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Ed Zlata Filipovic and Melanie Challenger. “Overcoming threats of punishment (as in the case of some war camps) or the constraints of time and space in which to write (such as most battlefield diaries),” these voices now emerge as damning evidence of man’s stupidity and recklessness in waging wars that only kill and maim mostly the innocent and the weak. In fact, UN official figures state that in the last decade two million children have been killed in “situations of armed conflict”, and six million children have been disabled or injured. Piete Kuhr in the First World War of 1914-18 writes, “ I was only twelve years old and was not a man. What’s the use of being a child when there is a war? A child is of no use at all in wartime.” She writes that soldiers going to war where many would die sang the song, “The little woodland birds/ sang such a wonderful refrain/ in the homeland, in the homeland/ there we’ll meet again.” WW 2 had a Russian mother Kosterina Mikhailovna receive a terse Notice 54 saying, “Your daughter, Nina Alexyevna Kosterina, a native of Moscow, died in December 1941, in the fight for our Socialist Homeland. Faithful to her military oath, she showed heroism and courage in the performance of her duty.” Shiela Allan writing about a detention camp in Malaysia under the Japanese in the same war says: “ I think I grew old, very old and very frightened during that short time. Rations consist of about five sardines, a quarter tin of bully beef with half a dozen tins of soup to feed about 100 people–some diet!” Clara Schwarz, 15, writes about the Holocaust: “ The Jews are loaded in sealed cattle cars, 100-150 in each car. Belzac is located in a forest area and that is where they are killed.” Ed Blanco, an American soldier who fought in Vietnam where this reviewer witnessed the bloody war as a neutral country Observer and Peacekeeper, writes in his diary: “ I saw VC bodies. They were piled on each other with thousands of flies and insects crawling all over them. I couldn’t stand the smell.” Hoda Thamir writing about the ongoing war in Iraq and how her brother was able to bring home a bunch of onions says, “Then a question came to my mind: does the happiness of Iraqis depend on a bunch of onions?” Voices such as these cannot be allowed to just die away, and the publishers need to be complimented for reminding us what wars are all about and that the sacrifices that soldiers and civilians make so that others may live, must not go in vain. Books of this kind must be made compulsory reading for our politicians, parliamentarians and lawmakers who often are the cause of wars, and all the suffering that such strife brings in its wake. Is enough being done for the PoWs who languish in foreign camps, children and the elderly who are taken captive on borders that are not well defined such as in Rajasthan and in Jammu and Kashmir, or more recently in states where anti-insurgency operations take place and charges of human rights violations are traded on a regular basis, is a question that governments need to ask themselves.
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Resigned to their fate, desperate, and surprisingly still content with their bleak future, these are the stories left behind by the cream of youth who mostly perished in wars, from World War I to Iraq, now made available to us through the diaries that they left behind. Consisting of diaries that have already been published and some that have not yet seen print, and ranging from the age of 11 to a maximum of 21 at the time of occurrence, these accounts were written in the hope that someone out there at some moment of time then or decades later would chance upon them and read what these individuals went through whether on the battlefield, a ghetto or a senseless insurrection in some part of the world.