November at the War Childhood Museum

This November, the War Childhood Museum continued strengthening its international collaborations — from global museum conferences and special delegations to educational visits, and new digital projects.

Read more about our activities this month:

Educational Programs and Visits

This month, we welcomed educational groups and visitors from Ukraine, Czechia, Italy, Germany, Croatia, and North Macedonia

We also hosted a delegation from the Imperial War Museum London, visiting Bosnia and Herzegovina as part of preparations for a major exhibition on war childhood set to open next year.

Conferences

At the 27th ICOM General Conference in Dubai, the world’s largest global gathering of museum and heritage professionals, the War Childhood Museum presented two important sessions:

Jasminko Halilović, WCM Founder, and Amina Krvavac, WCM Director in Bosnia and Herzegovina, jointly delivered the session “War Childhood Museum: Video Games and Museum Collections.” Participants explored community co-creation, how personal stories can be translated into interactive media, and tested a demo of “We Grew Up in War”.
Amina Krvavac was also among selected speakers in the “ICOM for Peace” session, where she presented the Museum’s peacebuilding approach and emphasized the role museums can play in divided and post-conflict societies.

WCM Educator Mersiha Began participated in the conference “Museum Education and Family: Intergenerational Learning, Shared Experience, and Identity Development” at the National Museum Kraljevo in Serbia. She presented WCM’s educational materials and shared best practices for fostering empathy, understanding, and intergenerational dialogue through museum activities.

Marking Important Dates

For the International Day of Solidarity with the Palestinian People, writer Amal Rafiq contributed a text for WCM reflecting on the shattered childhoods of Gaza’s children during and after the genocide.

Read the article on our website.

Special Projects

The demo of “We Grew Up in War”, a narrative video game based on stories from the War Childhood Museum collection, was released in November. The game introduces players to three children — Melisa, Valeria, and Matej — whose stories illuminate what it means to grow up during war in Bosnia and Herzegovina and Ukraine.

“We Grew Up in War” is developed by the award-winning indie studio Charles Games, as part of the international MEMENTOES project.

👉 Play, review, and share the demo: https://store.steampowered.com/…/We_Grew_Up_in_War_Demo/
👉 Watch the trailer here.

WCM Ukraine: Public Programs and Workshops

WCM Ukraine continued its series of online workshops exploring oral history, documentary film, education, and childhood studies:

“Oral, Visual, and Public History: The Experience of ‘After Silence’” — led by historian Andrii Usach and cultural manager Anna Yatsenko, who discussed their field expeditions across Ukraine, the digitization of family archives, and transforming collected materials into exhibitions, podcasts, films, and graphic narratives.
“Documentary Filmmaking as a Chronicle of Time” — with film director Bohdan Prykhodko, exploring documentary cinema as a tool for preserving places and moments at risk of disappearing, and as a form of therapy for communities affected by war.
“Working with Memory Themes in Participatory Educational Projects” — psychologist Anna Leninchska shared approaches to action-based learning, intergenerational dialogue, teen media communication, and ethical engagement with trauma.
“The Evolution of Childhood Concepts in the Soviet Union” — historian Julia Skubytska traced historical shifts in Soviet childhood ideologies and reflected on their lingering influence on contemporary policies toward children.

We also published an interview with Andrii Borutia, Public Programs Coordinator and Researcher at WCM Ukraine. You can read it here.

Media Mentions

The War Childhood Museum continues to be featured in both Bosnian and international media. Below is a selection of articles covering our work this month: