Beautiful Souls: The Courage and Conscience of Ordinary People in Extraordinary Times Highlight

Aco’s personal background should, in theory, have made him peculiarly susceptible to the fears that colored the way Serbs began to imagine Croats as the fabric of trust in Yugoslavia unraveled in the early nineties. But before this happened, an intervention occurred. Before his refusal to conform came another act of refusal: his mother’s decision not to bequeath to her son the aggrieved sense of victimhood her story seemed to warrant, and not to encourage him to judge other people by the labels that had cost her own parents their lives.