The Unwomanly Face of War - Svetlana Alexievich
# Metadata
- Author: Svetlana Alexievich
- Full Title: The Unwomanly Face of War
- Category: #books
# Highlights
—Already in the fourth century B.C. women fought in the Greek armies of Athens and Sparta. Later they took part in the campaigns of Alexander the Great. (Location 66)
During World War II the world was witness to a women’s phenomenon. (Location 76)
Millions of the cheaply killed Have trod the path in darkness… —OSIP MANDELSTAM (Location 88)
my Ukrainian grandfather, my mother’s father, was killed at the front and is buried somewhere in Hungary, (Location 99)
The Germans burned alive eleven distant relations with their children— some in their cottage, some in a village church. (Location 102)
At school we were taught to love death. We wrote compositions about how we would like to die in the name of… We dreamed… (Location 113)
For a long time I was a bookish person, both frightened and attracted by reality. My fearlessness came from an ignorance of life. (Location 115)
I searched for a long time… What words can convey what I hear? I searched for a genre that would correspond to how I see the world, how my eye, my ear, are organized. (Location 117)
Everything we know about war we know with “a man’s voice.” We are all captives of “men’s” notions and “men’s” sense of war. “Men’s” words. Women are silent. (Location 126)
If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the “women’s” war but about the “men’s.” They tune in to the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful among their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, (Location 128)
There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things. And it is not only they (people!) who suffer, but the earth, the birds, the trees. All that lives on earth with us. They suffer without words, (Location 134)
Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. (Location 146)
The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. (Location 151)
After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon— plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments— and goes on to herself. Into herself. (Location 156)
We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art. I must admit, women boldly set out on this path… (Location 162)
Calmly and as equals. Without joy and amazement, which are the gifts of the meeting between youth and age. (Location 165)
After long years a person understands that this was life, but now it’s time to resign yourself and get ready to go. (Location 170)
In the midst of all this— married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks… Look at me… Look how I am! Begin by making me a woman: give me flowers, court me, say beautiful words. (Location 180)
To ask Dostoevsky’s question: How much human being is in a human being, and how to protect this human being in oneself? (Location 189)
What are we looking for? Most often not great deeds and heroism, but small, human things, the most interesting and intimate for us. (Location 201)
It is precisely there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is concealed and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare. Its chaos and passion. Its uniqueness and inscrutability. Not yet subjected to any treatment. The originals. (Location 215)
We like war less and less; it’s more and more difficult to find a justification for it. For us it’s simply murder. At least it is for me. (Location 233)
I would like to write a book about war that would make war sickening, and the very thought of it repulsive. Insane. So that even the generals would be sickened… (Location 234)
“women’s” war is more terrible than “men’s.” Men hide behind history, behind facts; war fascinates them as action and a conflict of ideas, of interests, whereas women are caught up with feelings. (Location 239)
They are capable of seeing what is closed to men. I repeat once more: their war has smell, has color, a detailed world of existence: (Location 242)
And how much more unbearable and unthinkable it is to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives it. Bears it in herself for a long time, nurses it. (Location 251)
Yes, they cry a lot. They shout. Swallow heart pills after I am gone. Call an ambulance. But even so they beg me: “Come. Be sure to come. We’ve been silent so long. Forty years…” (Location 267)
I LISTEN TO THE pain… Pain as the proof of past life. There are no other proofs, I don’t trust other proofs. Words have more than once led us away from the truth. (Location 277)
…our memory is far from an ideal instrument. It is not only arbitrary and capricious, it is also chained to time, like a dog. (Location 291)
she saved herself by stealing horse dung at the kolkhoz* 7 stable by night and eating it. Nobody could eat it, but she did: “When it’s warm it’s disgusting, but you can eat it cold. Frozen is the best, it smells of hay.” (Location 305)
They are still paralyzed not only by Stalin’s hypnosis and fear, but also by their former faith. (Location 312)
a great idea needs a small human being, not a great one. A great one is superfluous and inconvenient for it. Hard to process. (Location 324)
the history of the war had been replaced by the history of the victory. (Location 326)
We still did not know (or else forgot) that revolution is always an illusion, especially in our history. (Location 336)
What wounds us most of all is that we have been driven from a great past into an unbearably small present. (Location 358)
—Our heroism is sterile, it leaves no room for physiology or biology. It’s not believable. War tested not only the spirit but the body, too. The material shell. (Location 399)
we were saved by the swamps where the punitive forces didn’t go. A quagmire. It sucked in equipment and people for good. For days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. (Location 404)
precisely at the moment when the rats disappeared from sight, the bombing began. (Location 423)
The only thing we were afraid of was that our own girls would find out about it. Our nurses. (Location 436)
—True, I don’t love great ideas. I love the little human being… (Location 458)
People turned against each other. The children of the kulaks* 11 came back from exile. Their parents had been killed, and they served the German forces. They took their revenge. (Location 481)
