Page 11 - Dear unkown friend

Children imitate what grown-ups do. one’s life and the surrounding world.

That is how children become grown- When we manage to look through the

ups. What is more significant, they veil of all those symbols, we always find

become the same as grown-ups. That is only this and always this—a child star-

where the misery lies since most grown- ing at the glory and the horror of the

ups represent a bad model, and world.

children have no choice.

All grown-ups were children once, even

Some children imitate grown-ups by the worst of criminals. It is no big thing

playing the game of war—even in war to grow up. It is much bigger, once that

time. It is a frightening and appalling happens, to find the child in ourselves

fact, pregnant with meanings we can again. When a grown-up truly recol-

never fully translate. While these chil- lects his childhood and asks himself

dren play their game of war with wood- who he was then and who he is now,

en guns, tangible death enters their he is well on the way to salvation as a

world from a tangible war, a war made human being. We believe that reading

by grown-ups, a war in which children the letters collected in this book can be

are victims. They do not understand the starting point for this journey.

the war, but they learn to imitate it.

When a child is born, it is neither a

Serb nor a Croat nor a Muslim, it is not Program Officers

British or Russian or French, neither Pen Pals for Peace

Christian nor Jew, neither Hindu nor Open Society Fund for Bosnia

Buddhist. It is yet to become any of and Herzegovina

these. Its universal human identity has Sarajevo

yet to be hidden beneath the acquired May 1994

identities of ethnicity, religion, and

national politics. These acquired iden-

tities represent merely one of myriad

possible ways of bringing reason into

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