My Childhood Under Fire: A Sarajevo Diary

Dave Jenkinson is a professor in the Faculty of Education at the University of Manitoba and the author of the “Portraits” section of Emergency Librarian.

As the subtitle reveals, this work is a diary. It was written in a
notebook from May 31, 1992, to August 6, 1995, a period Nadja
Halilbegovich, her parents, and her older brother spent in the besieged
city of Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia and Herzegovina, once part of
Yugoslavia. Twelve years old when the war began on April 6, 1992, Nadja
was 16 when a humanitarian agency selected her as one of 20 young
Bosnians to go to America, a situation requiring her to abandon her
family in a conflict that continued until December 1995.

Nadja’s brief diary entries fall mainly into levels 1 and 2 of
Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: physical survival and safety needs. They
speak to topics like the shortages of food, water, and electricity and
the deaths of children and adults from shelling and sniper fire.
Occasionally, the adult Nadja inserts “Looking Back” sections, which
elaborate on the adolescent Nadja’s words. Although Nadja’s diary
concludes before she escapes Sarajevo, a “New Hope” section details
her dangerous evacuation.

Two sections of black-and-white photos (largely family snapshots
totalling 13 pages) concretize the setting and the biography’s major
players. While the diary’s events happen during a civil war, the book
is not about that war or its causes. Nadja never refers to those doing
the killing as the Serbian army, but just “the aggressor.” Instead,
her diary gives a personal face to war’s innocent victims—civilians,
both adult and child. Recommended.