Zlata Filipović Today

As a twelve-year-old girl, Zlata Filipović never knew how much her diary would impact her life. Her diary not only helped her get through the emotional pain of war, it also helped her escape.

Many people were interested in publishing Filipović’s diary. Her family chose a French publisher with connections to the French government. In exchange, the publisher promised to help Filipović and her parents escape the fighting.

In 1993, the publisher kept the promise and Filipović and her family were flown to Paris in safety. After years of living without electricity, not going to school, and not having enough to eat, Zlata was finally free. To her great surprise, she was also famous.

“I had no idea of the impact the diary had, because we had no TV, no newspapers, no way to see what all these journalists coming to interview me had done,” she says. “We thought we’d come to France and be regular refugees, start our life again, but coming out of the plane there were cameras, photographers …people who could pronounce my name and had a sense of who I was based on the scribbles I’d done for myself as a twelve-year-old girl.”

For the next four months, Filipović shared her book and met with students around the world. Sometimes she felt guilty because she was one of the few people to get out of Sarajevo.

“There was a level of guilt because my best friend stayed behind. Why was I different from another thirteen-year-old girl in Bosnia?” she remembers asking herself. “My responsibility was to use this in some kind of way for all those who remained. If people were willing to listen, I’d tell them about it.”

Today, in her twenties, Filipović is still sharing her voice and experiences. She lives in Ireland and has a college degree in International Peace Studies. Filipović teamed up with another writer to edit a book titled Stolen Voices, a collection of young people’s diaries written during wars—from World War I to the Iraq War. As she explains, when you study history there are “all the names and dates that you forget …but with a diary or an individual story …you connect.”