"When the family began to mix many years ago," she added, "they stopped believing in God." Miss Filipovic herself is of mainly Croat descent, but she insisted her family was mixed and not at all devout. Significantly, even though she was writing about an ethnic war fought against a religious background, the diary makes no reference to religion. But who asks ordinary people? Politics only asks its own people." No Mention of Religion "Ordinary people don't want this division because it won't make anyone happy, not the Serbs, not the Croats, not the Muslims.
"Those 'kids' are playing around with us," she wrote on May 4, 1993, using the nickname she gave Bosnia's politicians. Even when they're signing a cease-fire, we could hear the boom of shells landing." "It's a war between idiots, not between Serbs and Croats and Muslims," she said. In her diary and again in person, she poured scorn on all politicians. What Miss Filipovic has no time for is politics. "I want to say to people: 'Stop! You live normal lives. "When people read my book, when they see me on television, they may help the children of Sarajevo because we must not forget the children," she explained. It's crazy to think it could happen again." The difference is she was in an attic and I was in a cellar. "In a war, writing a diary, lonely, can't go outside, losing our childhood. "In a way, we were in the same position," Miss Filipovic (pronounced Fih-LEE-povich) said in an interview on Tuesday. More than once she hoped she would not suffer the same fate as Anne Frank, who died in a Nazi concentration camp at the age of 15. The French publisher Editions Robert Laffont/Fixot, which owns the foreign rights to the book, has predictably proclaimed Miss Filipovic to be the Bosnian war's version of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl who for 25 months kept a diary while in hiding from German troops in Amsterdam during World War II.Īnd as it happens, the Bosnian girl had read Anne Frank's diary before Sarajevo was engulfed by war and, like Anne Frank, she addressed her thoughts and fears to an imaginary friend, Mimmy. The diary's instant success suggests that even in a world numbed by television images of daily atrocities in Sarajevo, in a Western Europe racked by guilt over its failure to halt the 21-month-old conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina, the voice of an innocent child still carries special weight.
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