Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide

What if you'd been born in a place of death? What if you grew up not knowing why you hated yourself? These are a part of the human experience in a remarkable Missouri community of 50,000 Bosnian refugees. The people from the city of Prijedor told their stories in an oral history and exhibit project we supported last year. The exhibit opened at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center on November 25 with a crowd of many hundreds of people. You can see the exhibit for yourself through May of 2008. More on this moving event in an illustrated story by Patrick McCarthy....
-Michael Bouman

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By Patrick McCarthy

Director, Medical Center Library

St. Louis University

They came by the hundreds – old and young, Bosnian and American.

Zerina Musić (center) born fifteen years ago in the Trnopolje concentration camp, cuts the ribbon with Vedad Karahodžić to open the exhibit, Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide at the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, November 25, 2007.

Even before the official opening time, Museum staff stopped counting the numbers of people entering the building at 400 – and still they kept coming – on a cold and rainy Sunday afternoon that ended the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. A bus brought 60 Bosnian elderly into an already packed facility, where the line to get into the exhibit now filled the entrance hallway and backed up a flight of stairs leading to the gallery space.

The overflow crowds had come to see the new multi-media exhibit Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide at the St. Louis Holocaust Museum and Learning Center. With major funding and support from the Missouri Humanities Council, the exhibit is a unique collaboration among Bosnians from Prijedor, the staff of the Holocaust Museum, and students and faculty from Fontbonne University who conducted video interviews with local survivors from Prijedor.

From the outset, it was apparent that the day’s events would be much more than an ordinary exhibit opening. The young woman who cut the ribbon to open the exhibit, Zerina Musić, had been born fifteen years earlier in the Trnopolje concentration camp just outside Prijedor. Her mother Erzena was told by the Serb authorities who attended the birth, “If the baby is a boy, we will take him. If it is a girl, you can keep her.” 

Award-winning British journalist, Ed Vulliamy, the first print reporter to gain access to Prijedor’s wartime network of concentration camps, provided the keynote address following brief remarks by Jean Cavender, the Museum Director, Amir Karadžić, the overall exhibit project coordinator, and Dr. Bisera Turković, Ambassador to the United States from Bosnia-Herzegovina.

In the packed gallery space, Bosnian survivors from Prijedor and their children pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with Americans who came to learn more about the experiences that brought the large local Bosnian community to live, work, and rebuild their lives in St. Louis, Missouri. Now numbering more than 50,000, Bosnian refugees in St. Louis form the largest such community of any city in the world.

Bosnian visitors view exhibit panels about attacks on the towns of Kozarac and Hambarine, near Prijedor.

Tears flowed freely among Bosnian and American visitors who quietly viewed a series of exhibit panels detailing the chronology of events in Prijedor during the war years 1992 to 1995. Many lingered at a display case containing the sweater and boots recovered with the body of Dr. Kemal Cerić, one of Prijedor’s intelligentsia targeted for liquidation, whose remains were identified using DNA comparison with relatives. Hushed conversations stopped when visitors came to photographs of camp prisoners with washboard ribcages that recalled images from the permanent Holocaust exhibit in the next room.

Exhibit panel with a photo on an inmate at the Trnopolje concentration camp.  (Panels designed by Barbara Nwacha).

For some, it was the first time they had directly confronted what had taken place in Prijedor: an organized and systematic terror campaign that consisted of the forced deportation of nearly all of the area’s non-Serb population and the imprisonment of thousands in concentration camps where they were subjected to mass killing, sexual assault, torture, and humiliation on a scale unseen in Europe since the end of the Second World War.   

For others, the response was much more personal and emotional. For Alisa Gutić, from Kozarac whose father was killed in the war, the exhibit and opening program provided a transformative release for pent-up feelings kept private for most of her life. “Through the years, I have cursed and hated myself for being Bosnian because I was only three years old when I lost my father,” Alisa wrote in the days following the exhibit. “Still today my father has not been found and I curse everything about the war!”  

Now a student at Saint Louis University, Alisa continued:
“I see my life differently now…For years I have been searching for myself and trying to find out who I really am, and your exhibit and the beautiful messages are just leading me in the right direction. Today, I can finally say what I couldn't a week ago, that I am very proud to be Bosnian and that my hatred can one day cease as I discover who I am and why I am here today and not dead like so many in Bosnia.”

