Zlata's Diary (3 page)

Going back to Bosnia every year and keeping in touch with my family and friends there, and keeping up to date with all the events, brings another perspective to the war that disrupted everything there. People assume that because we no longer hear of something on the news, everything is fine, the war is finished and everything is back to normal. But peace means not only the absence of war, but so many other things that take a long time to rebuild, and Bosnia, even ten years after the war finished, still faces a lot more challenges. I once asked a man whose job it is glue together broken countries just how long it would take for Bosnia to be where it was in April 1992. He said it would take thirty, forty years. No human being can afford this many years to wait for things to get better. I realize there seem to be two scales of time, two very different ways of measuring it—the historical time for countries and politics, and that which can only fit into a lifetime. While it may take decades for a country torn apart by war to recover, the people who experienced the war, who lost their dear ones in it, who perhaps escaped and have become displaced elsewhere, must find the strength to continue with their lives on a daily basis.

Today, Bosnia is facing its recent history, and people are trying to put all the broken pieces together. There is a War Crimes Tribunal putting the people responsible for the war and the atrocities that happened on trial and maybe even in jail. Various ethnic groups are trying to talk to each other again, with varying success; refugees are trying to return to their old addresses; families who have lost members are living daily with their grief and trying to pick up their lives; factories and companies are trying to rebuild from where they were interrupted by war. Personally, I have not yet understood what really happened in Bosnia. Why did people turn against one another, why did neighbors suddenly start feeling different, why did people mark themselves as “us” and “them,” why do horrors of incredible scale still happen in the twenty-first century? The full truth of what happened, one that can be accepted by all sides, is still not fully unearthed, it is still not ready. There is so much more work to be done.

I hope that my role in life will contribute somehow to the understanding of war, and the advancement of peace. That is what I have been doing for twelve years now, and this desire sprang from finding myself in the position of speaking out when this diary was published. I chose to accept that role, and I am choosing it every day and am looking to the future. I have also understood the power of the individual experience in war, or in any kind of large-scale tragedy. When we hear of wars, we hear the numbers of dead and wounded, of dates of battles, attacks, names of places that no longer exist. We become numbed by the onslaught of cold facts, and we forget that every event touched individuals, ordinary people, children, young people, grown-ups, grandparents, one by one. If we listen to each and every story, or if we even hear one and imagine all the others, we can get some sense of what the extent of the war really is.

Over the last year and a half, I have been working on a collection of other young people's diaries written in wars that happened over the course of the last 140 years, because I think we all need to become resensitized to individuals' stories and experiences, and if we multiply that by a million, a billion, we can get a sense of what kind of world we are living in, and become involved in making a future that is better than the record of our past. I think we all need to remember our capacity for empathy and through education, stretch ourselves to imagine what it is like to be in someone else's shoes and wish every person the same pair of shoes that we would like to wear. This year, we are also marking sixty years since the end of the Second World War, when we said “Never again!” to ever repeating such atrocities. Unfortunately, we did not keep that promise, but perhaps we can try again.

If at the end of this whole journey that my diary has taken, at least one person now knows where Sarajevo is and what events took place there in the early 1990s, that is a success for me. If one or more people get a sense of what it means to be a child in conflict, that is huge. If, on top of it, they feel compelled to remember this, to apply this knowledge elsewhere, to learn from it, to teach it to others, to truly understand it, then I feel completely delighted at what this tiny diary did and maybe still can do.

I first heard of Zlata Filipović in the summer of 1993 when a Bosnian friend told me about a young girl who was being called “the Anne Frank of Sarajevo.” I found out that Zlata was a thirteen-year-old girl, living with her parents, who had been keeping a diary since September 1991, a few months before the first barricades went up in the city and the heavy shelling began. Before the war broke out, she led a very happy, normal life; she had no way of knowing that within six months her life would change irrevocably. When she began writing her diary, which she called Mimmy, she had no idea that the family weekend house outside Sarajevo would be destroyed; that her best friends would be killed while playing in a park. She only thought about things that any normal thirteen-year-old girl thinks about: pop music, movies, boys, Linda Evangelista and Claudia Schiffer, skiing in the mountains outside Sarajevo and her next holiday in Italy or at the beach. Her family was comfortably well-off, the apartment in which her parents had lived for twenty years was spacious and elegant with a view of the river, and they had neighbors, relatives and friends nearby who were constantly dropping in.

Life changed quickly in the spring of 1992. Within a couple of months of Zlata's first diary entry, Serbian artillery positions were set up on the hills directly above her house and the family had to move all their possessions into the front room, which was protected from shrapnel by sandbags. Soon, there were no more windows left in Zlata's apartment: they were all blown out by the impact of shells. At that point, Bosnians who could leave the city fled; others refused to go, not really believing that their city would be reduced to rubble. Zlata watched with disbelief as her friends and relatives tried desperately to flee before it was too late. “I'm all alone here,” she wrote.

Over the next few months, Zlata watched her world fall apart. She could not comprehend the issues that had become all-important: ethnic cleansing, the Geneva talks, Lord Owen and the division of Bosnia. She could only comprehend that nothing was the same and nothing would ever be the same again. Her father, a lawyer whose office was next door to their apartment, stopped working, but eerily, the sign remained on the door which was littered with shrapnel. Her mother, a chemist, began to slip into a state of gloom and despair as the family spent day after day cowering in the cellar while heavy artillery ravaged Sarajevo. Supplies ran low and then became nonexistent. The electricity was cut, the phone went dead, water stopped running from the taps. Food consisted of humanitarian aid packages: tasteless white feta cheese, the occasional loaf of bread if you waited long enough in line and were brave enough to face the shelling, the occasional can of meat bought on the black market for 50 Deutsche Marks. There was no water to take a bath or flush a toilet. The only way to get it was to stand in a water line under frequent shell-fire. Her parents lost so much weight that they could not wear any of their old clothes. Zlata told me that “I gained some because I am still growing.” She could not remember when she'd last eaten an egg, a piece of fruit.

