Children who live through war don’t often have a chance to tell their stories. One museum in Sarajevo hopes to change that.
ADRIAN MA, HOST:
Jasminko Halilovic was 4 years old when the Bosnian war broke out, and he lived through the siege of Sarajevo. He says his memories of the earliest days of the war are foggy. But as the war continued, he formed stronger memories, difficult memories.
JASMINKO HALILOVIC: One of my friends during the war was killed, and she was killed by a sniper. And this was an event in 1994, which really, I would say, marked the war for me. And this was one of the reasons why I actually wanted to do something around this topic later, many years later.
MA:
Driven by his own experiences of the Bosnian war, he founded the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. The museum collects and preserves stories and objects of people who have experienced war as children and also of children still living in war zones around the world. Jasminko hopes to offer a space where they can feel understood and heard. I spoke to him last week.
For those who have never been to it, can you talk about, like, what kinds of collections are in this museum? And what do you hope to accomplish by showing these to the world? HALILOVIC: Well, today, we are seven years – like, very soon we will mark seven years since the museum opened its doors in 2017. And today, our collection includes over 6,000 personal objects and belongings from 18 different armed conflicts because I never wanted to limit this museum to the borders of our country or to our war. Now we have objects and stories from the Second World War to contemporary conflicts like the Russian aggression on Ukraine, for example. Of course, when people see War Childhood Museum, they expect toys. And it’s true, we have many toys in our collection. But we also have some unexpected objects. We have everyday tools you use at home that children maybe used to play with. We have many handmade things. We have clothing. We have pieces of furniture. We have a bicycle. We have some artworks that kids created. We also film video testimonies – so the oral histories with survivors. So it’s a very diverse collection in its nature when it comes to objects we documented but also when it comes to stories connected to these objects.
MA: You know, a lot of people might think about what happens in war, especially to children, and they think that this is a – kind of a difficult and an emotional subject, and it might just be too hard to talk about. What are your thoughts on that? HALILOVIC: Well, you know, I’m, like, working in this kind of museum and creating it. I’m very well aware of that fact, and very often I hear it. I hear it from my best friend. Some of my best friends never visited the museum because they are kind of reluctant to do it because they are afraid that it would be too emotional experience. And, of course, everyone chooses with which kind of content they want to interact with, especially when it comes to people who share this experience. Some of my friends would never watch a movie about the war because they went through the war, and they don’t want to be reminded of it. And that’s completely normal …