Priče iz drugog rata

The book contains about twenty short stories – each 4–10 pages – in which ordinary peasants, housewives, children and soldiers recount what they saw or experienced between 1941 and 1945.

There are: a boy who watches German soldiers eat chocolate for the first time in his life, an old woman who hid an entire Jewish family in a barn overnight, a partisan hiding in a tomb, a young man who hears gunshots on Banjica and realizes that they are his schoolmates, a peasant who plays with unexploded bombs as if they were toys…

Zograf draws minimalistically, with pencil and ink, almost childishly, but it is precisely this simplicity that makes the stories even more poignant. There is no heroism, no ideology, only human confusion, fear, hunger, accidental kindness and accidental cruelty. The war is depicted here as a series of absurd, often surreal moments that are etched in memory more strongly than all history books.

The collection was published in Serbian, English and Italian; is considered one of the most important contemporary comics from the Balkans and the most moving anti-war document created from oral history. Zograf shows that real history does not happen on the front, but in the yard, in the basement and in the head of a ten-year-old who will never forget the smell of burning flesh.