THE GRAVEDIGGERS ***SOLD***

Taina Tervonen
(Editions Marchialy, 300 pages, 2021)

***Winner of the 2022 Jan Michalski Prize***

***TRANSLATION SAMPLE AVAILABLE HERE***

Senem works as a forensic anthropologist in Krajina, a region in the northwest of Bosnia-Herzegovina, where she heads a team tasked with identifying the human remains still buried in the mass graves of the Bosnian war. Darija’s role in the mission is to find the living relatives of the missing to collect their DNA. Taina Tervonen, the author of this extraordinary account, is a journalist investigating the ongoing search for the thirty thousand people who are said to have disappeared during the wars. Only when she meets Senem and Darija does she realizes the intense labor, patient dedication, and moral fortitude required to restore dignity to the bodies of the dead and provide solace to the families still waiting for their loved ones.

During several visits over six years, Ternoven follows these two exceptional young women on their quest for the truth, so essential to healing a country traumatized by a war that ended in 1995. With Senem, she witnesses the minute and grueling demands of forensic work, from the locating and digging up of mass graves hidden in the hills and woods, to the painstaking reassembly of bones made ever more difficult by the fact that war criminals have displaced remains in order to cover their crimes. Tervonen observes those who are assisting Senem in what is at once a solemn undertaking and a technically complex task of reconstruction, and she meets women who regularly bring lunches to the forensic team as they unearth bones that could be those of their husbands, brothers, sons, or sons-in-law.

Ternoven accompanies Darija on her investigative tours to collect blood samples and dig into the families’ painful memories, the other facet of a collective mission of reweaving the ties between the living and the dead. Identifying relatives presents a different challenge than sorting through the bones: Some people have moved abroad, some have died, others are trying to forget or prefer to remain silent. As the author observes, the DNA may reveal blood links, but it says nothing of the depth of love, including quarrels and resentments, wounds and reproaches.

Tervonen’s artful narration pays homage to the memorable women we get to know over the course of her courageous investigation, and to their heart-wrenching, and seemingly never-ending, mission. With admirably sober realism, Tervonen’s subtle prose succeeds in evoking difficult scenes that will long linger in the reader’s mind. Attentive yet self-effacing, the author never lets her own feelings and experiences overshadow the unique life stories that she gathers. For, as she writes, she is well aware that “as long as there are people who engage in the work of repairing what has been trampled on and destroyed, something of the humanity of us all is preserved.” 

Born in Finland, raised in Senegal, and now living in France, Taina Tervonen is a documentary filmmaker and an investigative journalist. She received the Louise-Weiss Prize for European Journalism and the International True Story Award for her work retracing the story of an anonymous migrant who drowned in the Mediterranean (Au pays des disparus, Fayard, 2019). Her film based on Senem and Darija’s work in the Balkans, Parler avec les morts, was selected for the 2020 edition of the Cinéma du réel festival.