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children. They’ve had their childhood taken from them, and without that they can’t be children. It’s as if Sarajevo is slowly dying,
Colm O’Doherty - Derry, County Derry - 10 years old
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| This section is all about how children, sorrounded by war and conflict feel, in their own words. | ||
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| Zlater's Diary | ||
| Excerpts from Zlata’s Diary: A Child’s Life in Sarajevo | ||
| (Zlata Filipovic. New York: Penguin Books, 1994.) | ||
| Sunday, April 12, 1992 | ||
| “I keep thinking about the march I joined today. It’s bigger and stronger than war. That’s why it will win. The people must be the ones | ||
| to win, not the war, because war has nothing to do with humanity. War is something inhuman.” | ||
| Monday, June 29, 1992 | ||
| “That’s my life! The life of an innocent eleven-year-old schoolgirl!! A school girl without school, without the fun and excitement of school. | ||
| A child without games, without friends, without the sun, without birds, without nature, without fruit, with just a little powdered milk. | ||
| In short, a child without a childhood. A wartime child. I now realize that I am really living through a war, an ugly, disgusting war. | ||
| I and thousands of other children in this town that is being destroyed, that is crying, weeping, seeking help ,but getting none. | ||
| God, will this ever stop, will I ever be a schoolgirl again, will I ever enjoy my childhood again? | ||
| I once heard that childhood is the most wonderful time of your life. And it is. I loved it, and now an ugly war is taking it all away from me.” | ||
| Monday, March 15, 1993 | ||
| “There are no trees to blossom and no birds, because the war has destroyed them as well. There is no sound of birds twittering in | ||
| springtime. There aren’t even any pigeons—the symbol of Sarajevo. No noisy children, no games. Even the children no longer seem like | ||
children. They’ve had their childhood taken from them, and without that they can’t be children. It’s as if Sarajevo is slowly dying, |
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| disappearing. Life is disappearing. So how can I feel spring, when spring is something that awakens life, and here there is no life, here | ||
| everything seems to have died.” | ||
| Thursday, November 19, 1992 | ||
| “I keep wanting to explain these stupid politics to myself, because it seems to me that politics caused this war, making it our everyday | ||
| reality. War has crossed out the day and replaced it with horror, and now horrors are unfolding instead of days. It looks to me as though | ||
| these politics mean Serbs, Croats and Muslims. But they are all people. They are all the same. They look like people, there’s no difference. | ||
| They all have arms, legs and heads, they walk and talk, but now there’s ‘something’ that wants to make them different.” | ||
| Saturday, July 17, 1993 | ||
| “Suddenly, unexpectedly, someone is using the ugly powers of war, which horrify me, to try to pull and drag me away from the shores of | ||
| peace, from the happiness of wonderful friendships, playing and love. I feel like a swimmer who was made to enter the cold water, against | ||
| her will. I feel shocked, sad, unhappy and frightened and I wonder where they are forcing me to go, I wonder why they have taken away my | ||
| peaceful and lovely shores of my childhood. I used to rejoice at each new day, because each was beautiful in its own way. I used to rejoice at | ||
| the sun, at playing, at songs. In short, I enjoyed my childhood. I had no need of a better one. I have less and less strength to keep | ||
| swimming in these cold waters. So take me back to the shores of my childhood, where I was warm, happy and content, like all the children | ||
| whose childhood and the right to enjoy it are now being destroyed.” | ||
| Monday, December 28, 1992 | ||
| “...I look over at Mommy and Daddy. ... Somehow they look even sadder to me in the light of the oil lamp. ... God, what is this war doing to | ||
| my parents? They don’t look like my old Mommy and Daddy anymore. Will this ever stop? Will our suffering stop so that my parents can be | ||
| what they used to be—cheerful, smiling, nice-looking?” | ||
| Saturday, July 10, 1993 | ||
| “I’m sitting in my room. Cici is with me. She’s enjoying herself on the armchair—sleeping. As for me, I’m reading through my letters. | ||
| Letters are all I’ve got left of my friends. I read them and they take me back to my friends.” | ||
| Monday, August 2, 1993 | ||
| “Some people compare me with Anne Frank. That frightens me, Mimmy. I don’t want to suffer her fate.” | ||
| World War II Diaries | ||
| Excerpts from Children in the Holocaust and World War II—Their Secret Diaries | ||
| (Laurel Holliday. New York: Washington Square Press, 1995.) | ||
| Janine Phillips - Poland - 10 years old - August 23, 1939 | ||
| “Papa says that war is inevitable. I asked Papa why Hitler wants to attack us and Papa said because he’s a greedy bully. ... Grandpa | ||
| remembers many wars and he says that a war not only kills people but it also kills people’s souls.” | ||
| Tamarah Lazerson - Lithuania - 13 years old - December 5, 1943 | ||
| “I am weighed down by my enslavement and have no time or strength to write, to think, or even to read. I am mired in a morass, into | ||
| which I sink as I daily labor from early morning to night with the slave gang. Around me is darkness. I thirst for light. | ||
| Yitskhok Rudashevski - Lithuania - 14 years old | ||
| “We live in the ghetto as owners of white certificates. The mood of slaughter has not yet disappeared. What has been will soon be repeated. | ||
| Meanwhile life is so hard. The owners of white certificates do not go out to work. ... You hear people shout, ‘We wish, we also wish to eat!’... | ||
| Police are beating, chasing people. ... The policemen are urging us on to go more quickly. The frightened people feel that they ought not to | ||
| go. I sensed the craftiness of the exterminators.” | ||
| Macha Rolnikas - Lithuania - 14 years old - June, 1941 | ||
| “New decrees have been posted in the town: all the Jews—adults and children—must wear insignias, a white piece of cloth, ten square | ||
