10/10/1992 | Voices from the Drina

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With every passing day, week and month I feel more like an animal and less like a human being. Hunger and the self-preservation instinct has made me become someone else, something else

Srebrenica’s hospital is a living hell. A 🧵

I hear the most awful, bloodcurdling screams when passing by the hospital. Each time it happens I speed up, but the screams can be heard from a long way away. Even basic medical equipment and supplies are lacking.

Surgeons are having to cut through flesh with a scalpel and then cut through bone with a handsaw. Amputations are being performed without anaesthesia; patients are sometimes given schnapps instead, if their relatives can get hold of it.

This in itself is dangerous because alcohol thins the blood. The hospital is surrounded by row upon row of washing lines where bandages are hung out to dry. The bandages, used and reused and washed over and over again, form a yellowish wall around the hospital.

Inside the hospital everything smells of pus. It smells of pus, sweat and faeces. It smells of corpses, too, for sometimes there are dozens in the hospital morgue.

The nauseating stench spreads well beyond the building, and for all those who are not used to it, vomiting comes quite naturally. The stench of death is overwhelming.