Hard to comprehend.
Easy to understand.
The sky above Srebrenica demonstrates what’s possible. Mountains of clouds push themselves in front of brilliant blue, delicate tatters of fog condense to shades of grey and overlap into a sea of shapes. Rays of sun pierce the lead-grey sky and hit the ground, it´s starting to rain – all of a sudden only a few drops are left, to be blown away by the upcoming winds.

Gravestones pierce the ground from below – like thorns. Angled marble boards form half a circle roughly 330 feet in circumference. Written in stone are 8,372 names – names of identified victims of genocide. Tragedies abstracted to numbers and letters. And there is room for more names – the ones yet to be found, or identified. It’s hard to comprehend what has happened here.

A group of 20 women have gathered under a tree on the hillside to pray. When their prayer is finished one of them stands on the path between the gravestones, her head veiled by a shawl. The woman starts to shiver, to wail and finally to cry so bitterly that none of us will ever forget that moment.
This is the place where small Bosnia becomes a worldwide topic – because no matter who massacred whom and gave the command to murder an entire ethnic group or tolerated that command  or executed it – Srebrenica is the exact place where we easily understand what being a human means; and look straight into the eye of a hard fact: what we are capable of.
– Axel Rabenstein, text
– Thomas Bönig, images
Learn more about Thomas’ project on his website, YouTube and Facebook page.