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 The original plan was to open a permanent War Childhood
Museum in the capital Sarajevo in August. But when the site
chosen by the museum's founders was ruled out by municipal
authorities in favor of a fitness club, the project embarked on
a cross-country tour.
The traveling museum features more than 2,800 exhibits,
including toys, letters, photographs, diaries and humanitarian
food packaging, with accompanying texts in both Bosnian and
English. For Wider Image story, click on http://reut.rs/29pDpbY
"It all started when I put online a simple question: What does
childhood in war mean for you?" Jasminko Halilovic, a
27-year-old economist spearheading the project, told Reuters.
"We have the idea to expand the museum's scope and start
collecting memories from other conflict zones so as to create a
universal exhibition that would serve as a warning against new
wars," Halilovic said.
In 2013 he published War Childhood, a collection of wartime
memories of his generation. The book was translated into several
languages and helped Halilovic connect with other compatriots in
Bosnia and abroad who went through the death and destruction of
the 1992-95 war involving Serbs, Croats and Bosniak Muslims.
"Many people preserve wartime items, they still connect memories
from the war with these objects and have an urge to share their
experience and that's where the idea for the museum came from,"
Halilovic said.
The War Childhood Museum aims to investigate, exhibit and
educate and Halilovic said donating personal possessions that
people had associated with wartime had a "cathartic effect".
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"They would break down in tears but they were the kind of tears you
shed when you are over the past and ready to start over," said
Halilovic, who will keep looking for a permanent home for the
museum.
Among the display items is a Barbie doll donated by Asmira, 27, a
Bosniak who was three when separatist Serb forces expelled her
family from the eastern town of Bratunac in 1992 and imprisoned her
father in a nearby detention camp.
Asmira found refuge in a collective center in Tuzla in northern
Bosnia, where the only available toy for children, mostly boys, was
a makeshift sponge ball. But then a neighbor gave her the Barbie
doll.
"I took care of her as if she were sacred. She always slept in a
shoe box. Barbie did not have a name. When I played with her, she
was selling food, sewing up casualties' wounds or healing sick
people. Later I became a doctor, too," Asmira said in a note shown
at the current exhibition in the town of Zenica.
The Bosnian conflict was Europe's bloodiest since World War Two and
ethnic divisions still afflict the ex-Yugoslav republic.
(Writing by Maja Zuvela; editing by Daria Sito-Sucic and Mark
Heinrich)
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