At first the Germans disbanded the kolkhozes and gave people the land. People breathed more freely after Stalin. We paid quitrent… Paid it accurately… And then they began to burn us. (Location 484)
Aie, daughter dear, I’m afraid of words. Words are scary… I saved myself by doing good, I didn’t wish evil on anyone. I pitied them all… (Location 486)
—After the war… Human life was worthless. (Location 506)
We dug… Whatever we found and recognized we took. One brought an arm in a wheelbarrow, another a head in a cart… (Location 515)
It’s a pity my mother didn’t live to get this news. She died branded as the wife of an enemy of the people. A traitor. There were many like her. (Location 525)
We thought that after the war everything would change… Stalin would trust his people. But the war was not yet over, and the troop trains were already going to Magadan.* 14 Troop trains with the victors… Those who had been captured, those who had survived the German camps, those whom the Germans had taken along to work for them— all those who had seen Europe— were arrested. Those who could tell how people there lived. (Location 528)
After the Victory everybody became silent. Silent and afraid, as before the war… (Location 532)
Within my memory the history textbook has been rewritten three times. (Location 534)
for a long time I did not believe that our Victory had two faces— one beautiful and the other terrible, all scars— unbearable to look at. (Location 542)
The novel I Am from a Burning Village (also known in English as Out of the Fire), by the Belorussian writers Ales Adamovich (1927– 1994), Yanka Bryl (1917– 2006), and Vladimir Kolesnik (1922– 1994), (Location 550)
Gulag is the Russian acronym for “Main Administration of Camps,” (Location 554)
In Soviet legal terminology the phrase “without the right of correspondence” usually meant the prisoner had been executed. (Location 556)
Golodomor (“ holodomor” in Ukrainian) means “death by hunger.” The term refers to the deliberately created famine of 1932– 1933 in Ukraine, which cost many millions of lives. (Location 558)
why this absence in us of surprise in the face of evil? (Location 586)
I only remember what happened to me. My own war. There were lots of people around, but you were always alone, because a human being is always alone in the face of death. (Location 603)
Sometimes a messenger came in the middle of the night, gave them two hours to get ready, and they’d be carted off. They could even be taken right from the fields. (Location 617)
There were young people from all over the country, many of whom had been under occupation, spoiling to be revenged for the death of their near ones. From all over the Soviet Union. (Location 632)
We learned to assemble and disassemble a sniper’s rifle with our eyes shut, to determine wind speed, the movement of the target, the distance to the target, to dig a foxhole, to crawl on our stomach (Location 649)
The colonel came, walked around looking at the clearing, then stepped on a hummock— saw nothing. Then the “hummock” under him begged: (Location 665)
suddenly a thought flashed through my mind: he’s a human being; he may be an enemy, but he’s a human being— and my hands began to tremble, I started trembling all over, I got chills. Some sort of fear… That feeling sometimes comes back to me in dreams even now… (Location 678)
…I came back from the war gray-haired. Twenty-one years old, but my hair was completely white. I had been badly wounded, had a concussion, poor hearing in one ear. (Location 699)
Mama would catch me, press me to her, and talk to me: “Wake up, wake up. The war is over. You’re home.” I would come to my senses at her words: “I’m your mama. Mama…” She spoke softly. Softly… Loud talk frightened me… (Location 706)
We started out at daybreak and came back from the front line when it got dark. For twelve hours or more we lay in the snow or climbed to the top of a tree, onto the roof of a shed or a ruined house, and there camouflaged ourselves, (Location 722)
my girls sat and didn’t touch the supper. I understood what it was about, burst into tears, and ran out of the dugout… The girls ran after me, started comforting me. Then quickly grabbed their pots and began to eat… (Location 746)
I looked at skirts with horror… at dresses… We didn’t wear skirts at the front, only trousers. We used to wash them in the evening and sleep on them— that counted as ironing. (Location 777)
Can they make a color film about war? Everything was black. Only the blood was another color, the blood was red… (Location 785)
All those years she had been traveling from one invalid home to another, from one hospital to another, undergoing dozens of surgeries. She didn’t even tell her mother she was alive… She hid from everybody… (Location 794)
Even if you come home alive, your soul will hurt. Now I think: it would be better to be wounded in an arm or a leg. Then my body would hurt, not my soul… (Location 800)
I gather what I would call knowledge of the spirit. I follow the traces of inner life; I make records of the soul. For me the path of a soul is more important than the event itself. (Location 818)
The first year, when I came back from the war, I talked and talked. Nobody listened. So I shut up… (Location 835)
Before the war there were rumors that Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union, but such talk was strictly forbidden. (Location 852)
But after Stalin’s speech mama said: “We’ll defend the Motherland and sort it out later.” Everybody loved the Motherland. (Location 859)
one of our soldiers rush at a German tank with his rifle and beat the armor with the rifle butt. He beat, and shouted, and wept till he fell. Till a German submachine gun shot him. During the first year we fought with rifles against tanks and “Messers”…* (Location 891)
we reckoned three months was also long. But the program there was just about to end. We asked to be allowed to take the exams. There was one month of studies left. At night we got practical training in the hospitals, and during the day we studied. (Location 921)
there were trains passing by one after another with nothing but girls in them. They were singing. They waved to us— some with scarves, some with forage caps. (Location 947)
Mama wrote a prayer for me. I put it into a locket; maybe it helped— I did come back home. Before combat I used to kiss that locket… (Location 949)
