Consider This from NPR - A Sarajevo Museum Gives Children Of War A Voice

Episode Date: December 30, 2023

The trauma of war and its aftermath can leave scars on those who survive - deep scars that can be both physical and emotional. For children who experience war, trauma can cut deep, reshaping every part of their lives.While we hear news reports from war zones, stories from survivors don't often include children's voices.The War Childhood Museum is a unique place, dedicated to creating a space for those affected by war as children to tell their stories and donate items of significance.The museum collects and preserves the stories of both adults, describing their experiences as children, and of children currently living with war. The museum houses audio, video and objects from World War II to the current war in Ukraine - a collection that spans both the globe and time.NPR's Adrian Ma speaks with Jasminko Halilovic about growing up in war torn Bosnia, and dignity and resilience of children facing war.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

As the war between Israel and Hamas rages on, the Gaza Health Ministry says more than 21,000 Gazans have been killed, and UNICEF estimates that nearly a quarter of those casualties are children. Thousands of children are wounded, malnourished, or suffering from disease, and children who do survive this war will carry deep psychological scars. Fear of darkness, general tension, a flashback, nightmares, avoidance, difficulty sleeping, and a recollection of their trauma. Iman Farjala understands the toll experiencing war can have on a child.

That's because she grew up in Gaza and was living there during the time of the first and second intifadas. Those are Palestinian uprisings against Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank. And as a result of the Israeli military's response, Iman says she was constantly living in fear. The experience was so vicious, so scary, so harmful, that there's no words that you can actually describe it. Farjala now lives in the United States and works as a psychologist for refugee children in San Francisco. But she has made trips back to Gaza.

She says she tries to help children there cope with a reality that means they're often living under a threat of war. But she also says her work can only do so much. Even when you work with a child, he's going to ask you, but what if another war broke out? Can you protect me? Can you protect my parents? Our answer is no, we can't. It's a grim reality faced by millions of children around the world who experience war. And like Iman, these children may not always have a way to share their stories. Consider this.

From Gaza to Ukraine to Syria and many other places around the globe, children are living in war zones. And in the reporting of these wars, the children's stories can often be lost or excluded. But one museum in Sarajevo is trying to change that. The high percentage of people living through war are children. And then after the war, the war is documented by adults. And children are somehow left to decide. Their experiences are not as heard.

From NPR, I'm Adrian Ma. It's Friday, December 29th. It's Consider This from NPR. Jasmin Kohalilovic was four 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. One of my friends during the war was killed. 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 is one of the reasons why I actually wanted to do something around this topic later, many years later. 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 experienced war as children and those children who are still living in war zones. Yasmiko hopes to offer a space where they can feel understood and heard. And when I spoke to him last week, I started off by asking him to talk about the museum. For those who've 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? 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 museums, 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 and children maybe use to play with.

We have many handmade things. We have clothing. We have pieces of furniture. We have a bicycle. We have some artwork 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 being documented, but also when it comes to stories connected to these objects.

You know, a lot of people might think about what happens in war, especially to children, and they think that this is kind of a difficult and an emotional subject, and it might just be too hard to talk about. What are your thoughts on that? Well, you know, I'm 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 friends. 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 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. And we as a museum, we don't think that everyone wants to visit it. We don't think that everyone wants to share their story. For us, it's important that the platform exists for those who do feel to share their story or who do feel to visit. And also what we really try to do as a museum, and maybe people sometimes have different expectations when they think about war and children, they think only about suffering.

And suffering is inevitably part of this experience. But what we see through our collection and what we consider to be beautiful is that what comes out from these stories is also resilience of children, it's creativity of children, it's strength of children. And some expect that this exhibition would be only inspiring one feeling, like some kind of sadness or bitterness. But this is actually not what survivors want. They want to inspire respect. They want someone to learn from their experiences.

And they want their dignity to be preserved. Is part of the hope of that that people also find healing? You know, this process of giving your object or your story to the museum collection, it's not a mere donation. It has a lot of meaning attached to it, because first you need to think, are you ready to do this? Then maybe you will discuss with your family what you would give. Then maybe you will discuss with your family, do they agree with you?

Because these objects are often very precious to the whole family. So you will have these conversations in the family, then you will make your decision. Then you will give the object to the museum. Then you will be invited when the object is exhibited. Then you will maybe bring your children now or your friends or your partner or your colleagues to see your object and your story and this whole process for many for many people it has this kind of field of healing effect and this is something uh what's probably at the heart of our mission and our purpose given that you focus so much on trying to understand the experiences of what it is like for children to live through war, I want to turn to the conflict in Gaza right now.

Thousands of children are caught in this conflict between Israel and Hamas, starting with Hamas' October 7th attack and continuing now for almost three months as Israel has laid siege to Gaza. Thousands of children have been killed or have been displaced. They're dealing with hunger and thirst and unsanitary conditions. So I'm interested in your thoughts about the children involved who are caught in the situation without a choice. It's really difficult for, not only for me, but for our team as a museum, people who deal with this topic,

many of them being war survivors themselves, to hear any new news about any new conflict anywhere. It kind of re-traumatizes us in a way. And it's difficult to grasp that things are repeatedly happening, things like that. It's difficult to watch. It's even difficult, you know, to keep the belief in what we are doing as a museum. Because, you know, I'm telling you now about this experience. I'm telling you how it's important to give children a voice. I'm telling you how it's important to give children a voice. I'm telling you how it's a complex experience,

how we want to highlight children's resilience. I'm telling you all of these things. But at the same time, some children are being killed and they will never have a chance to tell their stories. So for me personally, this is very difficult. We have a collection from Gaza, actually. We have these stories in collection. We have to publish these stories at least now to get them out. So we publish them on our website and social media. But even that act, you know, you are publishing a story of your contributor,

who is, let's say, a 15-year-old girl, and you cannot even verify she's alive. So it really questions everything you do and everything you believe in. I have to wonder, as somebody who has dedicated so many years to chronicling others' experience as children living through war, what would you say, if you could, what would you say to kids right now who are just trying to get through the day in this terrible conflict? One thing that makes sense is difficult, but your question also reminds me of one situation we had during our fieldwork in Lebanon with Syrian child refugees.

And our researcher from Bosnia was there as well, and she met some of the children who contributed to our collection. She also talked to them about her own experiences and share bits of her own story. And then these children told her that it is important for them to hear that there is someone who went through similar things and survived and became museum professional and now came to document their story. So it gives them

this kind of perspective that if they manage to survive maybe there is also this kind of light at the end of the tunnel that they can build to survive, maybe there is also this kind of light at the end of the tunnel that they can build their life, that they can build their career, that they can fulfill some of their dreams.

So I just don't feel it's kind of the right thing to send any message to children who are more directly affected by the war. But I hope that some of the stories from our collection, from our museum as well, can bring some hope back to these children that hopefully there will be peace and hopefully there will be justice and hopefully there will be opportunities to recreate their lives. That was Yasmin Ko Halilovic,

founder of the War Childhood Museum in Sarajevo. Additional reporting came from NPR's Ritu Chatterjee. It's Consider This from NPR. I'm Adrian Ma.