raided by gunfire and shells as they were still inside them.   The fact that the survivors were able to pick up the pieces of their broken and damaged lives and move on in the aftermath of the war speaks even further about their strength to persevere and try to forget the three-and-a-half-year long living nightmare.  Safe Area Goražde is an authentic and honest testament to the survival and endurance of the human spirit in the most unimaginable of horrors, and as such, it should not be ignored by those who would otherwise find such subjects too depressing and dreary.
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