“The Monsters Are Growing Stronger”: A Night with The Long Road to Peace

I ordered The Long Road to Peace almost impulsively, and then placed it on a shelf where it stared at me for days. Every time I passed by, I asked myself why I had bought yet another book on war. Hadn’t I read enough? Wouldn’t it be wiser—especially now, recovering from an injury and feeling my body gather soft tissue out of thin air like plastic clinging to a burning surface—to reach for a pleasant New Age guide on wellness or weight loss instead? I even ordered one. I opened it, closed it after two minutes, and placed it on a lower shelf.

Then, on a rainy evening, The Long Road to Peace forced itself into my hands. I read it through the night. More than once, tears ran down my face like a child’s.

Danilo Kiš—still one of the greatest writers who ever lived—wrote upon the death of Varlam Shalamov: “There are lives that would have been better never to have been lived. Lives that were nothing more than chains of misfortune, injustice, and suffering: the experience of hell on earth—hell from which you never truly emerge, not even when you are liberated, not even when you are rehabilitated.”

And yet, even in that hell, there was always a small crack—just enough for a defeated life to look up toward the sky.

Perhaps that crack is the only reason we can still speak of hope.

That night I traveled through the landscapes that have carried war like a second skin for centuries: the rugged, jagged gorges of the Soča Front, where soldiers died in icy water and limestone walls;the torn Balkan mountains, where frontlines shifted faster than human bodies could move; the muddy, endless plains of Galicia, soaked with the suffering of infantry;the shattered brick villages of Ukraine, where history has decided—again—that peace has no place; and the dusty, tense terrains of the Middle East, which I have known since childhood and where war has become ordinary.

Each landscape in the book feels like an open wound. Each space carries the memory of bodies kneeling in mud, mothers waiting for sons, children growing up inside fear.

As I walked through these pages, I felt their cold, their terror, their endurance, and their despair.

Is there truly a path that leads elsewhere?

What do the soldiers and survivors tell us—those whom the authors bring back to voice—as they guide us, almost gently, like a mother guiding a child, along the only passable road toward the future: the road of peace?

Not only people—landscapes, too, are exhausted. 

Too many tears, too much human pain, has flowed into the rivers we cross.

Why remember, why return? Why revisit trenches, monuments, memorial plaques? Is memory truly the only road that leads toward peace?

History hides the glass sphere of the future in its dirty hands. When the witness is gone, memory dies. When memory dies, facts vanish. And when no one remains to speak of war, peace becomes nothing more than a word without longing—without light.

Peace is not the absence of war. Peace is a fragile form of learning.

When you shoot an arrow, the most important moment is the space in which you step back, so the arrow can fly freely. That space of withdrawal—of emptiness—is where learning happens. And the learning of peace—if the future still has the ability to build it—is hidden inside the learnings of war.

I have not written a single review, critique, or literary assessment since 2017. Before that, I wrote more than four hundred.

I would not have written this one either, had the book not moved me as deeply as it did.

There are books one reads—and there are books one experiences.

I have never learned as much about war from any book as I learned from this one.

This is not a book for those seeking comfort, but for those seeking truth.

Here the authors are assisted by experts on war, by people who have lived through war and their loved ones — all of whom become its victims, whether they ever stood on a battlefield or not.

For anyone who wants peace, it is required reading.

And perhaps most strikingly: Boštjan Videmšek, one of Slovenia’s greatest journalists—and certainly its most compelling war correspondent—has never, in any of his books until now, opened himself with such quiet, unguarded honesty. I do not always agree with him, neither in perspective nor in tone, yet here he reveals the deepest layer of his craft: he steps back, softens his presence, and allows the voices of others—voices soaked to the bone, carried from so many wars, so many frontlines, so many broken geographies—to walk with him. Their stories do not follow him; they move beside him, muddy, trembling, persistent, as if he were offering his own stride to help them cross terrain they could never cross alone.

My sincere congratulations to the authors for this extraordinary work—and my gratitude to all who carry the monumental Walk of Peace project and its European extension, BEWOP – Beyond Walk of Peace, brought to life by PromoTurismoFVG, GECT/EZTS, ZRC SAZU, the Milko Kos Historical Institute, the èStoria Festival, and the Municipality of Miren–Kostanjevica.

For me—sadly, precisely because of its subject matter—this is the Slovenian Book of the Year 2025.

In a time when monsters grow stronger—locally, regionally, globally—we need books like this, and we need communities capable of holding them.

Title: Dolga pot do miru (The Long Road to Peace)

Authors: Boštjan Videmšek and Abha Valentina Lo Surdo

Language editor / scholarly reviewer: Dr. Petra Svoljšak

Publisher: UMco

Year: 2025