ABSTRACT
Suhareka, Kosovo, March 2017: We are gathered in front of a thick glass window front, blocking what was formerly a cafe in the center of town. We are listening to Refki as he talks about this site, where approximately forty-four people, mostly women and children, were herded in by Serb forces, held captive, and then executed by a volley of grenades. Two women, one with her son, survived by pretending they were dead and then managed to escape the truck full of corpses on its way to a mass grave. I listen quietly with my nose to the glass, peering at the destruction and dusty residue still left behind from almost twenty years ago. This site was in the center of the last conflict of the 1998–99 Kosovo war after the fall of Yugoslavia. Town residents experienced wide-spread instances of civilian casualties, ethnic cleansing, disappearances, and other atrocities carried out under the orders of Milošević. As 2Refki tells the story, I feel my breath as it hits the glass and fogs. The heat and moisture on my face is rising as my body reacts to what I am hearing unfold. I am thinking about the mother who might have been my age, her son, who might have been the same age as my son; and I am trying to imagine where she stood in this space, where she fell, how she held her son under a pile of bloodied dead and dying … how was she able to emerge from this act of violence and still muster a sense of future for herself and her son? The story is both about survival and massacre. How does one have the capacity to think of life in terms of both limits and possibility—where trauma, chaos, new conditions, relations, desires, hopes, dreams, and imagination can sometimes, against all odds, propel resilience for new life and unexpected futures? We are here as part of a socially engaged arts and healing project empowering youth to envision and design community-centered solutions to endemic social and environmental challenges.—Personal reflection, Ann Holt <italic>There Were Survivors</italic>. Artwork by Ann Holt. This piece was created in response to work in Suhareka, Kosovo https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003148203/bed087a9-3f34-4fd2-9a14-88218ba6a781/content/fig0_1_PB.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/> https://s3-euw1-ap-pe-df-pch-content-public-p.s3.eu-west-1.amazonaws.com/9781003148203/bed087a9-3f34-4fd2-9a14-88218ba6a781/content/fig0_1_OC.jpg" xmlns:xlink="https://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"/>
