I entered through the metal detector and slid my bag over a low counter toward an officer. At each metal and bulletproof threshold were young, scrubbed armed security men who spoke several languages. Their name tags: Adriaan, Cees, Karim, Lieven. I felt something in Lieven, caught his eye, as I passed by. Inside was a raised reception desk and a great hall and a wide staircase under the vaulted ceilings of last century’s grandeur. The building was a many-doored purple martin house where people from eighty countries worked together, lawyers and case managers and legal assistants and language assistants and witness assistants and librarians and forensics experts and security people flying in and out.

The core of Karla’s team would be three women and one man. She had already worked and travelled with Sue and Lise to build the case. Back in The Hague she brought in a crime analyst. Nita Tamang would oversee the database that linked witness statements to other evidence. The only man on the team was Jonathon Bailey, nicknamed Joop, a small-town Canadian who happened to be travelling in Holland when the tribunal was being assembled. He applied for a job as a clerk but Karla discovered his photographic memory and saw his computer skills and she learned he had grown up with three sisters. She said to him, as if joking, You must have sometimes had a problem to find a free bathroom. Joop laughed and said, I made a bathroom spreadsheet but they all ignored it. So I just went outside.

Karla knew she’d found her case manager, bright, organized, flexible, forgiving and funny. In her habitual way of making strings of words, she called the women and Joop her Foča-Frauen-team.

They began with a database to integrate witness statements from church and refugee groups, the International Red Cross, Edina’s group and others in the region. Karla and Lise travelled to meet women in exile in Vienna and Istanbul and Ankara and London and New York and Hamburg and Sydney and Toronto.

The women had precarious new lives. New languages. New jobs.

There was fragility.

I am afraid if I testify I will be killed.

I need my job. I cannot leave.

I am caring for my children, my old mother.

I do not want to remember.

Will he be in the courtroom?

Karla carried a soft, battered locked briefcase full of the women’s words. She studied the files, mastered their detail. Memory is most accurate about place. I was taken to Foča High School where I was a student the year before. A group of soldiers came into the classroom and picked eight of us. One took me to a small room and told me to strip. Karla understood that she was disturbing a lightless world. There were three hundred of us. I spent four months in that hall. It is a nightmare that cannot be understood.

After reviewing three thousand files, Karla and her team finally settled on sixteen witnesses. Their stories were linked, all in Foča, the same perpetrators. The women were chosen for their place in the pattern of attacks and for their ability to withstand questioning. Karla wanted to show that the perpetrators’ intent was to destroy a community by using women across generations. She wanted to begin her prosecution with Edina, her mother and her daughter. Three generations of the same family. The other thirteen women’s stories would corroborate times and places and demonstrate the scope of the crimes.