January at the War Childhood Museum

This January, the War Childhood Museum continued the year with a strong focus on education, youth-led exhibitions, professional development for educators, and new international collaborations.

Read more about our activities this month:

Educational Programs and Visits

At the beginning of the year, we welcomed groups from Croatia, France, Germany, and Belgium, marking the continuation of our educational visits program. Through guided tours and workshops, participants explored how war shapes childhood and how personal stories and objects can foster empathy, reflection, and dialogue.

Conferences, Seminars, and Exhibitions

As part of the PEACESTORY project, a group of young people from Donji Vakuf, Central Bosnia, opened the exhibition “The City and Us.” Over the past year, the group worked closely with mentors from the War Childhood Museum and partner organizations to learn how to use creativity as a tool for developing museum collections and producing exhibitions. Similar youth teams across Bosnia and Herzegovina are currently working on creating their own exhibitions.

Take a look at the atmosphere from the opening here.

During January, we also announced an open call for the seminar “Children in Genocide: Educational Approaches.” The seminar brings together professionals working with children to exchange experiences and further develop educational practices on the topics of genocide, war, and childhood. Together with educational experts from the War Childhood Museum and HERMES, participants will reflect on their approaches and work on lesson plans tailored to their own contexts.

The seminar is open to teachers, educators, and professionals from different fields who work with children. More information is available here.

News

In 2025, we updated the War Childhood Museum mobile guide to include additional languages, making our content more accessible to visitors from around the world.

Explore the process in this video.

We also published an interview with Nikola Kandić, one of the Museum’s external educators, focusing on creating safe learning spaces, breaking down inherited stereotypes, and the importance of authenticity in peace education. Read the interview here.

In addition, the War Childhood Museum and the Center for the Prevention of Addiction (Stručni centar za prevenciju ovisnosti) signed a long-term Memorandum of Cooperation, formalizing support for children and young people involved in the Big Brother, Big Sister program. Through this partnership, the Museum provides free entry for mentor–volunteer pairs, further strengthening their role in children’s empowerment and healthy development.

Projects

The War Childhood Museum Ukraine team presented a new pilot project for educators titled “How to Talk to Children About Memory: Using the ‘Object-Based Learning’ Method.”
This project introduces the first learning materials developed from the Ukrainian archive’s collection of stories and objects.

Personal story highlight

In this month’s edition, we are publishing a story by Arina from Kharkiv about a special candle.

Cities and villages across Ukraine continue to face prolonged power outages, sometimes lasting several days, due to repeated damage to the country’s energy infrastructure caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion. In these conditions, people are forced to adapt their daily routines: working, studying, and carrying out everyday tasks without reliable electricity, heating, or water. Many businesses rely on generators to keep operating.

Despite these challenges, our team in Kyiv continues their work, documenting children’s experiences and preserving their stories.

You can read Arina’s story here..