ZLATA’S DIARY: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo...

ZLATA’S DIARY: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo by Zlata Filipovic, translated from the Serbo-Croatian by Christina Pribichevich-Zoric (Penguin: $7.95; 197 pp., illustrated). On Sept. 2, 1991, 11-year-old Zlata Filipovic began keeping the diary she addressed as Mimmy, chronicling the brutal destruction of her happy childhood. In the earliest entries, she worries only about school, her friends and exams. But the approaching war soon devastates the beautiful city she loves and deprives her family of electricity, running water, heat and decent food. Zlata cannot play her piano because the room is exposed to erratic shelling. Late in 1992, she reflects that before the war, her family and friends included Serbs, Croats and Muslims, and no one knew or cared who belonged to which group: “Now politics has started meddling around. It has put an ‘S’ on Serbs, an ‘M’ on Muslims and a ‘C’ on Croats, it wants to separate them. And to do so it has chosen the worst, blackest pencil of all--the pencil of war, which spells only misery and death.” Although a trifle self-conscious at times, the simple clarity of her observations makes this fragile memoir more devastating than the news accounts of the ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia.