Some of you may say that you shouldn’t bring to the surface literally everything that happened in the war, that, they say, “in war, just like in war,” all sorts of things happened, and now this “all sorts” should not be poked at face, saying: “After all, it happened! It happened!”
I'm not poking. I understand that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to accept the war to the end as it really was, and not as we know it from our favorite movies, books, and stories of our old people. Many of them, by the way, like my grandfather, did not like to talk about the war, apparently, they protected us from what could hurt us, painfully traumatize us.
Internally I am calm. I have long accepted for myself as an axiom that the old people will take the whole truth about the war with them to the grave, and we will only be left with what we have become accustomed to since childhood. But I don't want that! This is probably due to the fact that I am no longer a child, and am mentally ready to listen to these stories. I live and regret that my grandfather told me so little about the war, and now you can’t even ask him...
Two desires are fighting in me: to receive this forbidden knowledge about the war, the truth of it, through old man’s eyes, and the desire not to open this Pandora’s box. The first desire won, and having received a piece of this knowledge, I realized that it did not change me in any way, I remained the way I was. And my attitude towards the Soviet soldier, towards the woman in the war, towards the great Victory has not changed either. Although no, I understood, firstly, in a war you cannot remain the same as you were before it, and, secondly, we don’t even understand a hundredth part of how difficult it was there: it’s hard to survive, it’s hard to win, it’s hard not to become brutalized by blood, dirt, lice, constant death. And they, our old people, went through it all...
If you are not ready for this, better not read this...
“Everything can become literature...
What interested me most in my archives was the notebook where I wrote down those episodes that were crossed out by the censor. And also my conversations with the censor. There I also found pages that I had thrown away myself. My self-censorship, my own ban. And my explanation - why did I throw it away? Much of this and that has already been restored in the book, but I want to give these few pages separately - this is also a document. My way...
Svetlana Alexievich
From what the censorship threw out
I’m going to wake up at night now... It’s as if someone is, well... crying next to me... I’m at war...
We are retreating... Outside Smolensk, some woman brings me her dress, I have time to change. I’m walking alone... Alone among men... Either I was in trousers, or I’m walking in a summer dress. I suddenly started having these things... Women's affairs... They started earlier, probably out of excitement. From worries, from resentment. Where will you find what here? They slept under bushes, in ditches, in the forest on stumps. There were so many of us that there wasn’t enough space for everyone in the forest. We walked, confused, deceived, no longer trusting anyone... Where are our aircraft, where are our tanks? What flies, crawls, rattles - everything is German.
This is how I was captured... On the last day before captivity, both legs were broken... I lay there and urinated on myself... I don’t know with what forces I crawled away at night. She crawled away to the partisans...
I feel sorry for those who will read this book and those who will not read it...”
…………………………………….
“I was on night duty... I went into the ward of the seriously wounded. The captain is lying there... The doctors warned me before duty that he would die at night... He wouldn’t live until the morning... I asked him: “Well, how? How can I help you?" I’ll never forget... He suddenly smiled, such a bright smile on his exhausted face: “Unbutton your robe... Show me your breasts... I haven’t seen my wife for a long time...” I felt ashamed, I answered him something . She left and returned an hour later.
He lies dead. And that smile on his face..."
…………………………………….
“Near Kerch... At night we walked on a barge under fire. The bow part caught fire... And from the fire... The fire spread across the deck... The ammunition exploded... A powerful explosion! The explosion was so strong that the barge tilted to the right side and began to sink. And the shore is not far away, we understand that the shore is somewhere nearby, and the soldiers rushed into the water. Mortars pounded from the shore... Screams, groans, swearing... I swam well, I wanted to save at least one... At least one wounded... This is water, not land - a person will die immediately. Water... I hear someone nearby, either coming up to the top, or going under the water again. Up - under water. I seized the moment, grabbed it... Something cold, slippery...
I decided that he was wounded, and his clothes were torn off by the explosion. Because I myself am naked... I was left in my underwear... Darkness. Gouge out your eye. Around: “Eh! Ay-ya-ya!” And mate... I somehow got to the shore with him... Just at that moment a rocket flashed in the sky, and I saw that I had pulled down a large wounded fish. The fish is large, as tall as a man. Beluga... She's dying... I fell next to her and broke this three-story mat. I cried from resentment... And from the fact that everyone was suffering...”
…………………………………….
“We were leaving the encirclement... Wherever we rush, there are Germans everywhere. We decide: in the morning we will break through in battle. We’ll die anyway, but we’d better die with dignity. In battle. We had three girls. They came at night to everyone who could... Not everyone, of course, was capable. Nerves, you know. Such a thing... Everyone was preparing to die...
Only a few escaped in the morning... Not many... Well, about seven people, but there were fifty. The Germans cut me down with machine guns... I remember those girls with gratitude. I didn’t find a single one among the living this morning... I have never met...”
From a conversation with the censor:
- Who will go to war after such books? You humiliate a woman with primitive naturalism. A female heroine. You are debunking. You make her an ordinary woman. Female. And they are our saints.
- Our heroism is sterile; it does not want to take into account either physiology or biology. You don't believe him. And not only the spirit was tested, but also the body. Material shell.
- Where do you get these thoughts from? Other people's thoughts. Not Soviet. You laugh at those in mass graves. We've read enough remark... Remarqueism won't work for us. Soviet woman- not an animal...
…………………………………….
“Someone gave us away... The Germans found out where the partisan detachment was stationed. The forest and approaches to it were cordoned off from all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by the swamps, where the punitive forces did not enter. A quagmire. It captivated both the equipment and the people. For several days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. There was a radio operator with us; she had recently given birth. The baby is hungry... He asks for the breast... But the mother herself is hungry, there is no milk, and the baby is crying. The punishers are nearby... With the dogs... The dogs will hear, we will all die. The whole group is about thirty people... Do you understand?
We make a decision...
No one dares to convey the commander’s order, but the mother herself guesses. He lowers the bundle with the child into the water and holds it there for a long time... The child no longer screams... Not a sound... And we cannot raise our eyes. Neither at mother, nor at each other... »
…………………………………….
“When we took prisoners, they brought them into the detachment... They were not shot, death was too easy for them, we slaughtered them like pigs with ramrods and cut them into pieces . I went to see it... I was waiting! I've been waiting for a long time for the moment when their eyes begin to burst from pain... Pupils...
What do you know about this?! They burned my mother and sisters at the stake in the middle of the village...»
…………………………………….
“I don’t remember cats or dogs during the war, I remember rats. Big... With yellow-blue eyes... They were visible and invisible. When I recovered from my injury, the hospital sent me back to my unit. Some were in the trenches near Stalingrad. The commander ordered: “Take her to the girls’ dugout.” I entered the dugout and the first thing I was surprised was that there were no things there. Empty beds of pine branches, and that's it. They didn’t warn me... I left my backpack in the dugout and went out; when I returned half an hour later, I couldn’t find my backpack. No traces of things, no comb, no pencil. It turned out that everyone was instantly eaten by rats...
