Will the Shelling Never Stop? : A Bosnian Girl Bears Witness : ZLATA’S DIARY: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo, By Zlata Filipovic with an introduction by Janine Di Giovanni. Translated by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric <i> (Viking: $16.95; 220 pp.)</i>
In September, 1991, Zlata Filipovic, a fifth-grade girl living in Sarajevo, Bosnia, began a journal, a bouncy record of the daily doings of her bright, energetic, wholly extroverted self. She did not dream, as she began to write, that eight months later, in May, 1992, Serbian forces would move artillery into position on the hills surrounding her city and commence the slow slaughter of the population. Even when the shelling began, Zlata had no idea why it had begun and therefore none of whether it would ever end.
The words Serb, Croat and Muslim barely occur in her diary. An American reading it cannot tell her ethnicity. Her family celebrates Christmas, but two Muslim holidays are also mentioned. All she knows, once the shelling starts, is that she can no longer go to school or play outdoors or even sleep on the side of her house that is exposed to the man she calls “ ‘our’ sniper.”
Zlata did not begin her diary in imitation of Anne Frank. When she first thought of Anne, the Serbian onslaught had yet to begin. The war was happening in Dubrovnik on the Adriatic Coast. The Filipovic family watched reports of it on television; and if Zlata’s parents had a premonition, Zlata herself did not. No, what brought Anne to Zlata’s mind was just the memory of a detail of style: Anne’s diary takes the form of letters to an imaginary correspondent. For fun, Zlata decided to imitate her in that one regard and, after playing with several fancy names, settled on “Mimmy,” an echo of Anne’s “Kitty.”
Late in 1993, Zlata’s diary came to the attention of French journalists in Sarajevo. By that time, the genocidal intent of the Serbian, more recently Serbo-Croatian, war against Bosnia had become apparent. The journalists inevitably compared Zlata to Anne, but the comparison dismayed the Bosnian girl herself. What upset her was no literary presumption but something a good deal more basic: Anne had been killed; Zlata wanted to live:
“Monday, 2/VIII/1993
“ Dear Mimmy,
“More journalists, photo-reporters and cameramen. They write, take photographs, film, and it all goes to France, Italy, Canada, Japan, Spain, America. But you and I, Mimmy, we stay where we are, we stay and we wait, and, of course, keep each other company.
“Some people compare me with Anne Frank. That frightens me, Mimmy. I don’t want to suffer her fate.
“Zlata.”
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is a fascinating work of literature, quite apart from its unique importance as testimony from deep inside a genocide-in-progress. It elegantly demonstrates a key thesis of contemporary literary theory; namely, that the reader completes what the writer only begins. Kitty, Anne’s imaginary reader, is addressed on nearly every page of the diary, and the frequency serves as a recurring reminder to the real reader that he is a reader. Addressed with such frequency, he is drawn in, made to feel intimate with Anne; he becomes her correspondent, her secret collaborator, the completer of what she began.
“The Diary of Anne Frank” is, of course, incomplete in another, even more powerful way. On Tuesday, Aug. 1, 1944, the diary simply stops. Anne does not tell us why. It is we who must provide the reason; and providing it, we are left with the uncanny feeling that having been intimate with this child, we are now intimate with her destroyers.
The instinct to recoil from the sick, the dying, the accused or abused can never be entirely stilled in the mind. “The Diary of Anne Frank” escapes the working of that instinct by never showing us Anne at Bergen-Belsen, naked, sick, perhaps molested by sadistic guards, and in the end soiled, ugly, dying. If it did that, then, whatever our wishes, we would recoil from her. Instead, Anne’s last letter to Kitty before the unrecorded, unimaginable scene of her arrest is a girl’s meditation about being a “little bundle of contradictions.” It bespeaks nothing more than the instantly recognizable growing pains of a girl who wants to stay a girl and yet wants to be taken seriously as a young woman.
When Anne wrote her little meditation, the Nazi beast was only hours, perhaps only minutes, away from her door. By talking as she does, she slips past our natural instinct to shun a victim. And then, when the sudden interruption of her diary forces us to imagine on our own what it was like when the beast burst through the door, it is too late for us to escape. We feel trapped almost as she was, and the emotional impact becomes overwhelming.
On this count and others, “The Diary of Zlata Filipovic” may be interestingly compared to “The Diary of Anne Frank.” And yet when I came upon the particular comparison that Zlata herself had spontaneously made--”I don’t want to suffer her fate”--I felt ashamed. A genocide is taking place before the watching eyes of the Western world, and that world is looking on as if indeed it were just something to watch, a segment on the evening news, a strange species of entertainment. I abhor the underlying attitude, and yet here I was, treating a dispatch from this genocide-in-progress as if it were one more text for aesthetic analysis.
For Zlata Filipovic, the siege of Sarajevo was what a two-year-long series of earthquakes might be for a little girl in Los Angeles. She sees it more as a natural than as a political event. Aftershock follows aftershock, month after month. She keeps hoping it will end, but it doesn’t; and before her own defenses quite give way, she sees those of her parents failing.
Slowly, cruelly, the Serbs wear the Bosnians down. A Filipovic friend is killed in his back yard by a sniper. The stately trees of the elegant old city disappear, cut down for cooking and heating. Zlata’s father suffers a hernia carrying a heavy log home; later he suffers serious frostbite in the cellar attempting to chop another log to size for their little stove. The bird dies. The cat dies. Friend after friend, relative after relative dies or flees. As one convoy leaves with many old friends on board, Zlata says more than she knows; more, perhaps, than she can bear to know, when she writes: “Everyone kept saying: ‘We’ll see each other again, somewhere, sometime.’ It was sad. Sad and upsetting. It reminded me of the movies I saw about the Jews in the Second World War.”