Before the war, she had been a diligent student studying English, music, math and literature, but because the Serbs often targeted schools and playgrounds, school was stopped—it was too dangerous to walk the few blocks to attend classes. Zlata was not allowed to go outside and play, so she had to stay in the apartment. Whenever it seemed safe, she would practice the piano, which was in her parents' bedroom—one of the more dangerous rooms. She played Bach and Chopin even while the sound of machine guns echoed from the hills. It gave her comfort to know that, despite the war, her playing was improving. For a short while, it also made her forget that outside in the streets below her, a war was being fought. And all the time, she kept on writing about her daily life.

During the summer of 1993, Zlata submitted her diaries to a teacher, who had them published by a small press in Sarajevo with the help of the International Centre for Peace. She became an instant celebrity , with packs of journalists and television crews climbing the stairs to her apartment to quiz the small girl about her life. Zlata responded graciously in her careful schoolgirl English. She had lost so many of her friends that she became friendly with some of the journalists. But journalists do not stay for long in Sarajevo, and whenever one left Zlata suffered a feeling of loss.

I first met Zlata when her school temporarily restarted last autumn. A small figure with bright blue eyes bounded up to me enthusiastically with an outstretched hand and addressed me in English. We sat on a wall and when a shell fell I noticed that she did not flinch. As we walked to her house, she talked about her life, her dreams, her sadness. She told me about the death of Nina, a friend she had known since she was very young and who had been killed. “How many of your friends have died?” I asked her gently. She thought for a moment. “Too many to count,” she replied. I thought then that she seemed more adult, more resigned and stoical, than most of the adults I knew.

In October, during one of the worst days of shelling, I drove to Zlata's house to make sure that the family was all right. Her mother answered the door; she was shaking with fear. “We were in the basement all morning,” she said, and her voice broke. She sat on the sofa in the “safe room” and collapsed into sobs. Zlata and I stood by watching helplessly while she wept for half an hour. “No more, no more, we cannot bear any more.” I gave her a cigarette, but her hand shook so heavily that she could not bring it to her lips; her foot tapped violently against the bare floor. I sat on the floor with Zlata beside me, but there was little I could say. Certainly not “I understand,” because I did not—as a journalist, I was able to leave Sarajevo at free will—and certainly not “Don't worry, the war will end soon,” because we would have known that it was a lie.

At one point, I turned around to see Zlata. I placed my hand on her shoulder and asked, “Are you all right?” She looked at me gravely and said, “I have to be all right.” Her voice was very old and it chilled me. Not only had she lost her innocence, those wonderful years when she should have been meeting boys and laughing with her girlfriends, but she was in the terrible reversed position of having to be strong for the sake of her parents. Even if she wanted to, she could not fall apart.

That afternoon, Zlata's mother asked me if I would drive to a very dangerous part of town to make sure her sister was still alive. Her family lived in an area where the shelling was intense. I said I would, because I had access that day to an armored car. But the area was deep in the territory of a war-lord who was notorious for stealing cars and flak jackets and for dragging Bosnians out of their cars and forcing them to dig trenches. My driver, who had Serb identification, refused to go and told me it was suicide if I did. Frustrated, I abandoned the attempt and drove back. I used my Deutsche Marks to buy all I could find on the black market: the selection was pathetic, but I knew that Zlata and her parents would welcome anything. So I climbed the stairs to their apartment with a few bags of wilted vegetables, a few cans of Coke, some chocolate, a few cans of meat, some candles. When I entered the room, the family's eyes lit up: as though, instead of a few onions, I had brought a turkey from Harrods. When I talked to Zlata later about food, she reminisced about all the wonderful things that she used to eat, and then laughing, said, “Stop! That's enough!” The memory of walking through the streets of the old town of Sarajevo and stopping for a pizza or spaghetti (“real spaghetti, with meat and cheese, not the kind of spaghetti we have now, with nothing on it”) was too painful to bear for a thirteen-year-old who existed on rice and beans.

We sat on her bed in her bedroom decorated with posters of supermodels, and she showed me family pictures of a different world: Zlata as a baby being held by her grandmother, Zlata and her mother outside the beloved weekend house, Zlata and her father on the beach in Italy. There was one faded picture of two small children standing in a park. She stared at it and said, “That's my friend Nina. We were playing in the same park that she was killed in.” Before turning the page, she paused over the photograph, touching it as though she could touch her friend.

Zlata is an only child, treasured and protected by her parents. Perhaps it was the confidence inspired by her family life that gave her the will to endure the horrors that were taking place on her doorstep. During the course of reporting the war in Bosnia, I met many children, sat with them in the hospital, in their homes, in orphanages. All of them were traumatized and shell-shocked. I spoke to psychiatrists who talked of post-traumatic stress syndrome and the effect of the war on all these children. Zlata was different: she was suffering, but because she was recording the events taking place around her, she tended to see the world from a slightly detached viewpoint. It was almost as though she was watching a film in which she was a character. There are hundreds of thousands like her in Bosnia: besieged, frightened, their short lives suddenly ground to a halt. The difference is that Zlata kept a careful record of the chilling events—the deaths, the mutilations, the sufferings. When we read her diaries, we think of desperation, of confusion and of innocence lost, because a child should not be seeing, should not be living with this kind of horror. Her tragedy becomes our tragedy because we know what is happening in Sarajevo. And still, we do not act.

I wrote about Zlata in the
Sunday Times
[London] and shortly afterward, I received this letter from an eight-year-old in Glasgow, which she asked me to forward to Zlata: