Journalist Rezak Hukanovic's very short book about his experiences in the captivity of the Serbs is a harrowing reminder of how cruel people can be, even in this day and age when educated people tend to think such inhumanity is behind us. How, in the shadow of the Holocaust, can people convince themselves it's okay to act this way? Hukanovic does not know and does not pretend to know -- he simply reports the facts of his captivity and the monstrous depravities he witnessed and suffered.

The book stumbles into near-banality whenever Hukanovic does anything other than straightforward reporting of the facts. Perhaps this is due to difficulty of translation; perhaps it is just because any philosophical musing or attempts at poetry seem ludicrously flimsy in the face of the events reported. But almost all of the book is simple reporting of true occurrences. Technique is beside the point when the events themselves have the power of a waking nightmare.

There are still people who believe things like what happened to Hukanovic are impossible -- that no one could behave so reprehensibly towards other humans. Those people should read this book. Perhaps the knowledge that this sort of thing was happening in 1992 will awaken them and they will join the ranks of those, like the International Red Cross monitors Hukanovic lauds for mitigating his own plight, who try to ameliorate such horrors rather than ignore them.

THE TENTH CIRCLE OF HELL does not provide much background on the circumstances in Bosnia-Herzegovina that led Rezak Hukanovic and other residents of Prijedor being forced into a death camp, but the exact context is not especially important. As one reads about the real horrors behind the rather antiseptic phrase "ethnic cleansing," it is enough to know that this happened in the last decade of the twentieth century. People should keep memories such as Hukanovic's in mind the next time they wonder whether the civilized world ought ever to intervene in the "internal affairs" of other countries.

In his foreword to this book, attempting to clarify where the tragedies at Omarska and other Serbian concentration camps stand in the cannon of human suffering, Elie Wiesel says that "Nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz." When I closed The Tenth Circle of Hell - a third person account, though clearly a memoir of Hukanovic's own experience - I wondered not how, but why, Wiesel would choose to make such a distinction.

In this corner of existence, when "right" and "wrong" become meaningless and survival becomes not so much an act of defiance but a grinding and hopeless routine, there is no grayscale. In this corner of existence, the whole world becomes black, and the suggestion that any one concentration/internment/death camp can be compared to another becomes moot.

In clear-eyed and painful prose, Rezak Hukanovic gives voice to the thousands of interned Muslim and Croat civilians whose lives were destroyed by the next-door neighbors they once knew as friends. Too often, the atrocities detailed in this book become so horrible, so surreally depraved, that Hukanovic is brave simply in his willingness to recount them. How anyone lived through them, and how the rest of the world looked on in such a willfully Orwellian stupor, is an entirely more difficult discussion.

In this slender book, probably the most powerful single document of to come out of the Bosnian conflict, Hukanovic makes few attempts to understand how this all happened. The logic in that choice is clear: There is no understanding.

No, nothing, anywhere, can be compared to Auschwitz. Nor can anything, anywhere, compare to Omarska.