Journalist Ed Vulliamy speaks with young Bosnians after his keynote address, including Alisa Gutić, far right.

“You are not supposed to be here,” Ed Vulliamy said as he began his remarks, addressing the members of the audience from Prijedor. “You are supposed to be dead.”

Vulliamy’s comments passed liked an electrical current through the tightly packed audience, who paid rapt attention to the man to whom many credit their survival. Within days of Vulliamy’s August, 1992 visit to Prijedor’s camps, a series of reports he wrote for the Guardian newspaper contributed to a worldwide outcry that brought abrupt closure to the concealed places of despair and death from which there had previously been no exit.

Vulliamy’s presence before the survivors and their families brought an emotional intensity to the crowded room that was palpable as they spontaneously rose to their feet to welcome him with loud applause. Vulliamy’s impassioned call for “reckoning” with the genocide in Prijedor as a necessary prelude to reconciliation resonated deeply with Bosnians seeking to “forgive but never to forget” while offering important solace to those torn between looking back into the darkest chapters of their lives and moving forward into the future.

As he continued his comments (simultaneously interpreted from English to Bosnian by Kemal Cerić’s son, Jasmin), Vulliamy asked those assembled, “Why should you be asked to reconcile with the perpetrators of crimes that are not even admitted, let alone reckoned with?”

“It is not the Jews who are building monuments in Berlin and museums like that at Dachau, but the Germans,” Vulliamy remarked, as he highlighted efforts to minimize, obscure, and dismiss the experiences documented in the new exhibition.

While noting that comparisons of the Bosnian genocide with the Holocaust were not appropriate, Vulliamy related an earlier discussion with Walter Reich, then Director of the United States Holocaust Museum, in which they agreed that “echoes” of the Holocaust were certainly apparent in the “ethnic cleansing” of Prijedor.

As the crowds moved into the large atrium space in the Museum building for a closing reception of Bosnian food prepared according to Jewish dietary laws, Amir Karadžić, former Prijedor resident and the project’s overall head, whose unannounced visit to the Holocaust Museum’s Director more than two years earlier provided the initial impetus for the exhibit, reflected on the huge turnout. “This was the right place and the right time. We needed to tell our story, and we are grateful to the many friends who made it possible for us to do so.”

The members of Karadžić’s Union of Citizens of the Municipality of Prijedor, who developed the exhibit’s content with Fontbonne University faculty members Dr. Ben Moore and Dr. Jack Luzkow, are now discussing plans to move the exhibition to other U.S. cities with large Bosnian communities after its St. Louis run ends in May, 2008. 

Exhibit guests Subhija and Rešad Kulenović, whose son was killed in Prijedor in 1992.

“This exhibit is not meant to feed a spirit of vengeance and retribution,” said Karadžić. “We want our children to know what happened in Prijedor so that they can prevent this from ever happening again to anyone, anywhere.” 

Survivor and exhibit consultant, Dr. Said Karahodžić, poignantly summarized the sentiments of many about Prijedor’s recent past when he said, “We are ready to forgive, but first someone has to say, ‘I’m sorry.’”

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Patrick McCarthy is exhibit advisor to Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide and is Director of the Medical Center Library at Saint Louis University. He can be contacted by e-mail at mccartpg@slu.edu.

The Wrong Sort of People

Essay by Michael Bouman

Much of the news I read is all about "the wrong sort of people."  My newspaper ran an AP story on December 13 that said members of the three largest minority groups in the U.S. view each other with suspicion driven by negative stereotypes.  The story was based on poll sponsored by New America Media, a consortium of minority media outlets. Eleven hundred people who were either Black, Latino, or Asian were asked about other ethnic groups, and roughly 70% of those polled said "racial tension" was an important social problem.  The poll suggests that roughly half the people polled held negative stereotypes of the other two groups, while more than half rejected any such thinking. 

New America Media's spin on their poll is less sensational than the AP story. Their story takes note of interesting signs of change for the better. They include a link to an interview with Richard Rodriguez, a wonderful commentator who seems to offer a deeper, more sobering assessment of what such a poll might really mean.

