ST. LOUIS — Sinan Jasarevic remembers being able to play in his neighborhood park without worrying about land mines. Vedran Marjanovic was judged unfairly at a new school. Greta Morina recalls the red-headed soldier who helped her family when they first arrived in the United States.

They were all part of the last generation to be born in the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia before war ripped the European country apart in the ’90s. They were all, as children, uprooted to an unknown city that would later come to be known as the capital of the Bosnian diaspora: St. Louis. It’s believed the greater metropolitan area around the Gateway City has the largest population of Bosnians outside Bosnia-Herzegovina, estimated to be near 70,000.

Twenty years later, their lives are very different. Yugoslavia’s children are graduating college, having babies and entering the workforce. These days, it would seem their interrupted childhoods were generations away, but their success came with stories of their own, filled with a whole new set of challenges.