‘Do You Think It’s Fair Your Friend Died and You Lived?’ : War: Zlata Filipovic, 13-year-old Sarajevo diarist, answers tough questions from students at Westside appearance. She rejects comparisons to Anne Frank.

Zlata Filipovic, the 13-year-old Bosnian girl whose diary of war in Sarajevo has become a worldwide sensation, was fresh from a local morning television talk show interview. With her awkwardly chopped hair, yellow polo shirt and sweater, she seemed at first glance an unassuming presence, barely taller than the podium on the stage in the Simon Wiesenthal Center’s Museum of Tolerance.

But that was before she began to speak Tuesday morning.

With her head down over her book, she read excerpts--her voice simple and straightforward, never emotionally embellishing the stark diary entries. Afterward, as her audience of 280 junior high school students at the Westside museum quizzed her on everything from diaries to death, she lobbed back answers with the deftness of a polished speaker--which she is at this point of her epic four-month book tour. She was blunt or evasive but never a mere schoolgirl--perhaps proving the point she made in her diary that her childhood has been robbed from her.

Her listeners, in their youthful innocence, were just as blunt.

“Do you think it’s fair that your best friend died and you lived?” asked one boy. “Do you ever ask why?”

The well-behaved audience fell immobile in their seats. “Well, of course, I ask why,” Zlata said simply. “It’s horrible.”

From another: “Do you think you’re like Anne Frank?”

Zlata patiently repeated an answer she has given so often to this question. “Some people in Sarajevo say I’m the Anne Frank of Bosnia. I don’t like it. No one should make comparation.” (Despite her occasional lapses, she is quite eloquent in English.)

Indeed, Anne Frank was dead when her diary was published, whereas Zlata is alive and on her way to wealth. She sold the rights to her book in America for $540,000 and the movie rights for a reported $1 million. Still, the price she paid was a harrowing two years in Sarajevo--watching friends and relatives die, taking cover from sniper fire, living without water and power, existing on meager food, even running out of seed for the family bird.

What started in 1991 as a schoolgirl’s diary of life eating pizza and watching MTV became an eyewitness account of war and subsequently earned her salvation and scrutiny. While it secured passage out of Sarajevo for her and her parents, it also created skeptics who say the book seems self-conscious. (Despite her protestations over comparisons to Frank, she wrote that she would refer to her diary as “Mimmy”: “Since Anne Frank called her diary Kitty, maybe I could give you a name too.”) Some have wondered out loud: Did she really write it?

That was the one question that did not surface Tuesday morning--maybe because an auditorium full of 13- and 14-year-olds found nothing unusual about one of their peers writing an expressive book. Doubt was not what they brought to this program; they came full of sympathy and curiosity.

“Do you like being famous?”

“Well, I don’t like it,” Zlata said, “because I’m famous in a sad way.”

Lucy Stamm, a 12-year-old from Crossroads Elementary School in Santa Monica, had read the book. “I really enjoyed it,” she said. “I mean, you can’t really enjoy it, but it was very powerful.”

Someone wanted to know if Zlata, now living in Paris and touring to promote her book, is still keeping a diary. Her answer suggested that she has become a victim of her own success: “When I go home, I just go to sleep,” she said, her tone almost melancholic.

“Hi. Both my parents are from Croatia. I was wondering: What is your full ethnicity?”

“I don’t like to talk about it,” Zlata shot back, “because I think it’s stupid. We’re all the same.”

Later, Miro Bilaver, the 14-year-old from Millikan Middle School in Sherman Oaks who posed that question, mused over her answer. “I think her parents are mixed. . . . Those people wanted Yugoslavia to stay together.”

After the questions, listeners crowded around her, offering copies of the book for her autograph.

“What do you want kids in America to learn?”

“I think that the kids . . .” she said to Jordan Gilbert of Harvard-Westlake School in Studio City, stopping herself, perhaps because “kids” is the derogatory term she uses in her diary to describe the warmongering politicians. “Well, you are the future of the world.” She repeated the sentiment that she shared with President Clinton at the White House last weekend: “And you can learn that war is stupid.”