This is a book about the evil of war and one man's fight for good. Viktor Seger is a field doctor with Doctors Without Borders. He works where others flee, in the very center of war, where bombs fall closest and hospitals are the first targets.
In Congo, he operates on child soldiers and starving civilians while militia groups fight over the country's resources outside the walls of the field hospital. In Yemen, he encounters a country on its knees, a people dying of cholera, hunger, and airstrikes at the same time, while the outside world looks away. In Syria, he works in a bombed-out society where every day could be the last, and where the line between victim and perpetrator has long since blurred.
He has seen what people do to each other when power allows it. He has held the hands of those affected. He has learned that evil rarely looks like a monster, it often wears a face that resembles his own.
But nothing prepares Viktor for the day when his colleague Elin is kidnapped by an armed group in northern Syria. Because now it is no longer an unknown patient on the operating table. Now it is someone he loves.
Viktor stops following the rules. He begins playing the groups off against each other, falsifying messages and manipulating enemies into killing one another. Step by step, he is transformed into what he has fought against his entire professional life.
What distinguishes a doctor who saves lives from a man who takes them?
While the World Burns brings together three powerful stories from the front lines of modern war, stories about human suffering, moral choices, and the thin line between good and evil.
