Gretchen Shirm was a legal intern in the Hague, the UN’s International Court of Justice, which is the setting for her new novel, Out of The Woods. While Shirm interned in 2006, her novel is set earlier, in 2000. It fictionalises the real trial of Radislav Krstić, relating to a genocide that was the worst episode of mass murder in Europe since World War II.
In July 1995, Bosnian Serb forces killed more than 8,000 Bosnian Muslim boys and men, and expelled more than 20,000 civilians from Srebrenica, a town in eastern Bosnia and Herzegovina. Krstić, commander of the Bosnian Serb corps responsible for the Srebrenica area, was convicted in 2001 of aiding and abetting genocide and murder.
Shirm uses publicly available extracts from the witness testimonies at the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia. She did not attend the Krstić trial. But her experience at The Hague moved her profoundly – and its impact ripples and reverberates through her protagonist’s narrative.