The indomitable homing toward the ordinary that so astonishes every drop-in visitor to disaster shines from every page of this book, but so does the disaster itself:
“Saturday, 9/I/1993
“ Dear Mimmy,
“They killed Vice-Premier Hakija Turajlic, my workshop teacher’s husband. Everybody says he was a wonderful man. What a shame.
“My math lesson at my teacher’s was a success. We learned three new lessons. The arithmetic mean, ratios and percentages.
“No electricity, no water.
“Zlata.”
Children always seem so resilient, playing amid the rubble in a way that humbles and heartens their elders. But children’s despairs can be as sudden as their delights. As the war continues with no end in sight, Zlata begins to speak of her own death in sudden, uncharacteristic eruptions. One of these is precipitated by the news that “Seka is beside herself. It looks as though she’s going to be evicted from Bokica’s flat.” In April, 1993, Sarajevo was choked with refugees from elsewhere in Bosnia, but the city also had flats vacated by its own departed refugees. The government evidently was trying to match resource to need, and somehow poor Seka, apartment-sitting for the absent Bokica, had been ruled a squatter. It was all too confusing for Zlata:
“They’re replacing one tragedy with another. How awful it all is. Sometimes I don’t understand a thing. Actually, I don’t understand this war. I know it’s stupid, and since it’s stupid so is everything else.”
This is not eloquent writing. When critics write, as they may, “Zlata Filipovic is no Anne Frank,” they will be right. And yet the voice heard here, impotently and angrily repeating the word stupid , is the recognizable voice of a little girl pushed past her limit and about to burst into tears. In the sentences that follow, Zlata imagines that the war will never end. She’ll turn 20, even 30 . . . and “Gone will be my childhood, gone my youth, gone my life. And I’ll die and this war still won’t be over. And when Mummy says to me: ‘We’ll go away, Zlata,’ again I feel like killing myself. Sure. All they’re waiting for out there is for some Alica, Malik and Zlata to come along.”
As I write, the pretense of civil war has been all but wholly abandoned in Bosnia-Herzegovina. The regular armies of Yugoslavia (Serbia-Montenegro) and Croatia are openly operating on Bosnian soil. The two invader nations recently added a public agreement to the secret agreement they reportedly made in Graz, Austria, two years ago for the partition of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Meanwhile, the voices of reason urge evenhandedness as if Bosnian artillery were ringing Belgrade and Zagreb, as if little girls in those Serbian and Croatian capitals were cowering in their frozen cellars to escape Bosnian mortar, as if the repelling of aggression were morally equivalent to aggression itself.
The Filipovic family has fled Sarajevo and is living in Paris. Zlata’s diary, its last entry dated Oct. 17, 1993, has been translated into French and is a bestseller in Paris. American rights were sold to Viking Penguin last month for a reported $565,000, a figure that will doubtless be used by some to discredit the work and its author. Excerpts appear in the current Newsweek. The book itself will officially be published March 7 with an introduction by British journalist Janine di Giovanni.
The diary as a publishing phenomenon is refuted, in a way, by the diary as testimony. We are told until we are numb with the hearing of it that ours is an era in which image has triumphed over substance. But Bosnia may yet prove a triumph of substance over image. Try as they may, the political image-managers of Europe and America cannot quite conceal the fact that they have re-legitimized the revision of borders by force. Surely if little Serbia cannot be denied its piece of Bosnia, then great Russia cannot be denied its piece of Ukraine.
The Croatian writer Slavenka Drakulic drew the right moral when she wrote recently in the New Republic:
“If attention and understanding alone could save Sarajevo, then it would have been saved long ago. As I sit at my table on a quiet ordinary winter day, I feel helpless for the first time. My words--any words--have no real meaning. I am sick and tired of them. Finally all we have achieved with words is to establish Sarajevo as a metaphor for tragedy. So what? Will it help them survive, if they get 150 grams of bread? I doubt it, and this doubt, like an acid, is eating me from the inside.”
Slavenka Drakulic and Zlata Filipovic belong together as elder and younger sister in the same doomed family, for the younger sister ends her last letter to Mimmy on the very same note. She is delighted, naturally, that her diary is going into the world, grateful for the solicitude of journalists, but also confused and saddened that the killing and the attention go on simultaneously. The diary’s last entry records a day of ferocious shelling, six dead, 56 wounded, long, grim hours in the frozen cellar, and then a visit by journalist friends, checking to see how they had come through:
“I keep thinking that we’re alone in this hell, that nobody is thinking of us, nobody is offering us a helping hand. But there are people who are thinking and worrying about us.
“Yesterday the Canadian TV crew and Janine came to see how we had survived the mad shelling. That was nice of them. Humane.
“And when we saw that Janine was holding an armful of food, we got so sad we cried.”
Tears of joy? Not really. Tears from a child’s inarticulate understanding of what Drakulic puts so well. It is not that no one has noticed. It is not that no one cares. But noticing, caring, talking don’t still the Serbian guns. Substance triumphs over image:
“We haven’t done anything,” Zlata concludes, “We’re innocent.
“But helpless!”