Thursday, October 25, 2007

Prijedor: Lives From the Bosnian Genocide

More than 40,000 people from Bosnia now call St. Louis their home. For the past year the community leaders have been developing an exhibit titled, "Prijedor: Lives From the Bosnian Genocide." Their approach is to help people understand this sort of calamity as a collection of individual stories, with faces and names and memories. A series of community meetings is under way this fall to engage the Bosnian community in the interpretation of their shared story. The final two are on Sunday afternoons at 3:00 pm at Grbic Restaurant (4071 Keokuk, St. Louis, (314) 772-3100) on October 28 and November 11.

The new multi-media exhibit opens on Sunday, November 25, 2007 with a 2:00 pm program and reception at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center (12 Millstone Campus Drive, St. Louis). The exhibit opening program will feature a keynote address by award-winning British journalist Ed Vulliamy (author of Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia's War), one of the first reporters to uncover the network of concentration camps in the Prijedor area in 1992.

The Prijedor exhibit is a unique community collaboration among Bosnians from Prijedor, the Holocaust Museum staff, and students and faculty from Fontbonne University who recorded video interviews with local Prijedor survivors as part of a recent course on the Bosnian immigration. A small research team traveled to Prijedor this summer to gather exhibit materials and conduct additional interviews.

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