The Fiery Mary od Livno

“This is a book of mass testimony, a powerful indictment of genocide from half a century ago. An indictment but not a trial… Not much has been written about the genocide against the Serbian people in the last war. Especially about the crimes in the Livno region…

It is precisely this gap in our journalism, and even our science, that Budo Simonović fills to a large extent with his exceptional work “The Fiery Mary of Livno”… He approached this complex matter with great responsibility and, it seems to me, managed to preserve from oblivion many circumstances and events surrounding this most monstrous crime in our history…

Nevertheless, at the right time, perhaps at the right hour, we received a long-awaited book about a crime that must not be forgotten…”

“In the summer of 1990, Budo Simonović learned about the fate of Stana Lalić, one of the surviving Serbian women thrown into the Ravni Dolac pit in 1941, and as a reporter for “Ilustrovana Politika” he set off for the village of Čelebić, at the foot of Golija, to write a story about Stana. At that time, the author had no idea that this was only the first written page of a future book that would open a tragic page in Serbian history. Stana told him, among other things, that besides her, thirteen other people had survived in the pit on Dinara, ten of whom were still alive that year. For the next 15 months, Budo Simonović wrote down the stories of all the survivors from that pit, as well as many other survivors and direct witnesses from nearly twenty Ustasha execution sites in the Livno area. Thus, a shocking book about evil was created, complete with irrefutable and irrefutable evidence that had been concealed for half a century.”

“What is characteristic of this work, especially its first part, is the presence of a journalistic manner, of a kind of interviews. The author, in fact, used the statements of numerous witnesses, more precisely the statements of victims who, by some strange coincidence, remained alive, although massacred, wounded, many tied with wire, but still alive, and who were later taken out of the pit. The time that many spent in that hell, in Dante’s ninth circle, borders on the unbelievable. Because, spending 45 days in a pit, without food, without water, in the cold and in pain, truly borders on fantasy. These sufferers served the author as narrators, as tellers of all the suffering they experienced in the pit. These are the darkest and most terrifying scenes in the work. There are few works in our literature, if any, that can be compared to these scenes…”