Although most of us are familiar with Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl, few except the most dedicated diary readers have delved beyond Anne's story into other first hand accounts of an adolescence in wartime. Zlata Filipovic's diary of her childhood in Sarajevo (1993) was a shocking reminder of the terror of war and the war of terror, and its impact upon impressionable minds of teens and older children. Stolen Voices contains 14 diaries, 8 of which were previously unpublished. The youngest children are 11 and 12 years old, and the oldest is 21. It includes diaries from a 12-16 year old, Piete Kuhr, in Germany during World War I, diaries in World War II, the Holocaust, Vietnam, the Balkan Wars, the Second Intifada, and Iraq. Some of the diarists are civilian children, others are serving in the military. In one case, an Austrian child participated in the Kindertransport (Children Transport) and escaped from Vienna to a safe haven in Cornwall; an other diary was written by a teenager in Singapore who spent much of WWII interred in a Japanese camp.

One of the remarkable aspects of these diaries is their matter of factness about the conditions of warfare. Clara Schwarz, a Polish Jew, was hidden for 2 years under the house of a Christian, which was later taken over by a German officer directing the defense of Poland from the Russians. For 2 years, she and a dozen others lived under a trap door under the marital bed of the homeowner Beck and his wife, alternating between terror and boredom, and living in a surreal, underground world cut off from the world above. "The Becks," she writes, "are our only link with reality. We mirror their moods (163)." Her diary later saved the life of the Becks, who were convicted of collaboration after the war.

There is also the bittersweet story of William Wilson and Hans Stauder. Their diaries are remarkably intertwined. After Wilson, a New Zealand soldier in North Africa, was killed in combat, Stauder found his journal on a sand dune; not reading English, he used it as his own journal. After the war, he sought for 40 years to return the journal to its original owner, not knowing the man had been killed, and it was finally returned to Wilson's home town (he had no living kin), in 1993.

The consistency of these stories, however, covering a range of emotions from fear, terror, homesickness, loneliness, as young people sought words to describe their experience, is remarkable. As a reader of other wartime diaries, mostly from the Napoleonic Wars, I've noted the consistency there as well. Seeing war, explaining war, through the eyes of young people, those who did not cause the war, who did not decide to go to war, is truly an exercise in looking at the past from the experience of those with the least power to control their own lives. These diaries are mattter-of-fact; for the most part, they take no political stance. These children and young adults are trying to explain and describe what has happened to them and their diaries reflect their effort to understand it and interpret it for themselves. Their words are accusations, and should remind us that children are the world's greatest resource, and one that war squanders.



Recommended: Yes