my father thought that metallurgy was a woman’s work, and piloting wasn’t. The director of the flying club learned about it and allowed me to take my father for a flight in a plane. So I did. My father and I went up in the air together, and after that day he kept mum. He liked it. (Location 955)
there probably will never again be such people as we were then. Never! So naïve and so sincere. With such faith! (Location 998)
I started serving supper and fell down. They brought me back to consciousness and all I heard was: “Quick! Hurry!” And again—“ Quick! Hurry!” A few days later they were still taking blood from me for the badly wounded. People were dying… (Location 1019)
Now I live in Crimea… Here everything drowns in flowers, and every day I look out the window at the sea, but I’m worn out with pain, I still don’t have a woman’s face. I cry often, I moan all day. It’s my memories… (Location 1028)
It took me eight hours to drag him back, tied with a belt by the hand. He was alive when we finally made it. (Location 1041)
Those who escaped from encirclement or captivity were sent to the filtration camps. Behind us moved the retreat-blocking detachments… (Location 1071)
A show execution: this is what will happen to people who waver. Even for a single moment! A single moment… (Location 1076)
We stayed awake round the clock, there were so many wounded. Once none of us slept for three days and three nights. (Location 1079)
After the war I went scouting for some fifteen years. Every night. And dreamed things like that my submachine gun refused to shoot, or we were surrounded… I’d wake up grinding my teeth. Trying to remember— where are you? There or here? (Location 1094)
especially in Ukraine, where the ground after rain or in spring was so heavy, like dough. (Location 1136)
On watch I used to walk back and forth without stopping and recite poetry out loud. Other girls sang songs, so as not to collapse and fall asleep… (Location 1138)
Everything was black, only the bones were white… and the bone ash… I already recognized it… White as could be… (Location 1162)
There were German and police guard posts everywhere, nobody could pass except me. With the baby. I had her swaddled… (Location 1166)
The dew hadn’t dried on the leaves of the trees yet, and they were already saying— war! And this dew that I suddenly saw on the grass and the trees, saw so clearly— (Location 1195)
Nature was in contrast with what was happening with people. The sun shone brightly… Daisies bloomed, (Location 1196)
My papa used to do my braids when I was little. Tied the ribbons. He liked beautiful clothes more than mama did. (Location 1218)
Mama was shot… This happened a few days before we were supposed to move to the ghetto. There were orders hanging all over town: Jews are not allowed— to walk on the sidewalks, to have haircuts in barber shops, to buy anything in the stores… (Location 1236)
She loved, she wanted to live. And, of course, she was afraid. But she went… Not for the sake of Stalin, but for the sake of her children. Their future life. She didn’t want to live on her knees. To submit to the enemy… Maybe we were blind, and I won’t even deny that there was much then that we didn’t know or understand, but we were blind and pure at the same time. We were made of two parts, of two lives. (Location 1270)
I would accept to stand there all night till dawn, just to hear the birds sing. Only at night was there something reminiscent of the former life. Peaceful. (Location 1295)
It was hard to renounce all at once life as it had been up to then. Not only my heart but my whole body resisted. (Location 1305)
In the first days of training we lost two teams. There were four coffins. All three of our regiments sobbed out loud. (Location 1343)
On the train a young captain fell in love with me. He spent a whole night standing in our car. He had already been burned by the war, had been wounded several times. He looked at me, looked, and then said: “Verochka, only don’t lower yourself, don’t become coarse. You’re so delicate now… (Location 1355)
“Who should we take first?” “The silent ones…” (Location 1361)
You operate around the clock, then take a short nap, quickly rub your eyes, wash— and go back to your table. And every third man was dead. We had no time to help them all. (Location 1362)
I met Victory Day in Vienna. We went to the zoo, I wanted so much to go to the zoo. We could have gone to see a concentration camp. They took everybody there to see it. (Location 1368)
You ask me: what is happiness? I answer… To suddenly find a living man among the dead… (Location 1397)
If they’re conscious, they won’t give up their arm or leg. They take it along. And if they’re dying, they ask that it be buried with them. (Location 1401)
I left for the front a materialist. An atheist. I left as a good Soviet schoolgirl, who had been well taught. And there… There I began to pray… I (Location 1416)
amputations… They often amputated so high up that they’d cut off the whole leg, (Location 1432)
The orderlies who tried to bring him back were killed. Two first-aid sheepdogs (this was the first time I saw them) crept toward him, but were also killed. And then I took off my flap-eared hat, stood up tall, and began to sing our favorite prewar song: “I saw you off to a great deed,” first softly, then more and more loudly. Everything became hushed on both sides— ours and the Germans’. I went up to Kostia, bent down, put him on a sledge, and took him to our side. (Location 1446)
didn’t know yet how ordinary and indiscriminate death is. You can’t plead or argue with it. (Location 1501)
Old trucks kept bringing people’s militias. Old men and young boys. They were given two grenades and sent into the battle without a rifle. They were supposed to find themselves a rifle in battle. After the battle there was nobody to bandage… They had all been killed… (Location 1502)
Bread… I broke a piece off a loaf and gave it to him. He took it… Took it and didn’t believe it… He didn’t believe it! I was happy… I was happy that I wasn’t able to hate. I was astonished at myself then… (Location 1523)
memoirs, entitled The Cavalry Maiden, were published in 1836. (Location 1528)
The siege of Leningrad by the German army began in September 1941 and ended in January 1944, after 872 days, with a toll of some 1.5 million lives of Russian soldiers and civilians. (Location 1550)