And in the morning they showed me the gnawed hands of the seriously wounded...
In no scariest movie have I ever seen rats leaving a city before shelling. This is not in Stalingrad... It was already near Vyazma... In the morning, herds of rats walked through the city, they went into the fields. They smelled death. There were thousands of them... Black, gray... People looked in horror at this ominous sight and huddled close to their houses. And exactly at the time when they disappeared from our eyes, the shelling began. Planes flew in. Instead of houses and basements, there was stone sand...»
…………………………………….
“There were so many killed at Stalingrad that the horses were no longer afraid of them. Usually they are afraid. A horse will never step on a dead person. We collected our dead, but the Germans were lying everywhere. Frozen...Icy...I- driver, carried boxes with artillery shells, I heard their skulls cracking under the wheels... Bones... And I was happy...»
From a conversation with the censor:
- Yes, the Victory was difficult for us, but you must look for heroic examples. There are hundreds of them. And you show the dirt of war. Underwear. Our Victory is terrible... What are you trying to achieve?
Truth.
- And you think that the truth is what is in life. What's on the street. Underfoot. It's so low for you. Earthly. No, the truth is what we dream about. What we want to be!
(To be continued...)
War does not have a woman's face
One of the most famous books about the war in the world, which laid the foundation for the famous artistic and documentary cycle “Voices of Utopia.” “For her polyphonic creativity - a monument to suffering and courage in our time,” Svetlana Alexievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Here is the latest author's edition: the writer, in accordance with her creative method, finalized the book, removing censored edits, inserting new episodes, supplementing the recorded women's confessions with pages of her own diary, which she kept during seven years of working on the book. “War Doesn’t Have a Woman’s Face” is the experience of a unique insight into the spiritual world of a woman surviving in the inhuman conditions of war. The book has been translated into more than twenty languages, included in school and university curricula in many countries, and has received several prestigious awards: the Ryszard Kapuscinski Prize (2011) for the best work in the genre of reporting, the Angelus Prize (2010) and others.
Svetlana Alexievich
War does not have a woman's face
© Svetlana Alexievich, 2013
© “Time”, 2013
– When did women first appear in the army in history?
– Already in the 4th century BC, women fought in the Greek armies in Athens and Sparta. Later they took part in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.
Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote about our ancestors: “Slav women sometimes went to war with their fathers and spouses, without fear of death: during the siege of Constantinople in 626, the Greeks found many female corpses among the killed Slavs. The mother, raising her children, prepared them to be warriors.”
- And in new times?
– For the first time, in England in the years 1560–1650, hospitals began to be formed in which female soldiers served.
– What happened in the twentieth century?
- Beginning of the century... During the First World War in England, women were already taken into the Royal Air Force, the Royal Auxiliary Corps and the Women's Legion of Motor Transport were formed - in the amount of 100 thousand people.
In Russia, Germany, and France, many women also began to serve in military hospitals and ambulance trains.
And during World War II, the world witnessed a female phenomenon. Women have served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world: in the British army - 225 thousand, in the American army - 450-500 thousand, in the German army - 500 thousand...
About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most “masculine” ones. Even a language problem arose: the words “tanker”, “infantryman”, “machine gunner” did not have a feminine gender until that time, because this work had never been done by a woman. Women's words were born there, during the war...
From a conversation with a historian
A man greater than war (from the book's diary)
Millions killed for cheap
We trampled the path in the dark...
Osip Mandelstam
1978–1985
I'm writing a book about the war...
I, who did not like to read military books, although in my childhood and youth this was everyone’s favorite reading. All my peers. And this is not surprising - we were children of Victory. Children of the winners. The first thing I remember about the war? Your childhood melancholy among incomprehensible and frightening words. People always remembered the war: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, on holidays and at funerals. Even in children's conversations. A neighbor boy once asked me: “What do people do underground? How do they live there? We also wanted to unravel the mystery of the war.
Then I started thinking about death... And I never stopped thinking about it; for me it became the main secret of life.
Everything for us began from that terrible and mysterious world. In our family, the Ukrainian grandfather, my mother’s father, died at the front and was buried somewhere in Hungarian soil, and the Belarusian grandmother, my father’s mother, died of typhus in the partisans, her two sons served in the army and went missing in the first months of the war, from three returned alone. My father. The Germans burned eleven distant relatives along with their children alive - some in their hut, some in the village church. This was the case in every family. Everyone has.
The village boys played “Germans” and “Russians” for a long time. They shouted German words: “Hende hoch!”, “Tsuryuk”, “Hitler kaput!”
We did not know a world without war, the world of war was the only world we knew, and the people of war were the only people we knew. Even now I don’t know another world and other people. Have they ever existed?
The village of my childhood after the war was all women's. Babya. I don't remember male voices. This is how it remains with me: women talk about the war. They're crying. They sing as if they are crying.
The school library contains half of the books about the war. Both in the countryside and in the regional center, where my father often went to buy books. Now I have an answer - why. Is it by chance? We were always at war or preparing for war. We remembered how we fought. We have never lived differently, and we probably don’t know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently; we will have to learn this for a long time.
At school we were taught to love death. We wrote essays about how we would like to die in the name of... We dreamed...
For a long time I was a bookish person who was frightened and attracted by reality. From ignorance of life came fearlessness. Now I think: if I were a more real person, could I throw myself into such an abyss? What was all this due to – ignorance? Or from a sense of the way? After all, there is a sense of the way...
I searched for a long time... What words can convey what I hear? I was looking for a genre that would correspond to how I see the world, how my eye and my ear work.
One day I came across the book “I am from the village of fire” by A. Adamovich, Y. Bryl, V. Kolesnik. I experienced such a shock only once, while reading Dostoevsky. And here is an unusual form: the novel is assembled from the voices of life itself. from what I heard as a child, from what is now heard on the street, at home, in a cafe, on a trolleybus. So! The circle is closed. I found what I was looking for. I had a presentiment.
Ales Adamovich became my teacher...
For two years I didn’t meet and write so much as I thought. I read it. What will my book be about? Well, another book about the war... Why? There have already been thousands of wars - small and large, known and unknown. And even more has been written about them. But... Men also wrote about men - this became clear immediately. Everything we know about the war comes from a “male voice.” We are all captive of “male” ideas and “male” feelings of war. "Male" words. And the women are silent. Nobody but me asked my grandmother. My Mom. Even those who were at the front are silent. If they suddenly start to remember, they tell not a “women’s” war, but a “men’s” one. Adapt to the canon. And only at home or after crying in the circle of friends at the front, they begin to talk about their war, which is unfamiliar to me. Not just me, all of us. In my journalistic trips, I was more than once a witness and the only listener of completely new texts. And I felt shocked, just like in childhood. In these stories, a monstrous grin of the mysterious was visible... When women speak, they do not have or almost do not have what we are used to reading and hearing about: how some people heroically killed others and won. Or they lost. What was it like
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equipment and what generals. Women's stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting and its own space of feelings. Your own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are just people who are busy with inhumanly human work. And not only they (people!) suffer there, but also the earth, the birds, and the trees. Everyone who lives with us on earth. They suffer without words, which is even worse.
