I knew Bradley Viner, the popular vet on the Good Morning TV (GMTV) breakfast show, and I asked if he could speak to the show’s producer. I also knew a PR woman who had links to the editor of a national newspaper. Another contact knew someone at UNICEF. One week after pulling the Bosnian children’s letter from the fax machine, armed with huge motivation and the spark of an idea, a meeting was arranged with representatives from GMTV, UNICEF and the PR contact in the Fleet Street office of the Sunday People, editor-in-chief Bridget Rowe. Sitting in that room, it was yet another of many situations where I thought to myself: ‘How the hell did I get here?’
After two hours of exchanging thoughts and throwing ideas in the air, we came up with the ‘Anne Frank Children to Children Appeal for Bosnia’, the name of the campaign agreed by all in Bridget’s office. The concept was simple: children in the UK would be asked to send a letter to the children of Bosnia who were trapped in the war, showing their care and support. There was a feeling hovering in that office that the spirit of Anne Frank was about to link children across Europe.
The ‘Anne Frank Children to Children Campaign for Bosnia’ was launched by an appeal on the GMTV Breakfast Show in March 1993. I sat on the sofa with the presenters Eamonn Holmes and Lorraine Kelly and explained how we were asking for every British child to send a letter of support to a child in Bosnia. I hoped that thousands of children would be watching as they tucked into their cornflakes before going off to school. And maybe some teachers too, who would take the idea into their classrooms. I instructed the children to write on the envelope the word ‘ZDRAVO’ which means ‘Hello’ in the Serbo-Croat language. I also suggested adding the Serbo-Croat words for, ‘I wish you peace and I care about you’. Writers were asked to put their age on the front of the envelope so they could be delivered to similar-aged children, and if possible to include a small token, such as a hair slide, a page of stickers or a friendship bracelet, to remind the Bosnian children of normality – and childhood. However, I did explain that this was not a pen pal scheme and the British children should not expect a response from a child who was caught up in war and also that the letters would be delivered to children from all sides of the conflict, whether Serb, Croat or Muslim.
As the letters started to arrive and the plan was becoming a reality, it was all set up for the delivery to Bosnia to be undertaken by the Post Office. But to my horror, when I called the Post Office regarding the first batch of letters waiting to be delivered, I was told by a regional manager that the Post Office had just stopped all their deliveries into the war zone. This was a disaster. How could we disappoint the children of Bosnia, as well as the British children who were busy composing their letters of support? I had managed to expose the idea to millions of people all across the UK, and now they would be let down due to a logistics problem.
Suddenly the phone on my desk rang. I was not in the mood to answer any phone calls as I was so frustrated. Thankfully Ruth, my administrator, answered it. It was the UNICEF press officer on the line phoning for an update on the campaign. When I shared with her my frustration about the failure of delivering the letters to Bosnia, she made a brilliant suggestion to solve the problem by taking some of them on her next trip to Bosnia. She also offered to connect me with a group of gung-ho and fearless young New Zealanders who were driving supply trucks from London to Bosnia. Their set up was called ‘The Serious Road Trip’ and their missions were indeed serious. I went to meet them in their Camden warehouse and they agreed to collect all the letters and deliver them to Bosnia.
At 7.00 a.m. on a bright morning in May 1993 a group of people assembled on the South Bank of the Thames alongside the TV studios. We were to be filmed for GMTV loading the truck with boxes containing no less than 100,000 letters and gifts. We were joined by several school groups and our co-founder Bee Klug and her husband, both by then elderly but still passionately involved. Everyone helped them load the trucks. After making sure everything was properly loaded, the trucks were secured and our grateful goodbyes to the convoy were said, the engine revved up and the truck was off on its way, leaving long smoke trails behind as it slowly disappeared in the distance.
