Zlata's Diary Read Online Free

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:
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    Dear Zlata,
    I feel sorry about your friend Nina. I wish the war would stop. I don’t see the point of having wars.
    When my mum read me the interview you gave Janine di Giovanni, I was really interested. I thought you sounded like a nice person. I would like to be your pen-pal. I live in Glasgow, in Scotland. Hope you have a merry Christmas and no shooting or shelling in the new year.
    Yours sincerely,
    Helen Harvey
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    Unfortunately, there was increased shelling and shooting on Christmas Day and over the New Year in Sarajevo. Five children were killed when a kindergarten was shelled by the Serbs.
    However, on December 23, 1993, Zlata and her parents were transported from their home in the Skenderija district of old Sarajevo in two armored vehicles of the French UNPROFOR contingent and taken through government and Serb checkpoints at the airport. A few hours later, they left for the safety of Paris on a UN plane.
    As I watched the television images of Sarajevo at Christmas, I remember Zlata telling me about her dreams and I wonder what she is dreaming now, safe in Paris. “I used to dream about the beach, somewhere warm,” she once told me. “But when there is shelling, I only think about being safe.” She is now safe, but there are thousands of other children who are not, who are sitting in the dark around a candle, hungry, terrified by the shelling, who have lost parents, brothers, sisters. It is for them that Zlata wrote this book.
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    JANINE DI GIOVANNI
London 1994

Zlata