But why? – I asked myself more than once. – Why, having defended and taken their place in the once absolutely male world, did women not defend their history? Your words and your feelings? They didn't believe themselves. The whole world is hidden from us. Their war remained unknown...
I want to write the history of this war. Women's history.
After the first meetings...
Surprise: these women’s military professions are medical instructor, sniper, machine gunner, anti-aircraft gun commander, sapper, and now they are accountants, laboratory assistants, tour guides, teachers... There is a mismatch of roles here and there. It’s as if they remember not about themselves, but about some other girls. Today they surprise themselves. And before my eyes, history “humanizes” and becomes similar to ordinary life. Another lighting appears.
There are amazing storytellers who have pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. A person sees himself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from earth. Before him is the whole way up and the way down - from the angel to the beast. Memories are not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a vanished reality, but a rebirth of the past when time turns back. First of all, it is creativity. By telling stories, people create, “write” their lives. It happens that they “add on” and “rewrite”. You have to be careful here. On guard. At the same time, pain melts and destroys any falsehood. Temperature too high! I was convinced that ordinary people behave more sincerely - nurses, cooks, laundresses... They, how can I define this more accurately, pull words from themselves, and not from newspapers and books they read - not from someone else's. But only from my own suffering and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, oddly enough, are often more susceptible to the processing of time. Its general encryption. Infected with secondary knowledge. Myths. Often you have to walk for a long time, in different circles, to hear a story about a “women’s” war, and not about a “men’s” one: how they retreated, advanced, on what part of the front... It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. As a persistent portrait painter.
I sit in an unfamiliar house or apartment for a long time, sometimes all day. We drink tea, try on recently purchased blouses, discuss hairstyles and culinary recipes. We look at photographs of our grandchildren together. And then... After some time, you will never know after what time and why, suddenly that long-awaited moment comes when a person moves away from the canon - plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments - and goes to himself. Into yourself. He begins to remember not the war, but his youth. A piece of your life... You need to capture this moment. Don't miss it! But often, after a long day filled with words, facts, and tears, only one phrase remains in the memory (but what a phrase!): “I went to the front so little that I even grew up during the war.” I leave it in my notebook, even though I have tens of meters on the tape recorder. Four or five cassettes...
What helps me? It helps that we are used to living together. Together. Cathedral people. We have everything in the world – both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and talk about suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and awkward life. For us, pain is art. I must admit, women bravely set out on this journey...
How do they greet me?
Names: “girl”, “daughter”, “baby”, probably if I were from their generation, they would have treated me differently. Calm and equal. Without the joy and amazement that the meeting of youth and old age gives. This is a very important point that they were young then, but now they remember the old ones. Through life they remember - after forty years. They carefully open their world to me, they spare me: “Immediately after the war, I got married. She hid behind her husband. For everyday life, for baby diapers. She willingly hid. And my mother asked: “Be quiet! Shut up! Don’t confess.” I fulfilled my duty to my Motherland, but I am sad that I was there. That I know this... And you are just a girl. I feel sorry for you...” I often see them sitting and listening to themselves. To the sound of your soul. They compare it with the words. Over the years, a person understands that this was life, and now he must come to terms with it and prepare to leave. I don’t want to and it’s a shame to disappear just like that. Carelessly. On the run. And when he looks back, he has a desire not only to talk about his own, but also to get to the secret of life. Answer the question for yourself: why did this happen to him? He looks at everything with a slightly farewell and sad look... Almost from there... There is no need to deceive and be deceived. It is already clear to him that without the thought of death nothing can be discerned in a person. Its mystery exists above everything.
War is too intimate an experience. And as endless as human life...
Once a woman (a pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained over the phone: “I can’t... I don’t want to remember. I was at war for three years... And for three years I didn’t feel like a woman. My body is dead. There was no menstruation, almost no female desires. And I was beautiful... When my future husband proposed to me... This was already in Berlin, at the Reichstag... He said: “The war is over. We survived. We were lucky. Marry me". I wanted to cry. Scream. Hit him! What's it like to get married? Now? Among all this - get married? Among the black soot and black bricks... Look at me... Look at what I am! First, make a woman out of me: give flowers, look after me, speak beautiful words. I want it so much! So I'm waiting! I almost hit him... I wanted to hit him... And he had a burnt, purple cheek, and I see: he understood everything, tears were flowing down his cheek. By the still fresh scars... And I myself don’t believe what I’m saying: “Yes, I will marry you.”
Forgive me... I can’t...”
I understood her. But this is also a page or half a page of a future book.
Texts, texts. There are texts everywhere. In city apartments and village huts, on the street and on the train... I listen... More and more I turn into one big ear, always turned to another person. “Reading” the voice.
Man is greater than war...
What is remembered is exactly where it is larger. He is guided there by something that is stronger than history. I need to take it more broadly - write the truth about life and death in general, and not just the truth about the war. Ask Dostoevsky’s question: how much person is there in a person, and how to protect this person in yourself? There is no doubt that evil is tempting. It is more skillful than good. More attractive. I am plunging deeper and deeper into the endless world of war, everything else has faded slightly and has become more ordinary than usual. A grandiose and predatory world. I now understand the loneliness of a person who returned from there. Like from another planet or from the other world. He has knowledge that others do not have, and it can only be obtained there, near death. When he tries to convey something in words, he has a feeling of disaster. The person goes numb. He wants to tell
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the rest would like to understand, but everyone is powerless.
They are always in a different space than the listener. The invisible world surrounds them. At least three people are participating in the conversation: the one who is telling now, the same person as he was then, at the time of the event, and me. My goal is, first of all, to get to the truth of those years. Those days. No false feelings. Immediately after the war, a person would tell about one war; after tens of years, of course, something changes for him, because he is already putting his entire life into memories. All of yourself. The way he lived these years, what he read, saw, who he met. Finally, is he happy or unhappy? We talk to him alone, or there is someone else nearby. Family? Friends - what kind? Front-line friends are one thing, everyone else is another. Documents are living beings, they change and fluctuate with us, you can endlessly get something from them. Something new and necessary for us right now. At this moment. What are we looking for? Most often, it is not feats and heroism, but small and human things that are most interesting and close to us. Well, what I would most like to know, for example, from the life of Ancient Greece... The history of Sparta... I would like to read how and what people talked about at home then. How they went to war. What words were spoken to your loved ones on the last day and last night before parting? How the soldiers were seen off. How they were expected after the war... Not heroes and generals, but ordinary young men...
