Svetlana Alexievich - The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

I am writing a book about war

I, who never liked to read military books, although in my childhood and youth this was the favorite reading of everybody. Of all my peers. And that is not surprisingwe were the children of Victory. The children of the victors. What is the first thing I remember about the war? My childhood anguish amid the incomprehensible and frightening words. The war was remembered all the time: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, at celebrations and wakes. Even in childrens conversations. The neighbors boy once asked me: What do people do under the ground? How do they live there? We, too, wanted to unravel the mystery of war.

It was then that I began to think about deathAnd I never stopped thinking about it; it became the main mystery of life for me.

For us everything took its origin from that frightening and mysterious world. In our family my Ukrainian grandfather, my mothers father, was killed at the front and is buried somewhere in Hungary, and my Belorussian grandmother, my fathers mother, was a partisan and died of typhus; two of her sons served in the army and were reported missing in the first months of the war; of three sons only one came back. My father. The Germans burned alive eleven distant relations with their childrensome in their cottage, some in a village church. These things happened in every family. With everybody.

For a long time afterward the village boys played Germans and Russians. They shouted German words: Hnde hoch! Zurck! Hitler kaputt!

We didnt know a world without war; the world of war was the only one familiar to us, and the people of war were the only people we knew. Even now I dont know any other world and any other people. Did they ever exist?

T HE VILLAGE OF MY postwar childhood was a village of women. Village women. I dont remember any mens voices. That is how it has remained for me: stories of the war are told by women. They weep. Their songs are like weeping.

In the school library half of the books were about the war. The same with the village library, and in the nearby town, where my father often drove to get books. Now I know the reason why. Could it have been accidental? We were making war all the time, or preparing for war. Remembering how we made war. We never lived any other way, and probably didnt know how. We cant imagine how to live differently, and it will take us a long time to learn, if we ever do.

At school we were taught to love death. We wrote compositions about how we would like to die in the name ofWe dreamed