I don't often follow the trail of an AP story down to its source, but the theme of ethnic distrust is one I've encountered a lot in the work I do. I don't know how anyone can avoid encountering it -- distrust, I mean. In a village with just one ethnic group, distrust can thrive anyway. Distrust is part of our circuitry, and my dog, Lola-the-poodle, is wired for it, too. She sounds the alarm even when an icicle drops from the roof outside. She declares imminent war when someone comes to the door. But when I open the door and show her that I'm friendly to the intruder, she becomes a sweetheart.

Hers is an existence of outsiders and insiders. So is ours.

In connection with the mutual stereotyping of U.S. ethnic groups, I have pondered the situation of an exhibit by St. Louis Bosnians from the city of Prijedor about their persecution by the Serb regime when Yugoslavia fractured in the 1990s.  I've been thinking about the reported protest by an organization of Serbian lawyers concerning the exhibit's use of the term, "genocide." 

There are all sorts of arguments and legalities about the words that are appropriate in characterizing a horror.  To give a name to something is to "brand" it.  Since genocide is perpetrated on one group by another, a story of genocide brands not only the victim group, but also the perpetrator group.

The Bosnian story of suffering in Prijedor contains a parallel story of Serbian persecution. So, for the many thousands of Serbs who may have loathed the persecution of the Bosnians and detested the government that set those evils loose on the face of the land, the branding of the story must feel ruefully unfair. Here they are in America, trying to get a fresh start, and this story has followed them with its haunting finger of blame.

Since "story" is a noun, we can easily imagine that a story is an object.  But stories are not just objects; they are also, literally, us!  All of us are so fully "invested" in some stories, wearing them like a signature sort of garment, that to challenge the story, or to suggest amendments or edits, is to challenge the self. 

Unfortunately for all good Serbs, this is an ugly story, not one you want associated with your national group.  But the story is not something to suppress here, either, because the Bosnians from Prijedor are marked by catastrophe scarcely imaginable in Missouri.

Scarcely imaginable, that is, unless your family has been here for generations and experienced the varieties of catastrophe called The Civil War.

John Brown depicted in a mural titled, "Tragic Prelude" by John Steuart Curray. On display in the Kansas State Capitol in Topeka.

Stories of one group "branding" another are right at home in America.  In the era of the "Border War" between Kansas and Missouri (I don’t mean the 1850s, I mean today), there are tales still told of the "self-righteous Missouri-haters" of Kansas.  In Kansas, there are persistent ideas about the cruel attitudes, the deep investment in lies and cover-ups by Missourians. 

The fascination of forming a "Border War Network" is one of braving these stereotypes in networks of colleagueship.  In this network, we're going to help each other express the stories as they have truly been told here, felt here, by generations of people.  We're going to tell stories of cruelty, savagery, indifference, bravery, honor, and struggle.  We're not going to try to reconcile different interpretations, but to be truthful to the differences, together. We're all going to try to learn how to penetrate the insidious "mental filter" through which we suspect the motives or attitudes of the other side.

Talk about nation-building!  Nation-building starts with you and me.  It starts with you and me finding a way to avoid a rift when we discuss our stories. We have to build trust.  We have to take the time it takes.  We have to put broken family stories on display and respond to broken hearts.  We have to reenter war zones some times to emerge as neighbors again.

One of These Days

Julie Douglas brought back a flood of childhood memories when she wrote about parents teaching children to write letters. I remember how Mom taught me to practice circles and strokes with a pencil and paper, just as she had learned. Wonderful stuff! Read it! -Michael Bouman

One of These Days
By Julie Douglas, Family Reading Specialist

One of these days,

I'm gonna sit down

and write a long letter

To all the good friends I've known

                                 ~ Neil Young

When was the last time you received a letter?  You remember a letter, right? Comes in an envelope, bears a colorful stamp.  In this age of instant communication through poorly punctuated emails and cell phones that we can wear right on our heads, the letter seems a bit old fashioned.

December is a natural time to think about letter writing. After all, December 7 was "Letter Writing Day." Perhaps you know someone who is busy composing a note destined for the North Pole.  Many of you may be preparing to write your annual holiday letter or looking forward to receiving the "year in review" from friends and family.

