Bluebird
By Vesna Maric
Granta £12.99, 224 pages
FT Bookshop price: £10.39

Not My Turn to Die
By Savo Heleta
Amacom £16.99 240 pages

My Childhood Under Fire
By Nadja Halilbegovich
Kids Can Press $8.95 120 pages

The Cellist of Sarajevo
By Steven Galloway
Atlantic Books £7.99 288 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

Like Eating a Stone
By Wojciech Tochman
Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Portobello £7.99, 112 pages
FT Bookshop price: £6.39

The Bosnian war killed more than 100,000 people and disrupted the lives of millions. The brutal violence of 1992-1995, often played out before television cameras, left Europeans reeling at the thought that such destruction was still possible in their own backyard. It was as if nothing had been learnt from two world wars and the Holocaust. What hope was there for humanity if a continent that prided itself on its traditions of democracy, human rights and the rule of law could not stop genocide on its own soil?

More than a decade later, the war is slipping into history. With so much else on the global agenda from Iraq to the economic crisis, there is little time for Bosnia. But the territory is far from being at peace with itself. The fragile state created by the 1996 Dayton peace accord struggles to control Bosnia’s simmering ethnic hatreds. Without international administrators, backed by troops, the Serb, Croat and Muslim communities might again resort to violence. The legacy of 1992-1995 lives on.

The first books to record the war were instant histories. Often written by journalists covering the conflict, they combined political analysis with witness reportage. The best have stood the test of time, notably The Death of Yugoslavia by Allan Little and Laura Silber, a former FT correspondent. Later, came volumes from the foreign soldiers and officials involved in trying to stop the violence and to deal with its aftermath, such as Swords and Ploughshares: Building Peace in the 21st Century, by Paddy Ashdown, the British politician who served as postwar Bosnia’s international high representative.

A welter of publications on Iraq and Afghanistan over the past few years has squeezed Bosnia off the bookshelves. But five recent books on Bosnia show just how deep the wounds of war are, how far they extend and how long they fester. Even those who escaped the worst of the conflict see their lives utterly changed.

Two are memoirs by teenage victims of the Bosnian conflict who are looking back on the violence, showing how it altered their lives. The third is a child’s diary from the Sarajevo battlefront. The fourth, is a finely written novel by a Canadian author and the last a powerful piece of reportage by a Polish writer on the grim business of digging up mass graves. Together, these books do not replace the histories and the political analyses but they give a more personal insight into the conflict.

Not My Turn to Die is the memoir of Savo Heleta, an ethnic Serb living in the mainly Muslim town of Gorazde who was 13 when war broke out. Unlike many Gorazde Serbs who flee the town, Heleta’s parents decide to stay – they have Muslim friends, and are well-known and liked in the community.

The enormity of their misjudgment dawns on them as ethnic Serb forces surround Gorazde and shell the inhabitants almost daily. Fear breeds hatred and hatred generates violence, even among people who know each other well. Even the fair-minded struggle to stick to their principles. The rest fall prey to savage prejudice.

Heleta’s matter-of-fact account is sparse. One would like to know more of the older Heleta’s thoughts on his ordeal and on his transformation from war victim to professional conciliator. But this is a powerful book, which shows how difficult it is to make peace after such a conflict, not least peace among neighbours.

War memoirs don’t have to be grim reading. They can even be funny. Among those who watched the war unfold was Vesna Maric, a 16-year-old living in the historic town of Mostar when the fighting started. As she recounts in Bluebird, her lively memoir, Maric’s quick-thinking mother soon arranges for Maric and her elder sister to leave Bosnia. They join a coachload of other Bosnian women and children who are rescued by British charity-workers and brought to the UK.

Maric adjusts pretty well to British life, British rock music and British boys. But a sense of loss remains. Describing her first trip back to Bosnia after the war, she says: “You feel for your old slippers, and as you try to put them on you see your heels won’t fit and that they’re now three sizes too small.” Clearly Maric’s experiences were less traumatic than Heleta’s but the war has still changed her life utterly.

The same is true for Nadja Halilbegovich, a 12-year-old in Sarajevo when the war begins, who decides to keep a diary. Aimed primarily at teenagers, My Childhood under Fire is her brief account of the fighting, which she has translated from its original Bosnian into English. The striking element in her life under siege are the lengths to which Sarajevo’s inhabitants went to maintain what might be seen as life’s inessentials.

In Halilbegovich’s case, these include the city’s Palcici youth choir. In spite of the shelling, the killing and the maiming, despite the difficulties securing daily bread and water, the choir’s children continue to meet and to sing.

