Zlata and her family escaped to Paris in 1993, where they stayed for a year before settling down in Dublin, Ireland.

Zlata Filipović was given a diary in September 1991, when she had just begun fifth grade, and wrote from 1991 to 1993 during the Bosnian war, which began just before her eleventh birthday.

Zlata's diary chronicles her daily life and the war's increasing impact on her home town of Sarajevo.

In 1992, a small press in Sarajevo published 45 pages of Zlata's diary and released it for the UNICEF week.

However, Prose was critical of Western publishers looking to cash in by equating Zlata's story with that of Anne Frank, lamenting the indecency of "contrasting and judging the private writings of children in war".