Burdened with noble goals, five young Frenchmen embark on a journey to deliver humanitarian aid to the Kakani region in Bosnia, during the period of civil war, but what began as a dangerous humanitarian mission on a bumpy road in the snow and cold, took a different path that made all their assumptions subject to question and skepticism. What's really in the boxes? Where are they going? What awaits them there on the other end? In addition to having to cross real checkpoints, they will also face more difficult intellectual barriers. What do the victims really need: survival or victory? What must be found: the animal survival instinct that requires only food and housing, or the human sense of dignity that requires means of resistance?
In an interesting and well-paced plot, the French writer Jean-Christophe Ruffin raises very profound questions about humanitarian work: its feasibility, its motives, and how to be truly humanitarian to the fullest extent. These are questions that the novel's characters keep asking themselves, and to each other, throughout a dangerous journey that may change their convictions, and perhaps their destinies, forever.
Twenty years have passed since the end of World War II. A foreign man returns to the German city of Dresden to visit a friend. But instead of his friend, he meets a twenty-year-old girl who works in a new hotel, and a long night-time conversation takes place between a man who spent the last two years of the war in that city, and survived the devastating bombing and Nazi concentration camps, recalling all the pain and tragedies he experienced, and a girl from the next generation. The war, whose horrors he did not know or experienced, is trying to live with a legacy burdened by the crimes and atrocities of his fathers.
"I can't help you, my little love. It's your fight and you have to fight it alone. No one's going to help you, not even me."
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