What do the children in your life know about letter writing? Do they correspond with a pen pal? Have they received a letter from a special friend or relative?

Think of letter writing as a tool for practicing storytelling.  Encourage your child to look at the events in his daily life as fodder for a story.  Awaken the muse with an assortment of colorful stationary and interesting stamps.  Help her broaden her vocabulary by moving beyond, "How are you? I am fine."  Each of us has a story to tell…many stories actually. 

Need a little inspiration?  Check out some of these children's books that focus on the theme of writing and receiving letters.



Mailing May by Michael O. Tunnell, illustrated by Ted Rand (HarperTrophy; New Ed edition, 2000)

When little May's parents can't afford to buy a train ticket for their daughter, they mail her to her grandparents' house.  Rand's warm and nostalgic illustrations add richness to this true story.





The Jolly Postman by Allan Ahlberg, illustrated by Janet Ahlberg (L,B Kids; 20th edition 2006)

Favorite fairy tale characters get letters (in real envelopes!) in this clever classic.  The Jolly Postman is a delight for anyone who has ever secretly wanted to take a peek at someone else's mail.  (Check out The Jolly Christmas Postman by Ahlberg for more fun with letters.)




The Journey of Oliver K. Woodman by Darcy Pattison, illustrated by Joe Cepeda (Harcourt Children's Books, 2003)

When Tameka's Uncle Ray is unable to travel to see her, he sends a wooden man to California instead.  Luckily, Oliver K. Woodman makes many friends along the way.  The story of Oliver's trip is told through postcards sent to Uncle Ray from people who help Oliver reach his destination.  More of Oliver's adventures can be found in Searching for Oliver K. Woodman.






Dear Mrs. La Rue: Letters From Obedience School by Mark Teague (Scholastic Press; 1st ed edition, 2002)

Anyone who knows me knows this is one of my all-time faves (I have a stuffed Ike atop the bookcase in my office.)  Poor Ike pleads through a series of letters to be released from obedience school by describing the deplorable conditions that he is enduring. Ike's mistreatment continues in Detective LaRue: Letters from the Investigation.






Flat Stanley (picture book edition) by Jeff Brown, illustrated by Scott Nash (HarperCollins, 2006)

Based on the 1964 chapter book by Brown, this picture book version introduces young children to Flat Stanley.  Flattened by a falling bulletin board, Stanley finds himself able to do many new things…including traveling through the mail!






A Letter to Amy by Ezra Jack Keats (Puffin, 1998)
Peter (of The Snowy Day and Whistle for Willie) sends a letter to a special friend.  Told in Keats' gentle voice and paired with his brightly colored collages, A Letter to Amy is another Keats classic.

Exhibits for Schools and Libraries

After 18 months of touring, the Sac and Fox Heritage Exhibit has been refurbished and readied for more touring to small venues. It is 10 feet wide and 8 feet tall, and it has its own built-in lighting. It is ideal for libraries or small museums. Contact me, Michael Bouman, about booking it at your museum, school, or public library in 2008.

A touring exhibit on Osage Heritage is also in production for the same venues.

On-Line Interpretive Training Resource

I've been following the progress of the Missouri-Kansas partnership to develop a "Freedom's Frontier National Heritage Area." The group just sent out a great link to a web site for the National Park Service and "Tourism Professionals." Forget the "professional" part; even if you're an untrained volunteer, your business is interpretation, and the only question is whether you're developing your talent. Here's a place to investigate! -Michael Bouman

The Impact of the Governor's Humanities Award

The deadline for submitting nominations for the 2008 Governor's Humanities Awards is January 25. Information on submitting a nomination is on our web site. This month I want to share a first-person account of what this award means from one of last year's winners, Janice Lee Urton of the Urich Community Historical Society. Turn the page and ask yourself if you know of such an organization. -Michael Bouman


I recently had the pleasure of speaking with Janice Lee Urton of the Urich Community Historical Society. I called to ask about the meaning of their 2007 Governor’s Humanities Award.  Mrs. Urton was kind enough to take time out of her busy schedule, holidays notwithstanding, to share with our readers just how much this award means to them and about the impact this award has had on their organization and community.

