At the start of this preface, I mentioned all the people who wrote to me, and who are still writing today, telling me their thoughts on my diary, on the war in Bosnia, on war in general. These moving missives came and still come from people ranging from the age of ten all the way up to grandmothers and grandfathers across the world. I have been so overwhelmed and so touched by all of them. Their writings have been filled with questions: Where am I now? What happened to my friends, neighbors, parents? Do I still keep a diary? Do I have a new pet? Do I have a boyfriend? Do I still like Madonna and Michael Jackson? Have I ever gone back to Bosnia?
Well, here are some answers. After we left, the war went on for two more years, which I did not record, but maybe another girl who stayed behind did. Everyone mentioned in the diary remained in Bosnia, although eventually my uncle Braco, my cousin Melika and my best friend Mirna managed to leave Bosnia and all three of them came to live with us in Paris. When the war finished, my parents, Mirna, and I went back to Sarajevo as soon as our school year was over, in the summer of 1996. That was when Mirna returned to live in Bosnia with her parents (and she has just graduated as an architect there), but my parents and I came back to Dublin. Since then, I have returned to Bosnia every year, every summer, like thousands of other people who left during the war and became citizens of new countries. I still keep a very close relationship with the city and this is something very important for me.
My grandfather unfortunately passed away just two weeks before the peace agreement was signed. My grandparents did not have any gas or electricity, he was cold, got pneumonia, and passed away without ever knowing the war had ended, which makes it twice as sad. My grandmother is still in Sarajevo, and I look forward to seeing her every summer. As for my taste in music, this has changed somewhat, although shouting the lyrics of Madonna songs from 1991 still makes me very happy. Since Cicko (my canary) and Cici (my cat), I have not had any more pets, but I hope I will one day. And yes, I have a boyfriend, a most wonderful guy called Tobias, with whom I have grown and learned a lot.
When my diary came out as a book, I felt a little strange going back to keeping a diary again. There was also so much that I was experiencing, starting a new life away from Bosnia, away from war, so I stopped keeping a diary for some time. A year or so later, I had a bad day, I felt sad about something, and as soon as I was bothered, sad, or worried, I knew where to turn to first—the diary. And it is still here today, as a confidante, a way of getting things out of my heart and my head, a way of getting some perspective on problems and ideas. Everything feels so much different and easier when it is externalized on a blank page that does not judge or say anything back. I think it was really important for me to have written during the war, because in the madness that was around me, in the uncontrollable fear and uncertainty, the only space I had that I could truly control was writing in my diary. I realize today that it helped me keep sane, as well as remaining a record of a very strange time in my life, and in the history of my city and country.
There was also a strong will to live that drove me to write. I can see that will now, not only in the fact I was writing, but in how my family and our neighbors endured while living in the midst of death, keeping birthdays and marking holidays, exchanging presents and sharing jokes, adopting pets and making new friendships—even in the middle of the war, in a time of absolute uncertainty. I realize that our little unit of “the neighbourhood” was very special, since not everyone was so lucky to be able to find the will to re-create life even when there was so little— almost nothing—to create it with. Sometimes the feeling of that will to live is so strong that memory plays tricks on me—I sometimes forget the shells, the death, the cold and the hunger, and remember that strength and the huge warmth of humanity that I experienced. When I leaf through the pages of the diary, I remember everything else too, as it really was, hard and cold and dark. What is strange is that everyone who is in this diary, as well as many other people, have told me they use the diary to remember not only the time of war, but also to remember that humanity and strength and to remember Sarajevo and Bosnia the way they were before the war, which makes this diary not only mine, but something that belongs to many people who experienced this war: it also belongs to my city. Some friends even use it to remember a birthday of a friend—at least in my diary, the date is always accurate!
The diary itself has had a life of its own beyond me—first by being published and read by many people and even to becoming a ticket out of war-torn Bosnia for my parents and me. We left at a time when no one could leave Sarajevo, not even the people who were very sick or wounded, and the only way this happened for us is because the diary got out into the world, and it extended its arms and brought my family out with it, too. People who read it today sometimes see it as a book, and me as a character in that book, who is eternally in a war and eternally twelve, which is sometimes strange for me to deal with. I am not a character in a book that is frozen in time and space, that is immutable; I am a true living person. What I find most strange is that the diary has also had a life beyond the war it describes and that my story endures even after ten years of (relative) peace in Bosnia. The only way I can explain it is that it is no longer a story of a girl from Sarajevo, but a story of a child growing up in war, of a child without a childhood, and is therefore symbolic of so many others.
While I was in the war, I was experiencing one side of that reality, the much harder and more difficult side. Upon leaving for Paris, I started another chapter of my life, that of a refugee, migrant, someone who no longer lives in her country of birth where she thought she would spend her whole life. This challenge is not comparable to the hardship of war, but is a difficult process all its own consisting of learning new languages, finding new friends, starting from zero in every aspect of life. It is relatively easy for young people, but for people my parents’ age and older, it is much more difficult. The question of belonging is complicated even when you go back to your country of birth—even though I have been living in Ireland, I will never be fully Irish, just as I am no longer fully Bosnian since I have been out of Bosnia for twelve years now. In two years, when I am twenty-six, I will be marking yet another anniversary—that of a split straight down the middle of my life, with half of it spent in Bosnia, and the other half outside of it. I have often wondered what I would have been like if there had been no war, or if I had never managed to leave Bosnia, never lived in Paris or Dublin or Oxford. Would I have survived? Would I have been the same person I am today? Would I like the same things I like today, or would everything be completely different? This is a question that so many people living in the world today as refugees, asylum seekers, migrants, exiles—whatever they might be called—are asking themselves. I know a lot of people end up living outside of the city or country of their birth, some people even move around a lot, but for those who escaped war or poverty, it is different—we never left in search of a better job or nicer climate—we left because we simply had to leave, and we were lucky that an opportunity presented itself for us to realize this. Starting again, adapting, learning about belonging and identity are other stages in the string of experiences of war, something we perhaps forget about for those people who were lucky enough to have survived and escaped.
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.
Introduction
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 d
reams, 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.
Zlata's Diary Page 2