Russians often use “uncle” and “aunt” as terms of endearment, with no reference to family relations. (Location 1552)
Having sorted the available addresses, I came up with a formula: to try to record women of various military professions. (Location 1568)
“Sometimes after a battle there was no one left to eat… I’d cook a whole pot of soup, a pot of kasha, and there’d be no one to give it to…” (Location 1573)
Everybody got decorated, but she not once. They wouldn’t give her a medal, because her parents were enemies of the people. Just before our army came, her leg was blown off. I visited her in the hospital… She wept…“ But now,” she said, “everybody will trust me.” (Location 1593)
By ten o’clock in the evening all the girls had been badly wounded, but each of them had saved as many as two or three men. They were meagerly decorated; at the beginning of the war decorations weren’t just thrown around. (Location 1624)
A wounded man had to be saved along with his personal weapons. The first question in the medical unit was: where are the weapons? We didn’t have enough of them then. (Location 1625)
We wanted to forget the war. And we forgot our girls, too… (Location 1650)
None of us slept that night. We talked till morning. (Location 1653)
Then what are we in reality— what are we made of, what material? How durable is it— that I want to understand. (Location 1659)
From his coolness and accustomed curiosity, I understand that there are frequent visitors to this house. They are expected here. (Location 1661)
The adults ran to hide, but we were interested in seeing German planes, in seeing what Germans were. They flew over us, but we couldn’t see anything. We were even upset. After a while they turned and flew lower. We all saw black crosses. There was no fear; again there was only curiosity. And suddenly they opened machine-gun fire and started rattling away, (Location 1682)
Tanks often burned. A tank soldier, if he survives, is all covered with burns. (Location 1727)
What did we know about love then? If there was anything, it was a schooltime love, and schooltime love is still childish. (Location 1767)
She hid the badly wounded among the hayricks, shelling began, the hay caught fire. Shura could have saved herself, but she would have had to abandon the wounded… She burned up with them… (Location 1796)
two truths that live in the same human being: one’s own truth driven underground, and the common one, filled with the spirit of the time. The smell of newspapers. (Location 1833)
the more listeners, the more passionless and sterile the account. To make it suit the stereotype. The dreadful would look grand, and the incomprehensible and obscure in a human being would be instantly explained. I would find myself in a desert of the past, filled with nothing but monuments. (Location 1838)
I was struck each time by this mistrust of what is simple and human, by the wish to replace life with an ideal. Ordinary warmth with a cold luster. (Location 1842)
1937 was the height of Stalin’s purges and the Moscow show trials; in June of that year there was also a secret trial of Red Army commanders, followed by their execution, and later in the year there was a massive purge of Red Army officers. (Location 1850)
Frequent wars and revolutions have probably broken our habit of maintaining a connection with the past, of lovingly weaving the family web. Of looking far back. Of taking pride. (Location 1865)
We hasten to forget, to wipe away the traces, because preserved facts can become evidence, often at the cost of life. (Location 1866)
The big ships moored by the pier were camouflaged, of course, but even so the possibility of a hit was not excluded. We became smoke-screeners. A special unit of smoke camouflage was organized, (Location 1881)
Mummies. They told us their siege menu, if I can call it that: soup made from leather belts or new leather shoes, aspic made from woodworker’s glue, pancakes made from mustard… (Location 1890)
she received a medal “For Courage,” and as a bonus she got leave to go home for a few days. When she came back we sniffed her. We literally lined up and sniffed her. (Location 1905)
They issued us footwraps, and we made scarves out of them and tied them on our necks. We wanted to do some women’s work. (Location 1908)
when a person speaks, something more takes place than what remains on paper. I keep regretting that I cannot “record” eyes, hands. Their life during the conversation, their own life. (Location 1912)
The women we met there are excellent wives. Faithful companions. Those who married in the war are the happiest people, the happiest couples. We, too, fell in love with each other at the front. Amid fire and death. That makes for a strong bond. (Location 1930)
They had not been warned about the world’s cruel underside. And these girls, getting married, easily fell into the hands of swindlers, who deceived them, because it was all too easy to deceive them. This happened with many children of our friends from the front. And with our daughter, too…” (Location 1938)
“It was only decades later that the well-known journalist Vera Tkachenko wrote about us in the central newspaper Pravda, about the fact that women were also in the war. And that there are frontline women who have remained single, have not arranged their lives, and still have nowhere to live. (Location 1947)
“I want to live at least one day without the war. Without our memory of it… At least one day…” (Location 1964)
They’re young in them, much younger than I am now. At once everything acquires a different meaning. It comes closer. I look at these young photos and already hear differently what I had just heard and recorded. The time between us disappears. (Location 1966)
“The furniture’s old, too, you see. We’d be sorry to get rid of it. When things live in the house for a long time, they acquire a soul. I believe that.” (Location 1981)
For the French, World War I caused a greater shock than World War II. (Location 1998)
At that moment a rifle shot rang out. They were aiming at my father, at his leather coat… Mother only managed to say “Pa…” and dropped me onto the hot dumplings… She was twenty-four years old… Later my grandfather was chairman of the village council in that village. He was poisoned with strychnine; (Location 2011)
