Even the all-powerful moving picture fails to deliver the sensual experience of touching and leafing through pages. By choosing comics to tell this story, Sacco has allowed readers to experience Gorazde with a visceral reality no other medium can match. Before the war, about 9,600 Muslims and 5,600 Serbs lived in Gorazde. The besieged city was eventually placed under tenuous UN protection. Sacco shows readers, through the poignant recollections of his interviewees, that for nearly four years the Gorazde Muslims lived under the twin shadows of hope and despair, never knowing if the next day would bring relief or extermination.
Medical workers recount in painful detail the difficulties of tending to the wounded in wartime.
We also meet Serbs who refused to join the Chetniks and who were nonetheless victims of the hatred of Muslim refugees who had suffered painful losses at Chetnik hands. Aptly, Sacco neither ignores nor emphasizes his presence. He reminds readers that what he is relating is his experience. He never pretends to objectivity or omniscience. A large part of Safe Area Gorazde concerns his friendship with Edin, a Gorazde Muslim who has taken Sacco into his home and confidence.