The Secret Life of Words

Like every week, I went to the library to get some DVD. I picked up one, "The Secret Life of Words." It was a very good movie.

First, it starts out as just showing this woman working. Then all of a sudden this little girls voice starts talking in the background. I was like "...if this is a horror movie I'm NOT watching it." But the little voice soon goes away. The woman is forced by her company to take a vacation, so she leaves to a little hotel on the sea. While she was there, she overheard someone needing a nurse for a burn patient that is also blind out on an oil rig. She takes the job and starts working with him.

He tries to get information out of her about who she is but she won't tell him anything. After working with him for awhile, he tells her a story about how he can't swim and has a fear of water, and another about how he fell in love with his best friends wife. She finally tells him about her life which turns out the she was forced to be a prostitute in the Yugoslav Wars. During that time she witnessed a mother forced to kill her daughter, and the girls that screamed at all would be cut open with shards of glass. She had slowly watched her one friend die from being cut open and not being treated. She then has him feel the shoulder area of her chest which is covered in scares from being cut.

The guy is air lifted off of the oil rig and she leaves him, but sends with him a backpack that has enough info in it for him to find her. He does and convinces her that she will be alright. It then cuts to her getting a glass of water by herself in a nice house and the little girls voice comes back. The little girl says that the woman doesn't think about her too much now except when she's alone on Sunday morning when her husband is getting the paper and her sons are out next door. "Yes, she has 2 sons now. My brothers." At this I started crying. It doesn't say if she had the baby or if she was forced to give it up...

I looked up information online about the Yugoslav Wars and found out it was basically an ethnic war. Rape camps or camps to impregnate women were set up, so the "pure" race men would rape "impure" women until they became pregnant. They did this because they thought the child would take on the fathers ethnicity and that would purify the land of unwanted ethnic groups.

I was horrified to read this. I didn't know anything about it even though it happened from 1991-2001. Why can't people just accept different ethnic groups for what they are? Why must one group be better than the other? Can't we just live in peace with everyone, no matter what their ethnic groups or background is? I also highly doubt that the ethnicity of these people were all that different...