History is told through the story of its unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, I am interested in this, I would like to turn it into literature. But storytellers are not only witnesses, least of all witnesses, but actors and creators. It is impossible to get closer to reality, head-on. Between reality and us are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, each has its own version, and from them, from their number and intersections, the image of time and the people living in it is born. But I wouldn’t want it to be said about my book: its characters are real, and nothing more. This is, they say, history. Just a story.
I am writing not about war, but about a person at war. I am not writing a history of war, but a history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand, I study a specific person living at a specific time and participating in specific events, and on the other hand, I need to discern in him an eternal person. Trembling of eternity. Something that always exists in a person.
They tell me: well, memories are neither history nor literature. This is just life, littered and not cleaned by the hand of the artist. The raw material of speaking, every day is full of it. These bricks are lying everywhere. But bricks are not yet a temple! But for me everything is different... It is there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is hidden and the irremovable tragedy of life is exposed. Her chaos and passion. Uniqueness and incomprehensibility. There they have not yet been subjected to any processing. Originals.
I build temples from our feelings... From our desires, disappointments. Dreams. From what was, but may slip away.
Once again about the same thing... I am interested not only in the reality that surrounds us, but also in the one that is inside us. What interests me is not the event itself, but the event of feelings. Let's put it this way – the soul of the event. For me, feelings are reality.
What about history? She is on the street. In crowd. I believe that each of us contains a piece of history. One has half a page, the other two or three. Together we are writing the book of time. Everyone shouts their truth. A nightmare of shades. And you need to hear it all, and dissolve in it all, and become all of it. And at the same time, don’t lose yourself. Combine the speech of the street and literature. Another difficulty is that we talk about the past in today’s language. How to convey to them the feelings of those days?
In the morning, a phone call: “We don’t know each other... But I came from Crimea, I’m calling from the railway station. Is it far from you? I want to tell you my war...”
And my girl and I were planning to go to the park. Ride the carousel. How can I explain to a six-year-old what I do? She recently asked me: “What is war?” How to answer... I want to release her into this world with a tender heart and teach her that you can’t just pick a flower. It would be a pity to crush a ladybug and tear off a dragonfly’s wing. How can you explain war to a child? Explain death? Answer the question: why do they kill there? Even little ones like her are killed. We adults seem to be in cahoots. We understand what we are talking about. And here are the children? After the war, my parents once explained this to me, but I can no longer explain it to my child. Find words. We like war less and less, it is increasingly difficult for us to find an excuse for it. For us, this is just murder. At least for me it is.
I would like to write a book about war that would make me sick of war, and the very thought of it would be disgusting. Mad. The generals themselves would be sick...
My male friends (unlike my female friends) are dumbfounded by this “feminine” logic. And again I hear the “male” argument: “You weren’t in the war.” Or maybe this is good: I don’t know the passion of hatred, I have normal vision. Non-military, non-male.
In optics there is the concept of “aperture ratio” - the ability of a lens to capture a captured image worse or better. So, women’s memory of the war is the most “luminous” in terms of intensity of feelings and pain. I would even say that a “female” war is more terrible than a “male” one. Men hide behind history, behind facts, war captivates them as an action and confrontation of ideas, different interests, and women are captured by feelings. And one more thing - men are trained from childhood that they may have to shoot. Women are not taught this... they did not intend to do this work... And they remember differently, and they remember differently. Able to see what is closed to men. I repeat once again: their war is with smell, with color, with a detailed world of existence: “they gave us duffel bags, we made skirts from them”; “at the military registration and enlistment office I walked into one door in a dress, and came out the other in trousers and a tunic, my braid was cut off, and only one forelock remained on my head...”; “The Germans shot the village and left... We came to that place: trampled yellow sand, and on top - one child’s shoe...”. More than once I have been warned (especially by male writers): “Women are making things up for you. They’re making it up.” But I was convinced: this cannot be invented. Should I copy it from someone? If this can be written off, then only life, it alone has such a fantasy.
No matter what women talk about, they constantly have the idea: war is first of all killing, and then hard work. And then - just ordinary life: singing, falling in love, curling hair...
The focus is always on how unbearable it is and how you don’t want to die. And it is even more unbearable and more reluctant to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives. He carries her inside for a long time, nursing her. I realized that it is more difficult for women to kill.
Men... They are reluctant to let women into their world, into their territory.
I was looking for a woman at the Minsk Tractor Plant; she served as a sniper. She was a famous sniper. They wrote about her more than once in front-line newspapers. Her friend's home phone number was given to me in Moscow, but it was old. My last name was also written down as my maiden name. I went to the plant where, as I knew, she worked, in the personnel department, and heard from the men (the plant director and the head of the personnel department):
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“Are there not enough men? Why do you need these women's stories? Women's fantasies..." The men were afraid that the women would tell the wrong story about the war.
I was in the same family... A husband and wife fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in a trench. Before the fight. And I made myself a white dress from a German parachute.” He is a machine gunner, she is a messenger. The man immediately sent the woman to the kitchen: “Cook us something.” The kettle had already boiled, and the sandwiches had been cut, she sat down next to us, and her husband immediately picked her up: “Where are the strawberries? Where is our dacha hotel? After my insistent request, he reluctantly gave up his seat with the words: “Tell me how I taught you. Without tears and feminine trifles: I wanted to be beautiful, I cried when my braid was cut off.” Later she confessed to me in a whisper: “I spent the whole night studying the volume “History of the Great Patriotic War.” He was afraid for me. And now I’m worried that I’ll remember something wrong. Not the way it should be."
This happened more than once, in more than one house.
Yes, they cry a lot. They scream. After I leave, they swallow heart pills. They call an ambulance. But they still ask: “You come. Be sure to come. We were silent for so long. They were silent for forty years..."
I understand that crying and screaming cannot be processed, otherwise the main thing will not be crying or screaming, but processing. Instead of life, literature will remain. This is the material, the temperature of this material. Constantly going off scale. A person is most visible and revealed in war and, perhaps, in love. To the very depths, to the subcutaneous layers. In the face of death, all ideas turn pale, and an incomprehensible eternity opens up, for which no one is ready. We still live in history, not in space.
Several times I received a text sent for reading with a note: “No need for trifles... Write about our great Victory...”. And the “little things” are what are most important for me - the warmth and clarity of life: a forelock left behind instead of braids, hot pots of porridge and soup that no one could eat - out of a hundred people, seven returned after the battle; or how they couldn’t go to the market after the war and look at the red meat rows... Even at the red chintz... “Oh, my good one, forty years have passed, and you won’t find anything red in my house. I hate the color red after the war!”