Halilbegovich’s diary is a very short account, which should not really be compared with Anne Frank’s diary. However, like Frank’s, Halilbegovich’s comfortable prewar existence is replaced by one in which nothing is certain, not even life itself. “I cannot describe the despair that smothers Sarajevo,” writes Halilbegovich. “Yesterday a neighbour was killed on my street. A bomb exploded right in front of him. His wife ran into the street, crying, screaming and tearing her hair out.”

Like Anne Frank, Halilbegovich and Heleta come from educated middle-class backgrounds. Maric’s prewar family life is blighted by her father’s alcoholism but her parents too are educated and by no means poor by Bosnian standards. All three left Bosnia during or after the war and went on to western schools and universities where they learnt English. All are, therefore, looking at their wartime experiences from a certain physical and psychological distance. This is true even of Halilbegovich’s diary, which is supplemented by autobiographical notes written later. As in previous wars, the educated have a big advantage in getting their stories out, particularly if they know English. The uneducated go unheard.

What can an outsider from far-off Canada, who did not experience the war, bring to our understanding of the Bosnian conflict? In the Cellist of Sarajevo, Steven Galloway examines how war distorts and corrupts almost everything in its path. His fictional account is inspired by the true story of Vedran Smailovic, a renowned local cellist, who marked in a unique way the 1992 shelling of the Vase Miskina market, in which 22 people died and 70 were wounded in the first of three particularly bloody mortar attacks on Sarajevo markets. When he heard the news, Smailovic took his cello to the site and for the next 22 days performed Albinoni’s beautiful Adagio in G Minor daily in honour of the victims.

The cellist is a nameless figure at the heart of the novel. Galloway concentrates instead on three people who go about their daily lives, knowing that the next mortar shell or sniper’s bullet could strike at any time. Kenan, a family man, struggles to cross the city to fetch water; Dragan, a pensioner, agonises over where to cross a road without being shot; and Arrow, a female sniper whose skill leads her to be drawn into the moral quagmire of war. As Galloway writes, quoting Trotsky, “You may not be interested in war but war is interested in you.”

Galloway is a fine writer who pays as much attention to the novel’s structure as to the geography of Sarajevo. But at times there is too much artifice in the narrative, giving the work a slightly detached air. For example, nobody is labelled Muslim, Croat or Serb. The purpose, I suppose, is to suggest that the human tragedy of Sarajevo transcends the mundane realities of ethnic identity. But that is not how the people of Bosnia see themselves in war – everybody has a label and bears it all the time. As Savo Heleta’s memoir shows, the idea that everybody was a Yugoslav vanished in a hail of bullets.

This point is not lost on Wojciech Tochman, a Polish reporter who, after the war ended, followed Bosnian women trying to discover what had happened to their missing husbands, sons and fathers. In Like Eating a Stone, he focuses on the work of Ewa Klonowski, a Polish-born anthropologist, whose macabre job it is to examine mass graves so that the survivors can help identify the dead. These people know exactly who is a Serb, a Muslim or a Croat and can never forget.

The reminders of war are everywhere, and not just in the bones collected by Klonowski. Mejra Dautovic, a 58-year-old Muslim mother, is looking for her daughter, Edna, a beautiful woman in her 20s when she disappeared. Dautovic must accept not only that Edna is almost certainly dead but that her Serbian interrogator and torturer, Nebojsa B, still lives in a nearby town and works for the police. And Nebojsa had once been Edna’s boyfriend.

Tochman doesn’t spare the details. At one point, Jasna Ploskic, a Muslim mother, describes how she and other women are locked in a cellar with their children, with no food or water. An eight-year-old Serb boy peeps through the window and Ploskic asks him to bring water. The boy runs off and comes back. He opens the bottle of water and empties it in full view of the thirsty children.

Tochman makes no comment on the atrocities he records and he lets the witnesses speak for themselves. His work is all the more powerful for leaving the answers to terrible questions hanging. What kind of country can Bosnia be now where a torturer such as Nebojsa B still works for the police?

This is a profound meditation on the horrors of war. These are horrors that are felt not through the brain or even the heart but through the pit of the stomach. A woman describes how she gets up in the morning after yet another restless night and greets her son: “ ‘Same thing again, Mama’, says my son. ‘You were gnashing your teeth in the night again.’

‘Was I crunching again, sorry.’

‘As if you were eating a stone.’ ”

This is reportage of the highest order – reportage that employs the specific to tell a universal truth, that war is always evil, especially civil war. Somehow Tochman’s approach reaches deeper into the heart of darkness than the other books.

Read the memoirs to see how ordinary (middle-class) young people experienced the war. Read The Cellist of Sarajevo to discover what a fine novelist can make of the tragedy. But to peer into the deepest recesses of man’s inhumanity to man, read Like Eating a Stone.

Stefan Wagstyl is the FT’s East European editor