Zlata's Diary Read Free

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,