I listen to the pain... Pain as proof of a past life. There is no other evidence, I don’t trust other evidence. Words have led us away from the truth more than once.
I think about suffering as the highest form of information, which has a direct connection with mystery. With the mystery of life. All Russian literature is about this. She wrote more about suffering than about love.
And they tell me more about this...
Who are they - Russian or Soviet? No, they were Soviet - Russians, Belarusians, Ukrainians, and Tajiks...
After all, he was a Soviet man. I think there will never be such people again; they themselves already understand this. Even we, their children, are different. We would like to be like everyone else. Similar not to their parents, but to the world. And what can we say about grandchildren...
But I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag, but they also had Victory. And they know it.
I recently received a letter:
“My daughter loves me very much, I am a heroine for her, if she reads your book, she will be very disappointed. Dirt, lice, endless blood - all this is true. I do not deny. But are memories of this capable of giving rise to noble feelings? Prepare for the feat..."
I have been convinced more than once:
...our memory is far from an ideal tool. She is not only arbitrary and capricious, she is also chained to time, like a dog.
...we look at the past from today, we cannot look from anywhere.
...and they are also in love with what happened to them, because it is not only the war, but also their youth. First love.
I listen when they speak... I listen when they are silent... Both words and silence are texts for me.
– This is not for publication, for you... Those who were older... They sat on the train thoughtfully... Sad. I remember how one major spoke to me at night, when everyone was sleeping, about Stalin. He drank heavily and became bolder; he admitted that his father had been in the camp for ten years, without the right of correspondence. Whether he is alive or not is unknown. This major uttered terrible words: “I want to defend my Motherland, but I don’t want to defend this traitor to the revolution - Stalin.” I have never heard such words... I was scared. Fortunately, he disappeared in the morning. Probably came out...
– I’ll tell you a secret... I was friends with Oksana, she was from Ukraine. For the first time I heard from her about the terrible famine in Ukraine. Holodomor. It was no longer possible to find a frog or a mouse - they had all been eaten. Half the people in their village died. All her younger brothers and her mother and father died, and she was saved by stealing horse manure from the collective farm stable at night and eating it. No one could eat it, but she ate it: “The warm one won’t fit into your mouth, but the cold one can. It’s better frozen, it smells like hay.” I said: “Oksana, Comrade Stalin is fighting. It kills pests, but there are a lot of them.” “No,” she answered, “you are stupid. My dad was a history teacher, he told me: “Someday Comrade Stalin will answer for his crimes...”
At night I lay and thought: what if Oksana is an enemy? Spy? What to do? Two days later she died in battle. She had no relatives left, there was no one to send a funeral to...
This topic is touched upon carefully and rarely. They are still paralyzed not only by Stalin’s hypnosis and fear, but also by their former faith. They cannot stop loving what they loved. Courage in war and courage in thought are two different courages. And I thought it was the same thing.
The manuscript has been lying on the table for a long time...
For two years now I have been receiving refusals from publishing houses. The magazines are silent. The verdict is always the same: the war is too terrible. Lots of horror. Naturalism. There is no leading and directing role of the Communist Party. In a word, not that kind of war... What kind of war is it? With generals and a wise generalissimo? Without blood and lice? With heroes and exploits. And I remember from childhood: we were walking with my grandmother along a large field, she said: “After the war, nothing was born in this field for a long time. The Germans were retreating... And there was a battle here, they fought for two days... The dead lay one by one, like sheaves. Like sleepers in a train station. The Germans and ours. After the rain, they all had tear-stained faces. We buried them for a month with the whole village...”
How can I forget about this field?
I don't just write down. I collect, I track down the human spirit where suffering creates a big man out of a small man. Where does a person grow up? And then for me he is no longer the dumb and traceless proletariat of history. His soul is torn away. So what is my conflict with the authorities? I realized that a big idea needs a small person, it doesn’t need a big one. For her it is unnecessary and inconvenient. Labor-intensive to process. And I'm looking for him. I'm looking for a little big man. Humiliated, trampled, insulted - having gone through Stalin's camps and betrayals, he still won. Performed a miracle.
But the history of the war was replaced by the history of victory.
He will tell you about it himself...
Seventeen years later
2002–2004
I'm reading my old diary...
I'm trying to remember the person I was when I wrote the book. That person no longer exists, and the country in which we lived then does not even exist. And they defended her and died in her name in forty-one - forty
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fifth Outside the window, everything is already different: a new millennium, new wars, new ideas, new weapons and a completely unexpectedly changed Russian (more precisely, Russian-Soviet) person.
Gorbachev's perestroika began... My book was immediately published, it had an amazing circulation - two million copies. That was a time when many amazing things were happening, we again rushed somewhere furiously. Again - into the future. We did not yet know (or forgot) that revolution is always an illusion, especially in our history. But that will happen later, and then everyone was intoxicated by the air of freedom. I began to receive dozens of letters every day, my folders swelled. People wanted to talk... To finish... They became freer and more frank. I had no doubt that I was doomed to endlessly finish my books. Not to rewrite, but to add. You put a dot, and it immediately turns into an ellipsis...
I think that today I would probably ask different questions and hear different answers. And I would write a different book, not completely different, but still different. The documents (with which I deal) are living evidence; they do not harden like cold clay. They don't go numb. They move with us. What would I ask more about now? What would you like to add? I would be very interested in... I'm looking for a word... biological man, and not just a man of time and ideas. I would try to look deeper into human nature, into the darkness, into the subconscious. Into the secret of war.
I would write about how I came to a former partisan... A heavy but still beautiful woman - and she told me how their group (she the eldest and two teenagers) went out on reconnaissance and accidentally captured four Germans. We circled around the forest with them for a long time. We ran into an ambush. It is clear that they will not break through with the prisoners, they will not leave, and she made the decision to waste them. Teenagers won’t be able to kill: they’ve been walking through the forest together for several days, and if you’ve been with a person for so long, even a stranger, you still get used to him, he’s getting closer - you already know how he eats, how he sleeps, what his eyes are like, hands. No, teenagers can't. This immediately became clear to her. So she must kill. And now she remembered how she killed them. I had to deceive both of them. She allegedly went with one German to get water and shot from behind. In the back of the head. She took another one to get some brushwood... I was shocked by how calmly she talked about it.
Those who were in the war remember that a civilian turns into a military man in three days. Why is only three days enough? Or is this also a myth? More likely. The person there is much stranger and more incomprehensible.
In all the letters I read: “I didn’t tell you everything then, because it was a different time. We are used to being silent about a lot of things...”, “I didn’t trust you with everything. Until recently it was impossible to talk about this. Or I’m ashamed”, “I know the doctors’ verdict: I have a terrible diagnosis... I want to tell the whole truth...”.