We saw a red-and-black ice block floating along, and on it two or three Germans and one Russian soldier… They had perished like that, clutching each other. They were frozen into this ice block, and the ice block was all bloody. All our Mother Volga was bloody… (Location 2081)
Before they found me, my feet got badly frostbitten. I was obviously covered with snow, but I could breathe, and an opening formed itself in the snow… A sort of pipe… The first-aid dogs found me. They dug into the snow and took my ear-flapped hat. My death passport was in it; we all had these passports: which family members to inform, and where. They dug me out, put me on a tarpaulin, my jacket was soaked with blood… But nobody paid attention to my feet… (Location 2099)
I thought I’d tie the towel to the bed and strangle myself. If I had strength enough. But Aunt Masha didn’t leave my side all night. She saved my young life. She didn’t sleep… (Location 2111)
It turned out that my ward doctor was against the surgery. He suggested another treatment, new at the time. To inject oxygen under the skin with a special needle. Oxygen nourishes… (Location 2114)
I bow down to my stepmother… She met me like a mother. I’ve called her mama ever since. She waited for me, waited so much. (Location 2129)
We were silent as fish. We never acknowledged to anybody that we had been at the front. (Location 2138)
It was later that they began to honor us, thirty years later… to invite us to meetings… But back then we hid, we didn’t even wear our medals. Men wore them, but not women. Men were victors, heroes, wooers, the war was theirs, but we were looked at with quite different eyes. Quite different… (Location 2139)
The plywood suitcase my husband brought from the front served as a cradle. Besides love there was nothing in the house. (Location 2150)
We had nothing over our heads, nothing under us, no rugs, no crystal, nothing… And we were happy. Happy because we were still alive. We talked, we laughed. We walked in the streets… I (Location 2154)
Everybody liked me, professors and students. Because there was a lot of love in me, a lot of joy. That’s how I understood life, that’s how I wanted to live after the war. (Location 2169)
it’s terrible to remember, but it’s far more terrible not to remember.” (Location 2181)
Stalin took his name from the Russian word сталь, “steel.” (Location 2188)
In all the time of my search I have had only a few desperate refusals: (Location 2200)
I kept thinking, “These people will be the end of me!” But soon I had to abandon all my doubts. The girls became real soldiers. (Location 2240)
We didn’t hold them the way you hold a weapon, but like this… Now I can’t even show it… The way you hold a doll… (Location 2264)
You march in a column and you sleep. You bump into the one marching ahead of you, wake up for a second, and fall asleep again. A soldier’s sleep is sweet everywhere. Once, in the dark, instead of going straight I swerved to the side and walked into a field. I walked and slept, until I fell into some kind of ditch. Then I woke up and ran to overtake the others. (Location 2291)
Soldiers sit during a halt— they have one hand-rolled cigarette for the three of them. One smokes, the other two sleep. Even snore… (Location 2294)
his whole chest was turned inside out, you could see his heart… Still beating, but he was dying… I’m bandaging him for the last time and can barely hold back my tears. I must finish quickly, I think, and go to some corner and cry my fill. He says, “Thank you, dear nurse…” and he hands me some small metal object. I look: it’s a crossed saber and rifle. “Why are you giving it to me?” I ask. “Mama said this talisman would save me. But I don’t need it anymore. Maybe you’re luckier than me?” He said it and turned to the wall. (Location 2312)
Most of all I was afraid of carrying the dead. The wind lifts the sheet, and he looks at you. If his eyes were open, I couldn’t carry him, I had to close them… (Location 2318)
—They bring the wounded… They’re crying… Crying not from pain, but from impotence. It was their first day at the front; some of them hadn’t fired a single shot. They weren’t given any rifles, because in the first year of the war weapons cost their weight in gold. (Location 2338)
When an arm or a leg is amputated, there is no blood. There is clean white flesh; the blood comes later. (Location 2344)
You’re getting ready to go, they look at you. Follow you with their eyes. There’s everything in their look: humility, hurt… They ask, “Brothers! Dear sisters! Don’t leave us to the Germans. Finish us off.” (Location 2368)
I remember that the smell of blood on the snow was especially strong… The dead… They lay in the fields. Birds tore their eyes out, pecked their faces, their hands. (Location 2376)
I suddenly saw that the sky was blue… (Location 2381)
—During a bombardment, a goat latched on to us. She lay down with us. Simply lay down nearby and screamed. When the bombing ceased, she went with us and kept clinging to people— well, she’s alive, she’s also afraid. (Location 2402)
They were no longer enemies, but people, simply two wounded men lying next to each other. Something human arose between them. I observed more than once how quickly it happened… (Location 2408)
On the threshold lay the man’s wife and three children… The dog sat next to them and wept. Really wept. Like a human being… (Location 2426)
How they desperately seek for words, yet wish to reconstruct what is gone in the hope that from a distance they may be able to find its full meaning. (Location 2448)
Most often it is already two persons— this one and that one, the young one and the old one. The one in the war and the one after the war. Long after the war. The feeling that I am hearing two voices at the same time never leaves me… (Location 2450)
“Here… I’m your blood brother.” He brought me two apples, a bag of candy— it was impossible then to buy candy anywhere. My God! How tasty those candies were! I went to the head of the hospital: “My brother has come…” They gave me a leave. He said, “Let’s go to the theater.” It was the first time in my life I went to the theater, and with a young fellow, at that. A handsome young fellow. An officer! (Location 2484)
It was my blood brother. He was from an orphanage, and probably mine was the only address he had. My address… When he was leaving he kept asking me to stay in this hospital, so that after the war he could easily find me. “It’s easy to lose each other during the war,” he said. And a month later I received this letter, that he had been killed… And I was so frightened. I was struck to the heart… I decided to do all I could to go to the front and avenge my blood; I knew that my blood had been spilled somewhere there… (Location 2491)