Travelling on the convoy was a young woman reporter for the Sunday People newspaper. Her name was Ruki Sayid, small but feisty and not overly bothered by the fact that as a Muslim she might be given a hard time at the Serb checkpoints and possibly even jeopardize her safety. The drive across Europe to Bosnia took three days, but once across the Bosnian border, driving into the city of Zenica took even longer, due to the interminable waits to get through checkpoints. All around they could hear the sounds of gunfire and shelling. As they approached the first Serb checkpoint, Ruki’s cavalier attitude was deflated, and she felt her first real concern when the armed soldiers demanded to go through the trucks’ contents box by box. But then when the soldiers saw the letters and colourful gifts crammed inside the boxes, they directed the trucks to a Serb village a few miles up the road so that these children too could receive some of the goodies. At each checkpoint, the contents of the trucks were scrupulously inspected by the Serb Army, and only when the soldiers were satisfied that they were not transporting guns or ammunition were they allowed to proceed. The first stop in Zenica was to be the school where the original letter from the class of 12-year-olds had been sent from. When the truck eventually arrived at the school, Ruki and the guys found to their shock it had been closed down and turned into a refugee centre. The class of 12-year-olds could not be traced. The children’s question about whether they would ‘live to see peace’ may have in some cases been premonitory. The convoy left some of the letters and gifts for the children at the refugee centre and headed on towards the ravaged city of Sarajevo, which had just thirteen years earlier been the proud location for the 1980 Winter Olympics. When ‘The Serious Road Trip’ got to the city, the letters were handed over to the UNICEF team, who delivered a consignment to children in a hospital and then made an appeal on the local radio station for children to come and collect letters and gifts.
Edith Simmons-Richner was working as the Liaison Officer for UNICEF in the Former Yugoslavia. She was travelling regularly through Croatia, Serbia, Sarajevo and Bosnia-Herzegovina managing a wonderful project called ‘I Dream of Peace’, which encouraged children throughout the former Yugoslavia to draw and write about their situation in the war and their hopes for the future. (An exhibition of the ‘I Dream of Peace’ drawings and paintings was later shown at the Anne Frank House and a book published by UNICEF sold all over the world.) I had first been put in contact with Edith while she was in Zagreb and she immediately became enthusiastic about the Anne Frank letter-writing campaign. Edith described the situation in Sarajevo when the convoy with our letters had arrived.
Sarajevo was under siege and, on top of daily bombings, people were also targeted by snipers from the surrounding hills; it was very dangerous. Children no longer went to school and many hid with their families in cellars because groups were easy targets. I often visited families, and especially children, in their cellars and in the hospital. Children missed school terribly and often asked me if I had seen their teacher. So, instead of children going to school, UNICEF facilitated teachers to visit children and teach in the cellars. When your letters arrived in Sarajevo, they were distributed along with vital distributions of food and other survival items.
Edith reminded me that the Anne Frank Children to Children Campaign had inspired the Holocaust Education Trust in Albany, New York State, to send a delivery of teddy bears for the children in Sarajevo hospitals to cuddle during their treatment.
The ‘Anne Frank Children to Children Appeal for Bosnia’ lasted three weeks. There was no internet, email, or social media in 1993 but nonetheless the idea of Anne Frank’s spirit linking children across Europe captured the imagination of the country. We received over 100,000 letters and gifts, including one from Zimbabwe and ironically we even had a few from the Netherlands. Some envelopes said ‘From a Mother to a Mother’ or ‘From
a Teacher to a Teacher’. The Mars confectionery company sent a crate of chocolate bars to be distributed to the children. Penguin Books sent a box of fluffy toy penguins, one of which sat on the truck’s dashboard on its journey across Europe, and I am sure its defiant presence helped dissuade any snipers from targeting the truck. The letters and gifts had meant so much to the Bosnian children and were so gratefully received that UNICEF asked if the Anne Frank Trust could continue the campaign. We were flattered to have been asked and willing to do so, but with the Trust at that time consisting of just me and Ruth, it was impossible.
Towards the end of the campaign Ruth and I paid a final visit to ‘The Serious Road Trip’s’ Camden warehouse and took photos of each other sitting waist-deep in letters and parcels. I can’t describe my feeling of joy that Anne Frank’s letter appeal had so captured the imagination of children.