And recently I received this letter: “It’s difficult for us old people to live... But it’s not because of small and humiliating pensions that we suffer. What hurts most is that we are expelled from the big past into the unbearably small present. Nobody invites us to perform in schools or museums anymore; we are no longer needed. In the newspapers, if you read, the fascists are becoming more noble, and the Red soldiers are becoming more and more terrible.”
Time is also homeland... But I still love them. I don’t love their time, but I love them.
Everything can become literature...
What interested me most in my archives was the notebook where I wrote down those episodes that were crossed out by the censor. And also my conversations with the censor. There I also found pages that I had thrown away myself. My self-censorship, my own ban. And my explanation is why I threw it away. Much of this and that has already been restored in the book, but I want to give these few pages separately - this is already a document. My way.
From what the censorship threw out
“I’m going to wake up at night... It’s as if someone is, well... crying next to me... I’m at war...
We are retreating... Outside Smolensk, some woman brings me her dress, I have time to change. I’m walking alone... among men. One moment I was wearing trousers, and the next I was walking in a summer dress. I suddenly started having these things... Women's things... They started earlier, probably out of excitement. From worries, from resentment. Where will you find what here? Ashamed! How ashamed I was! They slept under bushes, in ditches, in the forest on stumps. There were so many of us that there wasn’t enough space for everyone in the forest. We walked, confused, deceived, no longer trusting anyone... Where are our aircraft, where are our tanks? What flies, crawls, rattles - everything is German.
This is how I was captured. On the last day before captivity, both legs were broken... She lay there and urinated on herself... I don’t know with what forces she crawled into the forest at night. The partisans accidentally picked up...
I feel sorry for those who will read this book and those who will not read it...”
“I was on night duty... I went into the ward of the seriously wounded. The captain is lying there... The doctors warned me before duty that he would die at night. He won’t make it until the morning... I ask him: “Well, how? How can I help you?". I’ll never forget... He suddenly smiled, such a bright smile on his exhausted face: “Unbutton your robe... Show me your breasts... I haven’t seen my wife for a long time...”. I was confused, I hadn’t even been kissed yet. I answered him something there. She ran away and returned an hour later.
He lay dead. And that smile on his face..."
“Near Kerch... At night we walked on a barge under fire. The bow caught fire... The fire spread across the deck. Ammunition exploded... Powerful explosion! The explosion was so strong that the barge tilted to the right side and began to sink. And the shore is not far away, we understand that the shore is somewhere nearby, and the soldiers rushed into the water. Machine guns rattled from the shore. Screams, moans, swearing... I swam well, I wanted to save at least one. At least one wounded person... This is water, not earth - a wounded person will die immediately. It will go to the bottom... I hear someone nearby, either coming up to the top, or going under the water again. Up - under water. I seized the moment, grabbed him... Something cold, slippery... I decided that he was a wounded man, and his clothes were torn off by the explosion. Because I myself am naked... I was left in my underwear... Darkness. Gouge out your eye. Around: “Eh-eh! Ay-ya-ya!” And swear... I somehow got to the shore with him... Just at that moment a rocket flashed in the sky, and I saw that I had pulled down a large wounded fish. The fish is large, as tall as a man. Beluga... She's dying... I fell next to her and broke this three-story mat. I cried from resentment... And from the fact that everyone was suffering..."
“We were leaving the encirclement... Wherever we rush, there are Germans everywhere. We decide: in the morning we will break through in battle. We’ll die anyway, but we’d better die with dignity. In battle. We had three girls. They came at night to everyone who could... Not everyone, of course, was capable. Nerves, you know. Such a thing... Everyone was preparing to die...
Only a few escaped in the morning... Few... Well, seven people, but there were fifty, if not more. The Germans cut them down with machine guns... I remember those girls with gratitude. I didn’t find a single one among the living this morning... I never met again..."
From a conversation with the censor
– Who will go to war after such books? You humiliate a woman with primitive naturalism. A female heroine. You are debunking. You make her an ordinary woman. Female. And they are our saints.
– Our heroism
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-Where do you get these thoughts? Other people's thoughts. Not Soviet. You laugh at those in mass graves. We've read enough remarques... Remarqueism won't work for us. A Soviet woman is not an animal...
“Someone gave us away... The Germans found out where the partisan detachment was stationed. The forest and approaches to it were cordoned off from all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by the swamps, where the punitive forces did not enter. A quagmire. It captivated both the equipment and the people. For several days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. There was a radio operator with us; she had recently given birth. The baby is hungry... He asks for the breast... But the mother herself is hungry, there is no milk, and the baby is crying. The punishers are nearby... With the dogs... If the dogs hear, we will all die. The whole group is about thirty people... Do you understand?
The commander makes a decision...
No one dares to give the mother the order, but she herself guesses. He lowers the bundle with the child into the water and holds it there for a long time... The child no longer screams... Not a sound... But we cannot raise our eyes. Neither at mother, nor at each other..."
“We took prisoners, brought them into the detachment... They were not shot, death was too easy for them, we stabbed them like pigs with ramrods, cut them into pieces. I went to see it... I was waiting! I've been waiting for a long time for the moment when their eyes begin to burst from pain... Pupils...
What do you know about this?! They burned my mother and sisters at the stake in the middle of the village..."
“I don’t remember cats or dogs during the war, I remember rats. Big... With yellow-blue eyes... They were visible and invisible. When I recovered from my injury, the hospital sent me back to my unit. Some were in the trenches near Stalingrad. The commander ordered: “Take her to the girls’ dugout.” I entered the dugout and the first thing I was surprised was that there were no things there. Empty beds of pine branches, and that's it. They didn’t warn me... I left my backpack in the dugout and went out; when I returned half an hour later, I couldn’t find my backpack. No traces of things, no comb, no pencil. It turned out that everyone was instantly devoured by rats...
And in the morning they showed me the gnawed hands of the seriously wounded...
In no scariest movie have I ever seen rats leaving a city before shelling. This is not in Stalingrad... It was already near Vyazma... In the morning, herds of rats walked through the city, they went into the fields. They smelled death. There were thousands of them... Black, gray... People looked in horror at this ominous sight and huddled close to their houses. And exactly at the time when the rats disappeared from our sight, the shelling began. Planes flew in. Instead of houses and basements, there was stone sand..."
“There were so many killed at Stalingrad that the horses were no longer afraid of them. Usually they get scared. A horse will never step on a dead person. We collected our dead, but the Germans were lying everywhere. Frozen... Ice... I am a driver, I was carrying boxes with artillery shells, I heard their skulls cracking under the wheels... Bones... And I was happy..."
From a conversation with the censor
– Yes, the Victory was difficult for us, but you must look for heroic examples. There are hundreds of them. And you show the dirt of war. Underwear. Our Victory is terrible... What are you trying to achieve?
- The truth.
– And you think that the truth is what is in life. What's on the street. Underfoot. It's so low for you. Earthly. No, the truth is what we dream about. What we want to be!
