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

It was places like Jasenovac that led some observers to attribute the destruction of Yugoslavia to so-called ancient ethnic hatreds: the long history of fratricidal violence that erupted every couple of generations and made the country’s bloody disintegration unavoidable. The theory was crude and deterministic, ignoring the fact that, for fifty years, the region’s various ethnic groups had managed to coexist peacefully, even if it was under a repressive authoritarian system.