In the spring of 1993 the ‘Anne Frank Children to Children Appeal’ for Bosnia had managed to fulfil the plea of the Holocaust survivors with whom I had a conversation that had echoed in my head all that night. The campaign had achieved in three weeks what we had set out to do – to show British children that they can take responsibility for children caught in war in faraway places and most importantly to send a message to the children trapped in war that they are not forgotten and there are others who care about them. We wanted to ensure that the Nazi method of breaking children’s spirit by telling them that they were abandoned would not happen again. Anne Frank had brought together the children who suffered and the children who cared.
Zlata Filipović – the Bosnian Anne Frank
The war in Bosnia and Herzegovina was characterized by bitter fighting, indiscriminate shelling of towns and cities, ethnic cleansing and systematic mass rape. By the end of the conflict over 200,000 people had been killed, injured or missing, including those who had died from hunger or exposure. The Siege of Sarajevo, the longest siege of a capital city in modern history, lasted even longer than the notorious Siege of Leningrad in the Second World War.
After being first besieged by the forces of the Yugoslav People’s Army, Sarajevo was then besieged by the Serbian Army between April 1992 and February 1996. The city was encircled by 13,000 Serbian soldiers stationed in the surrounding hills, from where they continually assaulted the city with artillery, tanks and small arms. Ten thousand civilians, including 1,500 children, were killed in Sarajevo during the 46-month-long siege.
Sarajevo’s people fought desperately to defend themselves against shelling, starvation and the loss of everything they knew. ‘Sniper Alley’ became a notorious street where desperate civilians ran to get food and supplies, darting from side to side of the road to avoid the bullets. An elderly man was captured on camera lying dead beside two loaves of bread he managed to buy for his besieged family. Thousands of children also found themselves trapped. They could not play in the streets or playgrounds, they could not go to school and they could not see their friends. The children could not understand the meaning of the term ‘war’.
Eleven-year-old Zlata Filipović was one of those children. Up until the spring of 1992 Zlata had enjoyed an idyllic childhood, brought up in a comfortable professional family as an only child. Like Anne Frank she enjoyed holidays, in Zlata’s case spent on the Croatian coast or skiing in the mountains. Zlata’s father was a lawyer and she loved playing in his office. As an avid reader and writer she appreciated having this easy access to paper, pens and stationery. Zlata grew up with no knowledge of who happened to be Serb, Muslim, Croat, Jewish or Catholic and finding herself trapped in a war zone was totally strange to her. ‘When I read Anne’s diary, I thought that wars only happened in history, not in Europe anymore and certainly not in my home,’ she told me when I first met her in London in 1995. Later on, Zlata described to me how she felt for the fate of that ‘incredibly talented writer and beautiful person called Anne Frank’. Having read Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl, Zlata decided to start writing about being trapped in Sarajevo as the bombs rained down. She was also inspired by a friend who kept a diary, who was three years older and she considered ‘pretty cool’. Copying Anne Frank’s idea, she then made a list of names for her diary, most of which were comical, but then settled on Mimmy, in honour of her recently-deceased goldfish of the same name. As Zlata started to put pen to paper, little did this 11-year-old realize that she would soon become known around the world as ‘The Anne Frank of Sarajevo’.
The brutal war was difficult for Zlata’s family, particularly the siege which was intolerable. ‘Only those who were in it could understand the feeling of being under siege,’ said Meric Sidran, a 23-year-old student who managed to flee Sarajevo. ‘The feeling that you are alive but limited, capable but controlled by others, could freak the most relaxed person.’ Zlata’s handwritten notebook detailed her day to day life, her reaction to the war, her dreams of peace and fears for the future. Just like Anne Frank, Zlata dreams of going to the park again, playing with her friends and doing the things she used to. Anne Frank had hidden with her family in rooms above her father’s workplace, and in a vertical reversal Zlata hid in the basement below the family’s home in the centre of Sarajevo. Anne wrote poignantly about leaving her beloved cat Moortje behind when going into hiding, while Zlata writes about how her canary Cico died because they couldn’t get enough food for him.
