These postcards from the Second World War are part of the collection, Return to Sender: One Hundred Years of Postcards from Kosovo. The owner of the collection, Kenneth Andresen, Professor of Communication at the University of Agder, Norway, kindly made them available to the Oral History Initiative on the occasion of the exhibition: Below the Radar: Memories of the Second World War in Kosovo (Pristina, May 9, 2015), marking the seventieth anniversary of the end of the War.
The front of the postcards project images of an old Kosovo, where buildings and people are scarce; and images of pivotal events, such as the staged opening of a first Albanian school under German occupation, or the coming together of a crowd after the liberation from the same occupation. The back of the postcards are often empty and when written, they are in Serbian language; they gives us just fragments of conversations that, if put into contexts, reveal the longing for loved ones, and the harshness of wartime. We added the portraits of proud Montenegrin partisans, and an action scene with an Albanian partisan at the center.
We present here an edited version of the original presentation.