Holocaust Museum Exhibit to Explore
Ethnic Cleansing in Bosnia
Nov. 25, 2007 thru May, 2008

Prijedor: Lives from the Bosnian Genocide, a multi-media exhibit to explore ethnic cleansing in the Bosnian city of Prijedor, will open at 2 p.m., Sunday, Nov. 25, 2007, at the Holocaust Museum and Learning Center (HMLC) in the Jewish Federation Kopolow Building in Creve Coeur.

Bosnian Ambassador to the United States, Dr. Bisera Turkovic, joined by survivors from Prijedor, will officially inaugurate the exhibit with a ribbon cutting ceremony.  Also attended by Missouri Representative, Jeanette Mott Oxford, of the 59th District.

Through documentary artifacts, photographs and first-person accounts, the exhibit will tell the story of the Bosnian city that became the epicenter of genocidal violence in the former Yugoslavia in the early 1990s.  The exhibit will run through May, 2008.

“This exhibit is a natural extension of the work of our Holocaust Museum and an opportunity to bring the Jewish and Bosnian communities together to discuss shared experiences,” said Jean Cavender, HMLC director. “Survivors of the Holocaust and Bosnian genocide have experienced evil beyond human comprehension. The Museum gives them a forum for their testimony so that others may learn. This exhibition and the situation in Darfur, Sudan, are also reminders that the world community has not done a very good job of enforcing Never Again.”

At the opening program, award-winning British journalist Ed Vulliamy, author of Seasons in Hell: Understanding Bosnia’s War, will be keynote speaker. He was one of the first reporters to uncover the network of concentration camps in the Prijedor area in 1992. Vulliamy recently discussed the exhibit and the story of Prijedor on St. Louis' KWMU radio.  Hear the interview.

The Prijedor exhibition is a community collaboration among the Holocaust Museum, Union of Citizens of the Municipality of Prijedor, Bosnians from Prijedor who have either settled in St. Louis or are coming in for the special event, and students and faculty from Fontbonne University who conducted video interviews with local Prijedor survivors as part of a recent class on the Bosnian immigration.

St. Louis is home to some 50,000 Bosnian refugees, one of the largest such communities in the world. When the first Bosnian refugees began arriving in St. Louis in the early 1990s, they were mainly survivors of concentration camps and killing centers in Prijedor. Their arrival – against a backdrop of targeted mass killings of civilians, violent displacement from homes, forced imprisonment, torture and systematic rape – signaled the reemergence of genocide in Europe at the end of the 20th century.

“We want people to understand why we came to St. Louis and the events that brought us here,” said Amir Karadzic, president of the Union of Citizens of Prijedor and exhibit project coordinator.

“The exhibit provides a window into this new and important community for those of us on the outside, and it also serves as a mirror that reflects back on our Bosnian participants as we consider with them the human cost of the genocide in Prijedor,” said Patrick McCarthy, exhibit advisor and longtime contributor to local relief efforts for Bosnian refugees.  

“When we become indifferent to the suffering of others, we run the risk of becoming complicit in the crime of genocide. It is important to keep talking about these historical events with the hope that the next generation of leaders will learn and take action,” added Cavender.  

The exhibit and related programming are underwritten by the Missouri Humanities Council, the Regional Arts Commission, Southern Commercial Bank, Holocaust Museum and Learning Center, Fontbonne University, and donors Ken and Nancy Kranzberg, Karen and Mont Levy, The Mildred Simon Foundation, Union of Citizens of the Municipality of Prijedor and Hannah and Larry Langsam.

The Holocaust Museum and Learning Center is a department of Jewish Federation of St. Louis.