Lessons from an Attic and a Cellar : Youth speaks to youth as the Anne Frank diaries send the lessons of the Holocaustto war-torn Sarajevo.

Zlata Filipovic knows Anne Frank. Now I’d like her to meet Etty Hillesum. Filipovic, a 13-year-old Sarajevo girl, is the current literary star of Paris, thanks to the publication of her diary modeled explicitly after the one by the young Jewish girl of Amsterdam killed in a Nazi concentration camp. More than 50,000 copies of “The Diary of Zlata Filipovic” have touched the hearts of French readers, who airlifted her and her parents out of Sarajevo to Paris recently. Written from her family cellar to a mythical “Dear Mimmy,” the diary describes her daily life running in and out of bomb shelters during the Bosnian civil war, now almost two years old. The country is being led by “crazy” leaders, and all sides are being wronged, she says. “I’ll be 20 in a few years’ time,” she writes. “If it turns out to be another Lebanon, as they keep saying, I’ll be 30. Gone will be my childhood. Gone my youth. Gone my life. And I’ll die and this war still won’t be over.”

Will it be ever like this, the old stumbling in the dark and the young screaming for help? As it turns out, at the time I read of Zlata Filipovic’s journal, I was preparing a tribute to Etty Hillesum, who would have turned 80 this weekend. Hillesum was another young diarist writing only blocks away from the Amsterdam attic where Anne Frank’s family hid out with the Van Dams. Hillesum died in Auschwitz at age 29. Reading her diaries, collected in the book, “An Interrupted Life,” is like discovering the sequel to the Anne Frank story and with it our own capacity to care. We can imagine what Frank would have been like as a young woman, more experienced in love, sex, intellectual discourse and hence less surprised by civilization’s growing darkness, but still living in basic denial about mankind’s capacity for evil.

Hillesum was capable of seeing the good in a bad day. Even as the grocers were putting up signs saying “No Jews allowed,” Hillesum wrote, “I believe that I will never be able to hate any human being for his so-called wickedness, that I shall only hate the evil that is within me.” Maybe she was just an optimist on a self-destructive bender, ultimately refusing to save herself even when she could. But even as she came to accept that “they are out to destroy us completely,” she disowned the idea of nationalized hate.

It’s good sometimes to go back to basics. The writings of youth are not always naive. They often seem to be in touch with what Carl Jung called the “underground spring” of universal human hope, something that we adults often desperately need. I’ve needed it myself, these days, especially since seeing Steven Spielberg’s “Schindler’s List.” The movie has allowed me entry into a world I never wanted to know, to touch the possibility of madness and rage that I, far older than Frank, Hillesum and Filipovic, have denied as a matter of faith. Now I can’t stay away. The implications of the Holocaust are everywhere, at the movie theater, in casual conversation and in the diaries of a Bosnian girl.

But exactly what are those implications? Today, 50 years after the fact, we are being asked to decide the meaning of history. We, Jews and non-Jews, are at a crossroads. And we haven’t yet made up our minds. The last survivors are dying out, and the collective memory is dimming. Who knows what comes next?

On the one hand, according to a recent survey, a large percentage of Americans don’t quite believe that the Holocaust occurred. And some Jews have begun hoarding history. A disturbing double standard has set in. In responding to “Schindler’s List,” several critics object to the choice of Oskar Schindler as Holocaust hero, first because he isn’t a Jew and then because he was a mixed bag, a self-serving profiteer even as he spared Jews from death. They want their lessons of history clear-cut, when even young girls in bunkers know that they are not.

This is a step backward. In the 50 years since World War II, Jews have learned to forgo such narrow thinking. We honored good and evil when we saw them, however muddy the background, and recognized our own potential for both.

And that’s why Zlata Filipovic’s diaries come at precisely the right time. The young girl’s missives make irrelevant the Holocaust as a metaphor of unique Jewish victimization and broaden its canvas as a symbol of human triumph. A girl in an attic speaks her truth to a girl in a cellar. And the still, small voice is once again finally heard.