Stolen Voices Speak in Youth War Diaries

"I've just heard, Mimmy, that you are going to be published!" These are the words Zlata Filipovic wrote to her diary in October of 1992. Fourteen years later, Zlata's Dairy has been translated from the original Croat into 36 languages and serves as a window into a child's life in Sarajevo during war. Her diary-which she wrote between the ages of 11 and 13-moves from the worries of an adolescent to her reflections, frustrations, and fears of growing up in the midst of a war. She writes of missing her friends, of running from falling shells, of losing family, and of trying to understand the world around her.

After earning a Masters degree in international peace studies from Trinity College, Dublin, Filipovi? had the chance to publish the diaries of other children. She joined with another writer, Melanie Challenger to edit Stolen Voices: Young People's War Diaries From World War I to Iraq.

With excerpts from 14 diaries that include entries from the current Intifada in Israel and the war in Iraq, the book offers a survey of war experiences that is at once wide reaching and personal. The excerpts manage to make the reader care about the diarists and become invested in their fate in just a sampling of entries. The diaries are written with surprisingly eloquent and mature voices and the collection highlights the universal horrors of living during-or in the case of some of the diaries, fighting in-war. Below are selected excerpts from Spectator's interview with Filipovi.

Spectator: Your diary is excerpted in here. I was just wondering what it was like revisiting your diary.

Zlata Filipovi: It's strangely become public property for lots of people to remember things. It's sort of not only useful for me-I have family friends who know that in it is somebody's birthday, so if they can't remember it, they use it [the diary]. I use it like that as well. But it's striking. It's just sort of interesting how memory works. If I'm thinking about that period, I ... sometimes think, 'well it was really nice because we were so close, and there was so much sharing, and these neighbors ... have become our closest friends because of having ... gone through that together.' That's kind of the first memory, and it's actually when I go back to reading it that I see that that's only the tiniest part and there were ... so much more. ...

SPEC: Were there other diaries, when you were editing this book, that were particularly striking and brought back some of your own memories for you?

ZF: I think all of them had something which I could recognize, and that I found striking. From kind of the smallest details like what do you do when the shelling begins? How do you find water? Either the very specific things like that, or even just sort of emotions, or how you feel during this time. I would go to my mom and say, "you have to read this." And she reads it, and she's kind of mesmerized. And the date is 1943 somewhere but it's the same sentence almost that, you know, we felt, or I wrote.

SPEC: You wrote a lot in your own diary about the feeling that your childhood was lost, that you had spent your childhood in war and it was sort of stolen from you, and then again in the introduction to this collection you wrote about that. I was just wondering what the relationship was between losing childhood during war and sort of preserving childhood in diaries.

ZF: It is something that I was very aware of. ... Because it was taken away from me, I was trying to hang on to the smallest parts of it. I was playing with Barbies in the middle of the war, which you know no 13-year-old probably would be doing otherwise, but it was kind of trying to find these little pieces and value that because it is such a short period of your life and it's so precious, that ... it's really important to try and preserve it whenever possible. Knowing what it means not to have it made me hang on to it a bit more. I think you just sort of record because you want to take ... pictures of yourself at a particular period of time. That's what you are doing anyway as a diarist. You are writing almost to yourself in the future. In that sense, you are taking pictures of your childhood even if that childhood is devastated by war.

SPEC: What do you hope the effects of these are? Is this a call for peace? Or is this simply a call for awareness?

ZF: I'm hoping it's going to ... complement history lessons, or it's going to complement the way we think about current conflicts going on today. You hear... 56 people died here, you hear 34,000 people died in Iraq in the last year. These are numbers that are very difficult to grasp, to imagine, but I think you can imagine one story. I am hoping ... it's going to awake some sort of sense of passion and empathy which has been kind of blunted a bit. We're hoping it's going to give an opportunity for people to see what conflict is, what it means ... what it does to a daily life of a young person, and what it has done to the daily lives of young people across the twentieth century. And then after that, if you feel that you've kind of been opened up a little bit more, if you feel you want to be involved in ... peace work or not, that's up to you.

SPEC: Do you ever feel like you are stuck with this association with this 13-year-old self?

ZF: It's interesting because if you are in ... a book, people forget that books can be non-fiction and it means that you grow and you change. It doesn't help me that I actually apparently look quite young and still get IDed wherever I go. It's something that I like to remind people that actually I'm a real person and that it isn't a fictional book. That it isn't a story that's frozen in time. It's about a person who has gone on and lived. I hope that there is going to be other things in my life that I will do that people ... can associate me with.