Adem is fifteen years old, travels standing, uncomfortable on the back of a military truck packed with many other men. The deafening noise forces him to cover his ears. The dust of the road forces him to cough, his eyes burn. He leans against the rusty bulkhead that separates him from the driver in search of a less precarious balance, he doesn’t know where they are taking him, nor what will happen to him. He tries to figure out the destination by peeking through a tear in the truck’s tarpaulin, but the only certain thing is that he is moving further and further away from home. He is terrified, sweaty, dirty, he feels suffocated and the only way to survive is to search his memory for images capable of taking him far away. And it is grandfather Salih’s cherries that come to mind, the reddest ones chosen for himself, the unripe ones given to his cousin, but also the overripe ones, impossible to swallow, transformed into mush to be held in the mouth and spit on sticks use as swords for dueling between children, a war game in which the winner was the one with the fewest red marks on their body at the end of the battle…
The story of Adem (a fictional name chosen by the authors which refers to the primordial man in the Turkish-Arab and Balkan tradition) is the reconstruction of the life of a Bosnian boy who in the summer of 1992 together with other prisoners was captured in the rural communities around to the city of Prijedor along with many other unfortunates. The idea for the book was born after the two authors watched a documentary broadcast in late evening in 2000: the gaze of a terrified teenager never left them and the need to discover his story arose within them. The search for information continued for years, starting from the search for a possible route through the villages of northwestern Bosnia. Step by step, thanks to the testimonies of the survivors, the protagonists of this book were born and the events reworked in the plot are intended to be a (successful) attempt to preserve the memory of stories that still remain nameless and faceless today, “suppressed by the supremacist madness made possible by indifference” as the authors write.