Zlata’s diary was first published as a pamphlet by UNICEF and then picked up by French journalists. The manuscript was bought by a French publisher, who pulled all possible strings to evacuate the family to France. Recalling her escape twenty years later to the Daily Telegraph she said, ‘It was bizarre. If you were wounded, or an orphan, or sick, you could never have got out of Sarajevo. But we did.’ Leaving the besieged city in a UN truck, she remembers staring out of the tiny windows at the post office, her school and the city she grew up in as they sped away. After crossing the border, they first went to Paris, where Zlata started to settle in and recalls even fancying a boy, but then the family moved on to Dublin. As a student of English from childhood she found no problem in settling there and found the people warm and welcoming. She now speaks with a soft and distinctive Irish accent.
In a speech at the opening of the Anne Frank exhibition in Dublin in 2013, Zlata described her discomfort and embarrassment at the time with being described as another ‘Anne Frank’ as she knew that Anne’s writing was much more advanced and mature than hers as an 11-year-old. But as a worldly adult she was pragmatic at the description. ‘I guess that’s what journalists do. There’s an Anne Frank of Afghanistan (Latifa), of Pakistan (Malala), and probably now of Syria. But in my mind there’s only one Anne Frank.’ But recently she has confided in me an additional reason for her resistance to the comparison with Anne Frank. ‘There were 900 bombs falling on the city of Sarajevo. I was a superstitious kid. I didn’t want to be the Anne Frank of Sarajevo as I was terrified my fate would be the same as hers.’
Zlata’s Diary, A Child’s Life in Wartorn Sarajevo had first been published by UNICEF in 1993 while Zlata was still living in Bosnia. It was then picked up by countries around the world and her name became internationally known. She was first given the title the ‘Anne Frank of Sarajevo’ by the American journalist Janine di Giovanni and then other journalists followed suit. She had not known at the time about the Anne Frank Trust’s letter-writing appeal in 1993 as the family only used the radio once a day to preserve the batteries. She had received a letter from a school in America and she told me how much it had meant to her not to be forgotten by the outside world. When she heard that I had run the letter-writing campaign with the aid of one staff member and that it had generated 100,000 letters she gasped and profoundly thanked me on behalf of the children of Sarajevo. Even twenty-three years later, hearing this response from someone who had been on the other side was emotional and humbling.
The Anne Frank Exhibition goes to Bosnia
Mostar was a medieval city and the cultural capital of Herzegovina. The city got its name from the
bridge keepers (mostari) who in medieval times guarded the Stari Most (Old Bridge) over the River Neretva, which had been built by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. It was one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most recognizable landmarks and considered one of the most outstanding examples of Islamic architecture in the Balkans.
In November 1993, like many of Mostar’s bridges and over 2,000 of its citizens who were killed, the Old Bridge became a victim of the Bosnian war when it was destroyed by a Croatian army tank, effectively dividing the Muslim community on the east bank and the Croatian community on the west bank. The Bosnian war was officially ended by the signing of the Dayton Agreement in December 1995. Soon afterwards, the great Italian operatic tenor Luciano Pavarotti, along with artistes such as Brian Eno, U2 and others, used a series of concerts called ‘Pavarotti and Friends’, to raise funds to set up a music and arts centre to help heal the war-damaged children of the town, where there was ‘too much trauma’. The Pavarotti Music Centre opened in December 1997 providing music education for young people, as well as dance classes and theatre performances. There was even a small recording studio.
The centre’s trauma therapists decided the children needed to be introduced to a different history and so approached the Anne Frank House to bring the Anne Frank exhibition. The Holocaust had extended to Bosnia and Herzegovina, which was annexed by the Nazi puppet ‘Independent State of Croatia’ and 10,000 of the country’s pre-war 14,000-strong Jewish community were murdered. During the more recent Balkans war, the tiny remaining Jewish community, who were not targets of the violence, had taken part in the relief effort.
The Legacy of Anne Frank Page 19