“It’s as if Sarajevo is slowly dying, disappearing. Life is disappearing. So how can I feel spring, when spring is something that awakens life, and here there is no life, here everything seems to have died.”
― Zlata Filipović, Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
It's not exactly a Fiction Friday since this isn't Fiction, but it is a book review of another book I just read. The saddest part about a book like this is that it still happens. It seems no matter how many times humankind tries to learn the lesson that war is horror, it never seems to sink in.
(Viking, 1994)
When Zlata begins writing in her diary, her life in Sarajevo is a happy one. She writes about weekend trips to her family's vacation home in the mountains and the excitement of beginning a new school year with her friends. Her life consists of the familiar anxieties and joys shared by most Middle School students. She worries about how she will perform on upcoming tests and recounts the excitement of holiday celebrations and watching popular videos of MTV. But in the spring of her eleventh year, Zlata's childhood ends seemingly overnight when war comes to the city she loves, the city she calls home.
The Bosnian War, one of several conflicts which ravaged the Balkins in the 1990's, killed tens of thousands and displaced even more across Europe. The politics of these wars were extremely complicated, and often ethnically motivated. But the politics mattered very little to Zlata as she lived through the three year siege of Sarajevo. What mattered to Zlata were the very real results of the war that stole part of youth away from her. Unable to leave her apartment, she watches as a city once teeming with life begins to die under the strains of war. Buildings are destroyed. Stores closed. Electricity and water are unreliable. Trees that have stood for hundreds of years are cut down to be burned for heat in the hard winter months.
Nearly all of Zlata's friends have fled with their families, or have gone to stay with relatives in other countries. Eventually, Zlata and her mother have plans to leave, but discover that it is very hard to get out of Sarajevo once the war has engulfed the city. Through it all, Zlata is a witness to the struggles of the city inhabitants. But she is also a witness to the human spirit that somehow finds a way to survive even in the worst of times. Though she sometimes wants to give up, to succumb to the tranquility of death, she refuses to be defeated and finds ways to carry on because she knows that one day the war will end and Peace will triumph.
A heroic account of one young person's bravery in the face of devastating circumstances. Zlata may have lost her childhood to the war, but she never lost her love for life.
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