2007 McCloskey Fellow Announced: Ramajana Hidic Demirovic
IU student to travel to Croatia and Bosnia in summer 2007

Hidic Demirovic pictured with her daughter, Ayra

The second Frank McCloskey Fellow, Ramajana Hidic Demirovic, is a doctoral student in the IU History Department and a Bosnian war survivor. Hidic Demirovic was born and raised in Doboj, Bosnia and Herzegovina. She lived in Zagreb, Croatia, from 1992-1995 as a refugee before immigrating to San Francisco, California. She holds a bachelor’s degree from University of California Davis and a master’s degree from San Francisco State University.

Through this fellowship, Hidic Demirovic will receive support for her travel to Croatia and Bosnia in summer 2007 to complete preliminary research for her dissertation. Her topic is “Laura Papo Bohoreta: Sephardim in Bosnia.” It will tell the story of Sephardim life in the early twentieth century and its destruction during the Holocaust. Laura Levi Papo, also known as Bohoreta, was a famous poet and a playwright born in Sarajevo in 1891. Bohoreta was an exceptional woman of her time. She spoke six languages, taught French and literature, wrote poetry, short stories, plays and prose, including fifteen pieces in various Jewish magazines between 1924 and 1936.

Bohoreta’s work describes the life and the destruction of the Jewish community in Bosnia, as she lived during some of the most turbulent periods in Bosnian history. Changes starting from the late nineteenth century included the occupation of Bosnia by the Austro Hungarian Empire (1878), the two world wars, and the creation of Yugoslavia. Thus the goal of Hidic Demirovic’s project is to examine the effect of these changes on Bohoreta’s life, her career, her volunteer work, her family and the Bosnian Jewish community.  She will look at sources located in the Bosnian state archives, Sarajevo city archives, National Theater archives,  the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum in DC, and the Jasenovac camp archives.

Hidic Demirovic pictured with relatives in Bosnia

Hidic Demirovic’s selection as the 2007 McCloskey Fellow is in recognition of both her scholarly potential for the dissertation research project, and also of her ongoing work with the Refugee Transitions and Bosnian Genocide Survivors Project in San Francisco.

When Hidic Demirovic arrived in California some twelve years ago, one of the first things she did was to look for a local Bosnian community. It was 1995, and Bosnians had begun to settle in various parts of the United States as refugees who escaped the Bosnian inferno. She began to frequent Bosnian meetings in San Francisco and San Jose, where she met several survivors of the infamous Omarska camp. She started to pay visits to them and their families, partly because of the warm Bosnian pies she longed for, but also because she was intrigued by the way they lived their lives with the memories of war and imprisonment at Omarska.  The long afternoons she spent in their homes often ended with stories from Omarska and Manjaca. At times the stories were unbearable, but other times they were told with a drop of humor.

Together with a few incredible individuals, Hidic Demirovic was able to start an oral history project called the Bosnian Genocide Survivors Project in San Francisco, California. The project became part of Refugee Transitions, a non-profit group that has been instrumental in helping Bosnian refugees to adjust to their new lives in the San Francisco Bay area. The Bosnian Genocide Survivors Project aims to collect survivor testimonies in an archive accessible to scholars, students, educators, mental health professionals, decision-makers, and the general public, for use of interview footage and other materials to conduct presentations at schools, civic organizations, and conferences.

In December 2006 the project recorded its first five interviews, and five new ones will be conducted in Northern and Southern California in summer 2007. All five interviewees currently reside in San Francisco and came from different parts of Bosnia. Each person has a story with details that many of those working on the project, despite being around the survivors, were surprised to learn for the first time.

The team of volunteers is in the process of raising the awareness about the project in different Bosnian communities around the United States and are preparing to publish stories and parts of interviews in Sabah (Morning) and Peta Strana Svijeta (Fifth Side of the World), newspapers that are published in Bosnian communities in the U.S. Furthermore, they have begun to establish relationships with oral history centers around the country in hopes that such centers will be able to provide them with further training and guidance related to filming, storage, and distribution of these interviews. Ultimately, their hope is that these interviews will contribute to a better understanding of what took place in Bosnia during early 1990s and that researchers will incorporate these interviews into their current and future projects.