Sarajevo Roses: War memoir of a peacekeeper - Anné Marié Du Preez Bezdrob

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"The symbol of my superstition was the symbol of Sarajevo's terror: the crater left by an exploded mortar or artillery shell. Sarajevans, with their unique sense of the ironic, named these ???Sarajevo roses???. There was one outside the entrance to my apartment building and another on the pedestrian bridge I crossed daily. I meticulously made a point of treading on each of them on my way to work and back, wanting to believe this would protect me from the deadly path of a shell or sniper bullet." For two years, in the midst of the conflict in Bosnia, Ann?? Mari?? du Preez Bezdrob was a United Nations peacekeeper in the besieged city of Sarajevo. As a resident of the city, she was no partial observer, but became passionately involved in individual lives, sharing the Sarajevans??? terrors and hard-won joys. Calling the mortar scars ???roses??? is symbolic of how Sarajevans faced the horror and privation of the war in Bosnia - with extraordinary courage, inventiveness and wry humor. As her story unfolds, we sense this same irrepressible spirit in the author herself