Zlata's Diary: A Child's Life in Wartime Sarajevo
SynopsisPlot
It begins as the day-to-day record of the life of a typical eleven-year-old girl, preoccupied by piano lessons and birthday parties. But as war engulfs Sarajevo, Zlata Filipovic becomes a witness to food shortages and the deaths of friends and learns to wait out bombardments in a neighbor’s cellar. Yet throughout she remains courageous and observant. The result is a book that has the power to move and instruct readers a world away.
Story
About this book
Zlata Filipovic began keeping a diary in Sarajevo in the early 1990s, when she was eleven years old. The first entries record an ordinary life: piano lessons, school routines, birthday celebrations with friends. Within months, the Bosnian conflict reached the city, and the diary shifted from everyday concerns to something far more urgent.
As the siege of Sarajevo set in, Zlata documented food shortages, the loss of electricity and water, and the deaths of people she knew. She described sheltering from bombardments in a neighbor's cellar and watching her familiar surroundings change under sustained shelling. Her entries are specific and direct, noting particular days, particular losses, and particular fears without dramatic framing. The diary was first published while the conflict was still ongoing and became an international bestseller. It drew comparisons to The Diary of Anne Frank for its combination of a young, clear-eyed voice and the harshness of the circumstances surrounding it.
Filipovic was eventually evacuated from Sarajevo with her family. The published edition includes a new introduction added to later printings. The book sits within a longer tradition of wartime diaries kept by young people, valued for the concrete detail that only a daily written record can preserve.
