Wounded I Am More Awake: Finding Meaning After Terror

Wounded I Am More Awake follows the story of Esad Boskailo, a doctor who survives six concentration camps in Bosnia and emerges with powerful new lessons for healing in an age of genocide.

This gripping account raises questions for healers, survivors, and readers striving to understand the reality of war and the aftermath of terror. Is it possible to find meaning after enduring crimes against humanity? Can people heal after trauma?

Human rights journalist Julia Lieblich takes the reader through Boskailo's early years under Tito to the wars when friends turned on friends. She documents his harrowing experiences in the camps, where the men he once joined for coffee murder his best friend from childhood.

But the story does not end there. Boskailo moves to the United States and decides to become a psychiatrist so he can guide survivors through the long-term process of restoring hope. Today, inspired by the late psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, Boskailo uses his own experience to help patients mourn their losses and find meaning in the aftermath of terror.

Esad Boskailo is a Clinical Associate Professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona College of Medicine - Phoenix and Associate Director of Psychiatric Residency Training at the Maricopa Integrated Health System. Trained in family medicine in Bosnia, he works with survivors of trauma from domestic abuse to war.

Julia Lieblich is an award-winning human rights journalist whose work has appeared in the New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, Time, Life, and Ms. A former religion writer for the Chicago Tribune and the Associated Press, she is an assistant professor of journalism at Loyola University Chicago.