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PLOMIA remembers the day her Dinka village was attacked by a militia loyal to the Sudanese government. The troops put all the men inside a cattle barn and set it on fire. "My husband was inside -- he was burning alive, I could smell the flesh," she said. "We were not allowed to cry -- if you cried, they would shoot you. Instead, they made us dance."
When Nybel was fleeing her village in civil-war-racked Sudan, she put on all the clothes she owned. On the way to a refugee camp in the south, she "paid one layer of clothing to a ferryman, another to cross a road, and others to buy food. By the time she arrived in Rumbek, one month later, she was wearing only a bra and a skirt."
And there is Jeannette, holding a toddler in her arms, although she has no hands. They were hacked off after she was raped by Rwandan militants who stormed into her farming village in the Democratic Republic of Congo in the mid-1990s.
In "The Other Side of War," writer Zainab Salbi, editor Laurie Becklund and photographers Susan Meiselas, Sylvia Plachy and Lekha Singh capture in deeply affecting words and pictures the struggles of these three women and many others who have survived rape and starvation, seen relatives -- even entire tribes -- murdered, yet have found the strength to begin anew.
"When you read this book," author Alice Walker writes in her preface, "you will be astounded at how far we have...