I was so terribly frightened, and then I decided: so as not to turn coward, I took my Komsomol card, dipped it in the blood of a wounded soldier, put it in my pocket over my heart, and buttoned it. And by doing that I made myself an oath that I had to endure, and above all not to turn coward, because if I did it in my first battle, I wouldn’t be able to take a step afterward. (Location 2500)
Right after an attack it’s better not to look at faces; they’re some sort of totally different faces, not like people usually have. They themselves cannot raise their eyes to each other. They don’t even look at the trees. (Location 2517)
When I crawled to the last one, his arm was completely smashed. Hanging by little pieces… by the sinews. He was all bloody… His arm had to be urgently amputated and bandaged, otherwise it was impossible to bandage him. But I had no knife or scissors. My kit was loose on my shoulder, and things had fallen out. What was I to do? I bit his flesh off with my teeth. (Location 2530)
In the morning the whole battalion lined up, those cowards were brought out and placed before us. The order that they be shot was read. Seven men were needed to carry out the sentence… Three men stepped forward; the rest stood there. I took a submachine gun and stepped forward. Once I stepped forward… a young girl… everybody followed me… Those two could not be forgiven. Because of them such brave boys were killed! (Location 2538)
He treated me more with words than with medications; he explained my illness to me. He said that if I had left for the front at eighteen or nineteen, my body would have been stronger, but since I had just turned sixteen— it was a very early age— I had been badly traumatized. “Of course, medications are one thing,” he explained. “They may treat you, but if you want to restore your health, if you want to live, my only advice is: you should get married and have as many children as possible. Only that can save you. With every child your body will be reborn.” (Location 2555)
In war your soul ages. After the war I was never young… (Location 2568)
There have been thousands of wars on earth (I read recently that they’ve counted up more than three thousand— big and small), but war remains, as it has always been, one of the chief human mysteries. (Location 2577)
Yet in this seemingly small and easily observable territory— the space of one human soul— everything is still less comprehensible, less predictable than in history. Because before me are living tears, living feelings. A living human face, which the shadows of pain and fear pass over as we talk. (Location 2579)
There is only one path— to love this human being. To understand through love. (Location 2583)
However much I love to look at the sky or the sea, still I’m more fascinated by a grain of sand under a microscope. The world in a single drop. (Location 2595)
How can I call the small small and the great great, when both are so boundless? I’ve long ceased to distinguish between them. (Location 2597)
Went across the fields. What a harvest! We walked and trampled down the rye. And the harvest that year was unprecedented, the grain stood very tall. Green grass, bright sun, and dead men lying there, blood… Dead men and animals. Blackened trees… Destroyed train stations… Charred people hanging from black train cars… (Location 2634)
We walked forty miles on foot all the way to Stalingrad. One of us wore the boots, the other mama’s slippers. Then we’d change. (Location 2650)
We slept under their feet. The horse would move its leg carefully, and would never step on a human being. It would never step on a dead man, and if a living man was only wounded, it would never go away and abandon him. Very intelligent animals. For a cavalryman, a horse is a friend. A faithful friend. (Location 2665)
When the cavalrymen went it was like an avalanche— capes flying, sabers bared, horses snorting, and a horse when it races is so strong… This whole avalanche went against the tanks, the artillery— it was like in an otherworldly dream. Unreal… (Location 2670)
we committed one blunder: we didn’t cut the enemy’s communications. And the German artillery blanketed us with both mortar and long-range fire. (Location 2701)
Which way to go? I had been holding the bridle firmly; the horse went wherever I pointed him. Well, so here, I don’t know, some instinct told me, or I’d heard somewhere, that horses sense the road, so before that fork I let go of the bridle, and the horse went in a completely different direction from where I was going to go. (Location 2709)
the movement of the face: from soft, childish features to a confident woman’s gaze, even a certain toughness, severity. (Location 2726)
But the war quickly created its image of people. Painted its own portraits. (Location 2729)
I hadn’t forgotten anything. I remembered those boots… When they set up in front of their trenches a row of boots with cut-off legs in them. It was in winter, they stood there like stakes… Those boots… That was all we saw of our comrades… (Location 2741)
When men saw a woman at the front line, their faces became different; even the sound of a woman’s voice transformed them. (Location 2762)
Sometimes I hid from shelling, not so much thinking they won’t kill me this way, but just to hide my face. My hands. I think all our girls thought about it. And the men laughed at us, they thought it was funny. (Location 2769)
It’s awkward to admit it. So I ran all over, bandaging, until I fainted from loss of blood. My boots were full of blood… (Location 2786)
They gave me disability… And what did I do? I tore up those papers and threw them out; I didn’t even go to get some money. For that I’d have had to go through all kinds of commissions, tell about myself: when I got the concussion, when I got wounded. Where. (Location 2793)
I remember how father said to mother, “It’s my fault that the girls went to war at such a young age. I hope it hasn’t broken them… Otherwise they’ll be at war all their lives.” (Location 2805)
