**In this unforgettable book of more than 1,000 quotes and twenty
full-page color photos, adults reflect on their childhoods in war.
**In 2010, Sarajevo native Jasminko Halilovic began following through on
a dream: collecting as many short recollections from as many people as
possible who were children during the Bosnian War, which from 1992 to
1995 claimed the lives of 101,000 people amid the breakup of the former
Yugoslavia and changed Sarajevo's reputation from a onetime WInter
Olympics paradise to a city under siege.
The result: a unique, visually engaging, and accessible book of 1,100
quotations by adults looking back on their childhoods in war. Halilovic
collected the memories online, using the project's website and social
media.
The book, War Childhood, was crowd-funded and published in Bosnian in
Sarajevo, and in English translation for sale at the museum of the same
name--the War Childhood Museum--that Halilovic founded in his native
city in January 2017.
The book has three parts. The first comprises introductory texts on
Bosnia and Herzegovina, Sarajevo, the siege of Sarajevo, and the
project. The second, main section is a mosaic of the short recollections
gathered during implementation of the project. The third section has a
visual focus, bringing together keepsakes: photographs, drawings, diary
entries, stories, and letters.
Unique in having been cocreated by 1,100 people, this book also takes a
specific approach to the presentation of their memories. The memories
collected in the book are presented symmetrically. They are grouped both
by theme and by emotion. Some entries from the different groups are
mixed, but they are distributed in accord with a precisely calculated
algorithm. In this way, a balance is struck between emotion and theme.
Supplemented since its original, Sarajevo publication with material from
the 2022 Ukraine War, War Childhood is for anyone seeking an
accessible, ultimately hopeful book on the effects of war on
children--and, moreover, it is an indispensable reference for
researchers and students in the fields of conflict studies and
peacebuilding, history, childhood and adolescence, psychology and
trauma, Eastern European studies, and mental health.