| centimeters, and in the middle the yellow letter ’J.’ Is it possible that the invaders no longer regard us as human beings and brand us like | ||
| cattle? One can not accept such meanness. But who dares to oppose them?” | ||
| Sarah Fishkin - Poland - 17 years old - July 24, 1941 | ||
| “There seems to be no future for the Jewish population.” | ||
| “For the Jew the light of day is covered with a thick veil: his road is overgrown with tall wild grasses. Every horizon upon which his eye rests | ||
| is stained with the tears of lost children searching for their mothers in the dense woods. Convulsed with sobbing until their little souls | ||
| expired, the youngsters are now lifeless, at eternal rest. Only the quivering trees know of their death and will later on bear witness about | ||
| the sacrifice of these little ones.” | ||
| “No human heart can remain untouched and unpained by all of this. It is beyond human endurance to see so much trouble and so much | ||
| suffering experienced. It is painful to see people tortured by people until life is ended. Where is the human conscience, to demand truth, to | ||
| cry out?” | ||
| Diaries of Northern Ireland | ||
| Excerpts from Children of “The Troubles” Our Lives in the Crossfire of Northern Ireland. | ||
| (Laurel Holliday. New York: Washington Square Press, 1997.) | ||
| Glyn Chambers - Belfast - 17 years old | ||
| Two Communities | ||
| We live in this street, they live in that street, yet both communities live in Belfast. We follow this religion, they follow that religion, yet both | ||
| communities believe in God. We vote for these parties, they vote for those parties, yet both communities recognize each other’s mandate. We | ||
| feel bound to one country, they feel bound to another country, yet both communities are bound to Northern Ireland. We think they are | ||
| troublemakers, they think we are troublemakers, yet both communities have contributed to the Troubles. We claim they get too much, they | ||
| claim we get too much, yet both communities wish to create a prosperous, equal society with opportunities for all. Two communities, but | ||
| what are the differences? | ||
| Gemma McHenry - Ballycastle, County Antrim | ||
| “Being a child of the Troubles in Belfast was normal for me. I didn’t know anything else. Just like children in the slums of cities all over the | ||
| world who know no better, we knew there was a big world out there but this was our world. The love and security we had at home made up | ||
| for all the madness going on around us.” | ||
| “I was brought up in a mixed area (Protestant and Catholic) and I had mixed friends and thought nothing of it. We were all innocent | ||
| children. I would be asked by my Protestant friends to say the Hail Mary. To me it was the only difference between us. Sometimes I needed | ||
| to say it to prove I was a Catholic!” | ||
| “Those were happy days of innocence, but reality hit us with a bomb when a Protestant neighbour was shot by Republican paramilitaries for | ||
| being a member of the Security Forces. And then a Catholic neighbour was shot for being a Catholic.” | ||
| “As a Catholic family it became too dangerous for us to continue living there.” | ||
| Jeffrey Glenn - Dromore, County Down | ||
| “That was the day (Bloody Friday, January 30, 1972) that brought home to me what ‘terrorism’ means because I felt terrorised. My mood | ||
| was just total black despair. We seemed to be entering some sort of apocalyptic world where your worst nightmares ran for twenty-four | ||
| hours a day. You couldn’t go on a bus or a train for wondering if either it or the station would be blown up. You couldn’t walk down a street | ||
| where cars were parked for wondering if one of them contained a bomb. You couldn’t leave your car on to be fixed because when you went | ||
| back to collect it the workshop was probably now a hole in the ground. Every day some landmark that you loved or a favourite store was | ||
| bombed or burnt.” | ||
| “I remember coming into Belfast one afternoon and finding the giant Co-Op store blazing from end to end. That was the final straw. I put | ||
| my head in my hands and found tears running down my cheeks.” | ||
| Natasha Ritchie - Belfast - 18 years old | ||
| Lying in bed you hear a bomb in the distance Close your eyes and forget, try to keep your innocence Watching the news, there’s twelve | ||
| more dead Maybe a sigh or a shake of your head. There's nothing you can do, there's nothing you can say. You can't stop the pain, make | ||
| the hurt go away. So you go out to your friends and play your games You’re only young, you can’t make it change You learn to ignore, | ||
| pretend it never happened When you let it get to you that’s when childhood ends. And now there’s a cease-fire, now we have peace How long | ||
| will it last? A few months? A few weeks? You don’t know what to think, a whole new way of life You’re just not sure, but the other way | ||
| wasn’t right. There’s always been trouble, since before you were born People fighting, people killing, families forlorn Now there’s a new way | ||
| to live where nobody dies But should we believe it, or is it all just more lies? Will we have a new life where there’s no need to grieve It’s | ||
| going to take time before I can believe. | ||
Colm O’Doherty - Derry, County Derry - 10 years old |
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| Riots! | ||
| There’s riots! There’s riots! Oh what a shame, It’s children like us who get all the blame, The banging of the bullets, The bumping of horns, | ||
| Oh what a shame,
The riots are on.The crying of children filled with gas,
The ticking of bombs which mostly come last.
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| The smell of petrol all over the ground Oh my goodness! My head’s going round. The whizzing of stones flying through the air, This is one | ||
| thing I just can’t bear. | ||
| Laragh Cullen - Dungannon, County Tyrone - 11 years old | ||
| A Dream of Peace | ||
| Peace in our country. A truce in our land, Harmony in our world, All war banned. | ||
| I live in Dungannon, I’ve never known peace, I’m tired of the choppers, Soldiers and police. | ||
| I’m tired of the sirens The town’s like a cage, I wish there was peace, I’m eleven years of age. | ||
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