Dreams of Peace : When Zlata Filipovic began her diary, she did not know her words would launch her family’s escape from the war in Bosnia. Now free from mortar shells and hunger, the girl is hoping the journal--a best-selling book--will aid the children of Sarajevo.

“I keep wanting to explain these stupid politics to myself, because it seems to me that politics caused this war, making it our everyday reality. War has crossed out the day and replaced it with horror, and now horrors are unfolding instead of days.” --”Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo,” Nov. 19, 1992

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Zlata Filipovic is here today, out of a cold cellar, safe from mortar shells, liberated from the war in Bosnia.

She is wearing a new Swatch watch, pondering luxurious pastries on a breakfast buffet and watching the skaters in Rockefeller Center.

“I’m not really hungry,” she says.

But in a while, she gives in to a treat, switching from hot tea to hot chocolate with whipped cream. She sips it carefully.

It is not easy to be a little girl who is also very much a grown-up--to love sweets and best friends, yet know hunger and sniper fire; to have a darling heart-shaped face yet a childhood blasted apart by war.

The guilt is heavy. The emotions confusing.

“I don’t know how I came here,” says 13-year-old Zlata, again watching the skaters. “It’s like being on another planet from where I was. But it doesn’t matter if it’s the distance from U.S. to Bosnia or Croatia to Bosnia. When there is war, every place is far away.”

For the last four months, she raced around Europe promoting “Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo,” her chronicle of two years as war erupted around her. Now she is in America doing the same--the “Today” show, “Charlie Rose,” cover of Newsweek, bookstore readings, a meeting with President Clinton.

Although her promoters have called her “the Anne Frank of Sarajevo,” the comparison is absurd to Zlata. Unlike the Jewish girl who never knew her diary would reach the world and eventually died in a Nazi concentration camp, part of Zlata’s journal was published before she had finished it. That brought her to the attention of the French minister of defense, who helped Malik and Alica Filipovic and their only child escape in December.

“I am safe,” says Zlata, who fled to Paris. “Anne Frank was never safe.”

Zlata is something of a youthful sensation, particularly in guilt-ridden Western Europe, which until recently was staying out of the brutal conflicts of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Zlata’s diary became a bestseller in France as well as selling in 12 other countries. And last week, Viking issued 200,000 copies in English and a Hollywood studio paid $1 million for the rights to her story. Somewhere along the way, the Filipovics expect to earn enough money to help them put their lives back together.

Zlata has been with so many journalists that they have become her “best friends.” She even wants to be one when she grows up.

“They tell the world things to make it better,” she says, which leads her to explain more about how she lives with hot chocolate in her tummy and the knowledge of her niece and her best friend, Mirna, starving in Sarajevo. “I am trying to help the children of Sarajevo,” says Zlata, who started learning English at age 4. “I just started the diary like millions of others, but now it’s become something that can help.”

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Zlata began keeping a diary innocently enough in September, 1991, before she was to start fifth grade. The daughter of a lawyer and chemist, her life was comfortable--all birthday parties, MTV, tennis and piano lessons. Her problems were school tests and colds. A sinus infection almost ruined her 11th birthday: “I am so unlucky,” she writes. “Why am I sick?? Boo Hoo, Boo Hoo!!”

The beginning of the diary seems ordinary enough.

But by April, 1992, her reasons to cry accelerated as war prompted her parents to contemplate splitting up the family so her mother could get Zlata to safety. She writes, “Mommy can’t make up her mind--she’s constantly in tears.”

The diary turns into a person, almost. She names it Mimmy. She talks to it as a friend and signs “Love Zlata” after many entries.

As she explains in an interview, “I needed friends. My real ones were leaving or I couldn’t see or talk to them.”

Indeed, her best friends leave Sarajevo; another young friend, Nina, dies from shell fire, and the bombardment breaks every window in Zlata’s house, periodically trapping her family in the cellar. Zlata disdains the politicians, known as “kids,” for their paltry efforts at peace. “The ‘kids’ really are playing, which is why us kids are not playing,” she writes. “We are living in fear, we are suffering, we are not enjoying the sun and flowers, we are not enjoying our childhood. WE ARE CRYING.”

Zlata’s writing is alternately compelling and self-conscious. In parts it brings the reader deep inside the normal existence of a little girl; other times she seems to be parodying adult political discussion she overhears.

But Zlata always sounds sincere.

After a teacher learned of Zlata’s diary, UNICEF published the first 45 pages in her native Croat in Sarajevo. That brought her to the attention of a flood of war correspondents, now part of the effort to get her out. The final published version of her journal ends with Zlata and her parents still enduring deprivation and avoiding death in Sarajevo.

But, Zlata’s dramas continue.

She and her parents were whisked out of Sarajevo in darkness. (There was rarely electricity or water.) Zlata packed a few small teddy bears and books such as “The Little Prince”; her mother took her chemistry books; her father brought one photograph of his parents, who had died when he was younger.

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The contrast between Sarajevo and Paris is almost too much for Zlata. At the airport in Paris, she was blinded by the lights of television crews and photographers. Later the family was caught in a traffic jam at rush hour. There too the light overwhelmed her.

“It was such shock,” Zlata recalls. “One moment we were in Sarajevo in complete darkness and the next moment we were in all this light.”

When she got to the hotel, although she was offered anything she wanted to eat after two years of living on peas and rice, she immediately went to sleep.

A New York Times reviewer recently held it against Zlata that she doesn’t deliver the material that Anne Frank did. The critic complains that not only does her diary have a happy ending, her literary gift isn’t up to Anne Frank’s. And on “Charlie Rose,” the authenticity of her diary was questioned.

Did her parents write it?

No, a self-possessed Zlata said, simply dismissing these criticisms: She wrote it. It’s her life. So be it.

Zlata is not pretending to be Virginia Woolf. She is simply an innocent whose eyewitness account of life during war accentuates its horror. Her diary never takes sides among Croats, Serbs and Muslims. There are good and bad among both, she says.

Time and distance from the war have not particularly made her more sophisticated about matters of why. Why isn’t there peace? She seems only sadder.

“It’s too heavy to understand who is right,” says Zlata, who is mostly Croat but insists that her background is mixed. “We always lived with mixed nationalities, but we never saw the hateness that came out.”

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Right now, Zlata is trying to imagine when her life will get back to normal as it was when she was about to enter the fifth grade. She expects to start school in Paris after Easter. Probably the eighth grade. But her parents still have to find work and perhaps the family will relocate to Slovenia.

While she was giving a reading at a bookstore on the Upper West Side of Manhattan last week, her parents met up with acquaintances from Sarajevo: refugees trying to resettle in New York. They had seen Zlata on television and had read about her dairy. The families exchanged phone numbers and addresses, hoping to stay in touch. This has happened wherever Zlata’s publicity tour has taken her.

“We now have a lot of little papers with addresses in our pockets,” she says sadly.

She has this fantasy about the future--that somehow all these friends and family might reassemble in one place.

Would that place be Sarajevo?

“That seems impossible, but wouldn’t it be nice,” she says.

This little girl--her resilience and innocence remarkably still intact--wonders if she might be the link for her scattered community. “I can only think about it.”

For now, she has stopped keeping a diary. She’s too busy, moving around, talking to strangers, trying to enjoy the sites, but plagued by her memories.

That quick turn between joy and guilt threw her again, recently, at a Disney store.

“I thought about my niece in Sarajevo,” she says. “She is 4. I saw all the things and remembered that she doesn’t know about ‘Beauty and the Beast’ or ‘Aladdin.’ She doesn’t even know what a vegetable looks like. When she saw one, she thought it was soap. I started to cry.”