I decided to sell the overcoat. I went to the market… I came in a light-colored summer dress… With my hair pinned up… And what did I see there? Young fellows without arms, without legs… All fighting men… With orders, medals… Whoever has hands sells homemade spoons. Women’s bras, underpants. Another… without arms, without legs… sits bathed in tears. Begs for small change… There were no wheelchairs then; they rolled around on homemade platforms, pushing them with their hands, if they had them. Some are drunk. Singing about an orphan, “Forgotten, abandoned.” Such scenes. (Location 2808)
As soon as I close my eyes I see… Spring… We go around some field, just after a battle, looking for the wounded. The field is trampled all over. I come upon two dead men— a young soldier of ours and a young German. Lying in young wheat and looking into the sky… No signs of death on them yet. Just looking into the sky… I still remember those eyes… (Location 2826)
The last days of the war… I remember this… We were driving and suddenly there was music somewhere. A violin… For me the war ended that day… (Location 2830)
We all imagined that after the war, after such oceans of tears, there would be a wonderful life. Beautiful. After the Victory… after that day… We imagined that all people would be very kind, would only love each other. They would all become brothers and sisters. How we waited for that day… (Location 2832)
I stood guard. They shout, “Sentry! Sentry!”— and I can’t respond. I don’t even have strength enough to speak… (Location 2874)
The Uzbeks and Tajiks were especially afraid of frost. In their parts it’s always sunny, and here we had minus twenty to minus forty. (Location 2892)
How did we transport trees? We’d all pick one up and carry it. The whole unit carried one tree. We had bloody blisters… On our hands… on our shoulders… (Location 2937)
Many of their relations had been killed or lived on territory occupied by the enemy. They couldn’t write. So we used to write letters from an Unknown Sender: “Dear soldier, it is an Unknown Girl writing to you. How is the fight with the enemy going? When will you come home with the Victory?” (Location 2959)
We wash the underwear, and before we dry it we soak it in the special “K” soap to prevent lice. We had insect powder, but it didn’t work. We used “K” soap, very stinky, it smelled awful. (Location 2978)
one laundress was awarded the Order of the Red Star. She was the best laundress, she never left the tub: everybody was exhausted, falling off their feet, and she went on laundering. She was an older woman, her whole family had been killed. (Location 3015)
how many years will it take to rebuild it all? War kills time, precious human time. (Location 3032)
The head of the militia made a speech: “I knew, Babina, that you’d be the first to volunteer. And you are all fine girls, no cowards. The war is over, you could go back home, but you go to defend your Motherland.” (Location 3075)
A human wave carried us out onto the platform. Having turned into a pair of icicles, we were unable to move. We stood, supporting each other so as not to fall down, not to break into smithereens, as a frog did once in front of my eyes, taken out of liquid oxygen and thrown on the floor. (Location 3102)
We were a factory on wheels. On special trucks, called letuchki, machines were installed for milling, boring, polishing, turning. (Location 3174)
Each machine was worked by two persons. Twelve hours of work without a moment of rest. The partner stayed while the other went to eat dinner, supper, breakfast. If one’s turn came to go on assignment, the other worked twenty-four hours. (Location 3175)
after just a few months of my civilian life, my joints got swollen, my right arm refused to work and was in terrible pain, my vision deteriorated, one of my kidneys turned out to have descended, my liver was not in the right place, and, as it turned out later, my vegetative nervous system was completely ruined. But all through the war I had dreamed that I would study. And the university became like a second Stalingrad for me. I finished it a year early, otherwise I would have run out of energy. (Location 3187)
Stepan Bandera (1909– 1959) is a controversial Ukrainian political figure. A nationalist and leader of a movement for independence of Ukraine from the Soviet Union, he led forces against the advancing Red Army in 1944 with aid from Germany. In 1959 he was assassinated by the Soviet secret police. (Location 3193)
whatever the women talked about, even if it was death, they always remembered (yes!) about beauty. (Location 3207)
Before we left for the front, our old professor told us this: “You have to tell every wounded soldier that you love him. Your strongest medicine is love. Love protects, it gives the strength to survive.” (Location 3240)
Another time, in an abandoned milliner’s shop, the girls each chose a hat for herself and slept all night sitting, so as to wear a hat at least for a little while. (Location 3307)
The planes they gave us were Po-2s. Small, slow. They flew only at a low level. Hedge-hopping. Just over the ground! Before the war young people in flying clubs learned to fly in them, but no one could have imagined they would have any military use. The plane was constructed entirely of plywood, covered with aircraft fabric. In fact, with cheesecloth. One direct hit and it caught fire and burned up completely in the air, before reaching the ground. Like a match. The only solid metal part was the M-11 motor. (Location 3333)
The body reorganized itself so much during the war that we weren’t women… We didn’t have those women’s things… Periods… You know… And after the war not all of us could have children. (Location 3352)
We would march by three holding hands, and the middle one could sleep for an hour or two. Then we’d change places. (Location 3371)
I got as far as Berlin. I put my signature on the Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill war.” (Location 3372)
Six months later… We were so overworked we ceased to be women… We stopped having… (Location 3410)
I wrote a letter to Voroshilov himself, asking to be accepted in the Leningrad Artillery School. They accepted me only on his personal order. The only girl. (Location 3457)
When I finished the school, they still wanted me to stay on dry land. Then I stopped telling them that I was a woman. (Location 3458)
I start talking, myself— that’s also not it. Not as frightening and not as beautiful. Do you know how beautiful a morning at war can be? Before combat… You look and you know: this may be your last. (Location 3531)
