Postcards to Sarajevo

We began this lesson by watching Centropa’s film, Survival in Sarajevo, and walking through the traveling exhibition of the same name, which we brought to our school. Each class discussed the story and hardships the people in Sarajevo faced, the choices they made to support no matter what each person’s ethnic background was, and the courage it took to do that during an ethnic war.  We discussed what life may have been like for people during the siege of Sarajevo to wait for letters from the outside (and for their loved ones outside of Bosnia to wait for news from them), and how different that is from the immediacy of email and social media. Students then created their own postcards, using images and symbols representing themes from the film to decorate one side, and writing a message on the other. The postcards were hung over the Survival in Sarajevo exhibition, viewed by all students in the school.