“We are advancing... The first German villages... We are young. Strong. Four years without women. There is wine in the cellars. Snack. They caught German girls and... Ten people raped one... There were not enough women, the population fled from the Soviet army, they took young people. Girls... Twelve to thirteen years old... If she cried, they beat her, they forced something into her mouth. It hurts her, but it makes us laugh. Now I don’t understand how I could... A boy from an intelligent family... But it was me...
The only thing we were afraid of was that our girls wouldn’t find out about it. Our nurses. It was a shame in front of them...”
“We were surrounded... We wandered through the forests and swamps. They ate leaves, ate tree bark. Some roots. There were five of us, one was just a boy, he had just been drafted into the army. At night, a neighbor whispers to me: “The boy is half-dead, he will die anyway. Do you understand...” - “What are you talking about?” - “One prisoner told me... When they fled from the camp, they specially took a young man with them... Human meat is edible... That’s how they escaped...”
I didn't have enough strength to hit. The next day we met the partisans..."
“The partisans arrived on horseback in the village during the day. The headman and his son were taken out of the house. They hit them on the head with iron rods until they fell. And they finished off on the ground. I was sitting by the window. I saw everything... My older brother was among the partisans... When he entered our house and wanted to hug me: “Sister!” – I shouted: “Don’t come closer! Don't come near! You are a murderer!” And then I went numb. I didn't speak for a month.
My brother died... What would have happened if he had remained alive? And I would return home..."
“In the morning, the punitive forces set our village on fire... Only those people who fled into the forest were saved. They ran away without anything, empty-handed, they didn’t even take bread with them. No eggs, no lard. At night, Aunt Nastya, our neighbor, beat her little girl because she was crying all the time. Aunt Nastya had five of her children with her. Yulechka, my friend, is weak herself. She was always sick... And four boys, all small, all asked for food too. And Aunt Nastya went crazy: “Uh-uh... Uh-uh...”. And at night I heard... Yulechka asked: “Mommy, don’t drown me. I won’t... I won’t ask you for food anymore. I won’t...”
In the morning no one saw Yulechka...
Aunt Nastya... We returned to the village for the embers... The village burned down. Soon Aunt Nastya hanged herself from a black apple tree in her garden. It hung low. The children stood near her and asked for food...”
From a conversation with the censor
- It's a lie! This is slander against our soldier who liberated half of Europe. On our partisans. To our people-hero. We don't need your little story, we need the big story. History of Victory. You don't like our heroes! You don't like our great ideas. Ideas of Marx and Lenin.
– Yes, I don’t like great ideas. I love the little man...
From what I threw away myself
“Forty-first year... We are surrounded. Political instructor Lunin is with us... He read out the order that Soviet soldiers will not surrender to the enemy. We, as Comrade Stalin said, have no prisoners, but traitors. The guys took out pistols... The political instructor ordered: “Don’t. Live, boys, you are young.” And he shot himself...
And this is already forty-three... The Soviet army is advancing. We walked through Belarus. I remember a little boy. He ran out to us from somewhere underground, from the cellar, and shouted: “Kill my mother... Kill me! She loved a German...” His eyes were round with fear. A black old woman was running after him. All in black. She ran and was baptized: “Don’t listen, child. The child was merciful...”
“They called me to school... A teacher who returned from evacuation spoke to me:
– I want to transfer your son to another class. There are the best students in my class.
“But my son only has straight A’s.”
- It doesn't matter. The boy lived under the Germans.
- Yes, it was difficult for us.
- I am not talking about that. Everyone who was in the occupation... They are under suspicion...
- What?
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I don't understand…
– He tells children about the Germans. And he stutters.
“It’s because he’s afraid.” He was beaten by a German officer who lived in our apartment. He was dissatisfied with the way his son cleaned his boots.
- You see... You admit it yourself... You lived next to the enemy...
– Who allowed this enemy to reach Moscow itself? Who left us here with our children?
I'm hysterical...
For two days I was afraid that the teacher would report me. But she left her son in her class..."
“During the day we were afraid of the Germans and policemen, and at night of the partisans. The partisans took my last cow, leaving us with only one cat. The partisans are hungry and angry. They led my cow, and I followed them... She walked about ten kilometers. I begged you to give it up. She left three hungry children in the hut on the stove. “Go away, auntie! - they threatened. “Otherwise we’ll shoot you.”
Try to find a good person during the war...
He went his own way. The children of the kulaks returned from exile. Their parents died, and they served the German authorities. They took revenge. One shot an old teacher in the house. Our neighbor. He once denounced his father and dispossessed him. He was an ardent communist.
The Germans first dissolved the collective farms and gave people land. People sighed after Stalin. We paid the quitrent... We paid it carefully... And then they started burning us. Us and our houses. Cattle were stolen and people were burned.
Oh, daughter, I'm afraid of words. Terrible words... I saved myself with goodness, I didn’t want harm to anyone. I felt sorry for everyone..."
“I reached Berlin with the army...
She returned to her village with two orders of Glory and medals. I lived for three days, and on the fourth, early, my mother lifted me out of bed while everyone was sleeping: “Daughter, I put together a bundle for you. Go away... Go away... You still have two younger sisters growing up. Who will marry them? Everyone knows that you were at the front for four years, with men...”
Don't touch my soul. Write, like others, about my awards..."
“In war, as in war. This is not a theater...
We lined up a squad in the clearing and we formed a ring. And in the middle are Misha K. and Kolya M. – our guys. Misha was a brave scout and played the harmonica. Nobody sang better than Kolya...
It took a long time to read the verdict: in such and such a village they demanded two bottles of moonshine, and at night... two of the owner’s girls were raped... And in such and such a village: they took a coat and a sewing machine from a peasant... which they immediately drank from their neighbors...
They are sentenced to death... The verdict is final and cannot be appealed.
Who will shoot? The squad is silent... Who? We remain silent... The commander himself carried out the sentence..."
“I was a machine gunner. I killed so much...
After the war, I was afraid to give birth for a long time. She gave birth when she calmed down. Seven years later...
But I still haven't forgiven anything. And I won’t forgive... I was happy when I saw captured Germans. I was glad that it was a pity to look at them: they had foot wraps on their feet instead of boots, foot wraps on their heads... They were led through the village, they asked: “Mother, give me bread... Bread...”. I was amazed that the peasants came out of their huts and gave them - some a piece of bread, some a potato... The boys ran behind the column and threw stones... And the women cried...
It seems to me that I have lived two lives: one as a man’s, the second as a woman’s...”
“After the war... Human life was worth nothing. I’ll give you one example... I was riding on the bus after work, and suddenly shouts started: “Stop the thief! Stop the thief! My handbag...” The bus stopped... Immediately there was a crush. The young officer takes the boy outside, puts his hand on his knee and - bang! breaks it in half. He jumps back... And we go... No one stood up for the boy, no one called the policeman. They didn't call a doctor. And the officer had military awards all over his chest... I began to get out at my stop, he jumped off and gave me his hand: “Come in, girl...”. So gallant...