Most Russian family names have a feminine ending for women (Ivanov becomes Ivanova), but often Ukrainian names, such as Rudenko, do not. (Location 3558)
I’m falling asleep, looking at the fire. I sleep with my eyes open: some moths, some bugs fly into the fire, they fly all night long, without a sound, without a rustle, they silently disappear into this big fire. (Location 3602)
It took me a long time to realize that this was not some sort of game and not a simple school, but a military academy. Preparation for war. A commander’s order is law for a subordinate. (Location 3650)
We’d spend the whole day watching everything attentively and drawing up a map of the observed front line and marking the places where changes in the surface of the terrain appeared. (Location 3664)
Before our troops advanced, we worked during the night. We felt the ground inch by inch. Made corridors in the mine fields. All the work was done crawling… (Location 3668)
Make sure you live till the victory, it will come soon. (Location 3724)
Flowerbeds gone to seed. There were always mines hiding there; the Germans loved flowerbeds. (Location 3743)
Once there were people digging potatoes in a field, and next to them we were digging mines… (Location 3744)
For the sappers the war ended several years later; (Location 3758)
He told me that my smile brought him back to life, from the other world, as they say… A woman’s smile… (Location 3917)
There were bombs falling around… He lay on a tarpaulin… That moment… I was happy… I stood smiling to myself. Crazy. I was happy that maybe he knew about my love… (Location 4097)
war… I had to learn to be tender. To be weak and fragile. But my feet were used to size ten boots. I wasn’t used to being embraced. I was used to being responsible for myself. I waited for tender words, but I didn’t understand them. To me they seemed childish. (Location 4124)
For two years, along with our other women, the fascists made her lead the way during their operations: they feared the partisan mines and always drove local people ahead of them— (Location 4186)
On my way back, it was already growing light. How was I to get around the German patrols? I circled through the forest, fell into the lake; my father’s jacket and boots, everything sank. I got out of the hole in the ice… Ran barefoot over the snow… I fell ill and took to my bed and never got up. My legs were paralyzed. There were no doctors or medications. Mama treated me with herb infusions. Applied clay… After the war they took me to doctors. But it was already too late. I remained bedridden… I (Location 4343)
The Germans burned us down, picked us clean. We were left on a bare rock. We came back from the woods, there was nothing. Only the cats were still there. (Location 4362)
They were already shouting “Fall in!” But he couldn’t let go of him, he stood in the column with him… The commander yelled at him, and he was flooding the baby with tears. All the swaddling clothes got wet. We ran out of the village with the children; we ran for another three miles. Other women also ran along. My children were falling down, and I was barely able to carry the little one. And Volodya, that’s my husband, turned to look, and I kept running. I was the last… The children stayed behind on the road. I was running with the little one… (Location 4408)
—A Gypsy woman taught me: “When everybody falls asleep, put on a black shawl and sit down by a big mirror. He’ll appear in it… You shouldn’t touch either him or his clothes. Just talk to him…” (Location 4436)
I’ve operated on so many men, but I haven’t seen anyone like her. She never made a sound.” I controlled myself… I was used to being strong in front of people… (Location 4468)
I was afraid of torture… What if I couldn’t stand it? We all thought that way… Alone… Since childhood, for instance, I had borne physical pain poorly. But we didn’t know ourselves, we didn’t know how strong we were… (Location 4491)
I didn’t have the strength to lie down; if I did, I’d never get up again. (Location 4618)
how did he stay alive? Why didn’t he die? Even the dead were under suspicion… Even them… And they didn’t take into consideration that we fought, we sacrificed everything for the sake of victory. And we won… The people won! But Stalin still didn’t trust the people. That was how our Motherland repaid us. (Location 4762)
He fell asleep saying, “Mama, we have a cat. Now we have a real home.” (Location 4806)
When they bombed us, I took him with me from the freight car to the locomotive. I grabbed him, pressed him to my heart: “Let us die from the same shrapnel.” But could that be? Clearly, that’s why we stayed alive. (Location 4810)
The school didn’t accept me as a cleaning woman when I applied, they didn’t trust me to clean the floors. I became an enemy of the people, the wife of an enemy of the people. A traitor. My entire life was a waste… (Location 4860)
The person shaped by war had to be shaped by something that was not war. (Location 4881)
It was back then that you should have listened to us— listened and recorded it. It’s a pity that no one thought of hearing us out then; everyone just repeated the word “Victory,” and the rest seemed unimportant. (Location 4924)
Stalin was sitting in the government loge. My father had been arrested, my elder brother had disappeared in the camps, but despite that I felt so ecstatic that tears poured from my eyes. I was swooning with happiness! The whole room… (Location 5139)
Those conversations never occurred in groups. Only if there were two people. A third was too many, the third one would have denounced… (Location 5147)
The train station near Mogilev was being bombarded. And there was a train carrying children. They started throwing them out through the windows, little children— three or four years old. There was a forest nearby, so they ran toward the forest. The German tanks immediately drove out, and the tanks drove over the children. There was nothing left of those children… (Location 5181)
I went there as a heroine; I never thought a frontline girl could be greeted like that. (Location 5247)
For a long time after the war I was afraid of the sky, even of raising my head toward the sky. I was afraid of seeing plowed-up earth. But the rooks already walked calmly over it. The birds quickly forgot the war… (Location 5297)