Zlata's Diary Read Free Page A

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