Their story demonstrates what can happen when a group of people come together with a similar vision and the determination to realize it.  Is there an organization that is doing exemplary work like this in your community? Mrs. Urton's story exemplifies just one of our award categories. We hope you will look at the categories of award and see if you know of a person or an organization that is deserving. Nominations are being accepted until January 25, 2008.  More information is available on our website, or by contacting me at megan@mohumanities.org or (800) 357-0909. -Megan-Marie K. Cahill

By Janice Lee (Gates) Urton, UCHS Vice President

In 2006 the Board of the Urich Community Historical Society became aware that there was an award called the Governor's Humanities Award.

At that time we were still working on the completion of our museum building (remodeling the near derelict structure, originally the James A. Kerr Drug Store built in 1885) and preparing for our fall activities of honoring our American military and making plans for our first Christmas Open House.

After watching a small core of people work tirelessly, sacrifice a huge amount of their time, and give of their many talents toward building a place that would house the treasures of the community, I thought we had the time to create a presentation book that featured many of the aspects of UCHS' involvement in strengthening the community.  We had been formed seven and a half years ago by a dedicated group of both rural and townspeople who wanted to see Urich, population 499, survive and thrive once again.  At one time Urich boasted a population of 1,000 and was the hub of the wheel of crossroad communities and smaller towns around.

There are many stories about the people and the events in their lives that have to be told about a place we call Small Town, Hometown, Heart of America, U.S.A.  Urich is a symbol of thousands of small towns scattered across the nation.  She is rich in history.  Her people have kept the town alive when "forces of progress" had diminished her size and almost destroyed her.

When asked what we gained or what the impact of this award has been on our community, my answer is, it has given us HOPE; hope that Urich is now recognized as a contributor to the richness of the State of Missouri, not just a place to pass by en route to somewhere else, but a place to inquire of, to get to know and perhaps even to call "home."  Her people are precious. Her land is where the veterans of both sides of the Civil War and their families made the effort to secure peace among themselves and that "re-union" has continued for 113 years.  Her future is bright. 

Hope has a way of changing one's perspective from dwelling on the past despair of circumstances beyond one's control to looking forward to the future and one that has a promise of more good things to come. 

We were greatly blessed to have been chosen.  We are deeply honored to have been given this very prestigious award.  Our official grand opening was 07/07/07.  The Governor’s Humanities Award in the Category of Community Heritage was presented to the Urich Community Historical Society on October 10th.  We shall never forget the year 2007 and our new beginning.

High-Tech Benefits in "New Harmonies"

This is the last month we can accept community applications to host a touring Smithsonian exhibit on American "roots music" in 2009.

You can find a basic description of the exhibit on our web site. This article is all about why you should consider jumping in.


These exhibits are extremely popular in communities because they generate so much spirit and community involvement. The reason is, the exhibit is just the beginning! Host communities often create a local exhibit to go with the Smithsonian one. Where the subject is music, you can imagine the potential! Host communities also organize community activities. Again, just imagine the potential!

Do you have musical instrument makers in the vicinity? They could participate in fascinating ways? Do you have local people who compete in Bluegrass competitions or who represent other American musical traditions? How many people in your town do you imagine learned to play a musical instrument as some point in their lives?

Anything you can imagine about public activities or an exhibit can be enhanced, with our help, by setting a goal of creating some content for a web site. A library or museum might want to learn to create a downloadable audio recording of a local musician, or a podcast of an oral history interview with former students of a beloved band director. Or you might want to learn how to create an interactive feature where people in town can share pictures related to the theme of American music.

Involvement in the Smithson's exhibit program opens up all sorts of doors to involving the community and learning how to extend the life of your work on the internet. For any sponsor town that requests our help, we will organize training in techniques of gathering content so that it can be used in a variety of ways and of displaying content in a variety of formats.

We are very excited about helping people learn to function more comfortably in oral history, documenting, and disseminating. We'll help you set a goal and help you reach it.

The deadline for submitting an application is December 31, though. We want to give the six selected towns many months of lead time to create plans and work with us on ways and means of achieving them!

Contact my esteemed colleague, Patricia Zahn, if you need more information. -Michael Bouman