I remember this now... And then we were still military people, we lived according to the laws of war. Are they human?
“The Red Army has returned...
We were allowed to dig up graves and look for where our relatives were shot. According to old customs, when you are near death, you must wear white—a white scarf, a white shirt. Until my last minute I will remember this! People walked with white embroidered towels... Dressed in all white... Where did they get it?
They dug... Whoever found something admitted it and took it. Some carry their hands on a wheelbarrow, some carry their heads... A person does not lie in the ground whole for a long time, they are all mixed up there with each other. With clay, with sand.
I didn’t find my sister, it seemed to me that one piece of the dress was hers, something familiar... Grandfather also said - we’ll take it, there will be something to bury. We put that piece of dress in the coffin...
They received a “missing” document for my father. Others received something for those who died, but my mother and I were frightened at the village council: “You are not entitled to any help. Or maybe he lives happily ever after with a German Frau. Enemy of the people".
I began to look for my father under Khrushchev. Forty years later. They answered me under Gorbachev: “It’s not on the lists...”. But his fellow soldier responded, and I learned that my father died heroically. Near Mogilev, he threw himself under a tank with a grenade...
It's a pity that my mother didn't wait for this news. She died with the stigma of being the wife of an enemy of the people. Traitor. And there were many like her. They didn't live to see the truth. I went to my mother’s grave with a letter. I read..."
“Many of us believed...
We thought that after the war everything would change... Stalin would believe his people. But the war was not over yet, and the trains had already left for Magadan. Trains with the winners... They arrested those who were captured, those who survived in German camps, those who were taken by the Germans to work - everyone who had seen Europe. I could tell you how the people live there. Without communists. What kind of houses are there and what kind of roads are there? About the fact that there are no collective farms anywhere...
After the Victory, everyone fell silent. They were silent and afraid, as before the war...”
“I am a history teacher... In my memory, the history textbook was rewritten three times. I taught children using three different textbooks...
Ask us while we're alive. Don't rewrite without us later. Ask...
Do you know how difficult it is to kill a person? I worked underground. Six months later I received an assignment - to get a job as a waitress in the officers' mess... Young, beautiful... They took me. I had to pour poison into the soup pot and go to the partisans that same day. And I’ve already gotten used to them, they are enemies, but every day you see them, they tell you: “Danke Sean... Danke Sean...”. It’s difficult... It’s difficult to kill... Killing is worse than dying...
I taught history all my life... And I always didn’t know how to talk about it. What words..."
I had my own war... I have come a long way with my heroines. Like them, for a long time I did not believe that our Victory had two faces - one beautiful, and the other terrible, all covered in scars - unbearable to look at. “In hand-to-hand combat, when killing a person, they look into his eyes. This is not dropping bombs or shooting from a trench,” they told me.
Listening to a person how he killed and died is the same - you look into his eyes...
“I don’t want to remember...”
An old three-story house on the outskirts of Minsk, one of those that was built hastily and, as it seemed then, not for long, immediately after the war, long ago and comfortably overgrown with jasmine bushes. With him began a search that would last seven years, an amazing and painful seven years, when I would discover the world of war, a world with a meaning that was not fully understood by us. I will experience pain, hatred,
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temptation. Tenderness and bewilderment... I’ll try to understand how death differs from murder, and where the border between human and non-human is. How does a person remain alone with this crazy thought that he can kill another person? Even obliged to kill. And I will discover that in war, besides death, there are many other things, there is everything that is in our ordinary life. War is also life. I will face countless human truths. Tyne. I will think about questions that I had no idea existed before. For example, why are we not surprised at evil? Do we lack surprise at evil?
Road and roads... Dozens of trips across the country, hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of meters of tape. Five hundred meetings, and then I stopped counting, faces disappeared from memory, only voices remained. The choir sounds in my memory. A huge choir, sometimes you can hardly hear the words, only crying. I admit: I didn’t always believe that this path was within my power, that I could overcome it. I'll get to the end. There were moments of doubt and fear when I wanted to stop or step aside, but I couldn’t. I became a prisoner of evil, looked into the abyss to understand something. Now, it seems to me, I have acquired some knowledge, but there are even more questions and even fewer answers.
But then, at the very beginning of my journey, I had no idea about it...
What brought me to this house was a small note in the city newspaper that recently at the Minsk Udarnik road machinery plant, senior accountant Maria Ivanovna Morozova was seen off to retire. And during the war, the same note said, she was a sniper, has eleven military awards, and has seventy-five killed as a sniper. It was difficult to connect this woman’s military profession with her peaceful occupation in her mind. With an everyday newspaper photo. With all these signs of ordinariness.
...A small woman with a girlish crown of a long braid around her head sat in a large chair, covering her face with her hands:
- No, no, I won’t. Go back there again? I can’t... I still don’t watch war films. I was just a girl then. I dreamed and grew, grew and dreamed. And then - war. I even feel sorry for you... I know what I'm talking about... Do you really want to know this? I ask my daughter...
Of course I was surprised:
- Why to me? We need to see my husband, he loves to reminisce. The names of the commanders, generals, unit numbers - he remembers everything. But not me. I only remember what happened to me. Your war. There are a lot of people around, but you are always alone, because a person is always alone before death. I remember the terrible loneliness.
She asked me to remove the tape recorder:
“I need your eyes to tell the story, but he will get in the way.”
But after a few minutes I forgot about him...
Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina), corporal, sniper:
“This will be a simple story... The story of an ordinary Russian girl, of which there were many then...
Where my native village of Dyakovskoye stood is now the Proletarsky district of Moscow. The war began when I was less than eighteen years old. The braids were long, long, down to the knees... No one believed that the war would last long, everyone was waiting for it to end. Let's drive away the enemy. I went to a collective farm, then completed accounting courses and began working. The war continues... My girlfriends... My girls say: “We must go to the front.” It was already in the air. Everyone signed up for courses at the military registration and enlistment office. Maybe someone is in the company, I don’t know. There we were taught to shoot from a combat rifle and throw grenades. At first... I admit, I was afraid to pick up a rifle, it was unpleasant. I couldn’t imagine that I would go kill someone, I just wanted to go to the front and that’s all. There were forty of us in the circle. There are four girls from our village, well, we are all girlfriends, from the neighboring village there are five, in a word, someone from every village. And only girls. All the men had already gone to war, those who could. Sometimes the orderly arrived in the middle of the night, gave them two hours to get ready, and they were taken away. Sometimes they even took me from the field. (Silent.) Now I don’t remember whether we had dances, if so, then a girl danced with a girl, there were no guys left. Our villages became silent.
Soon there was a call from the Central Committee of the Komsomol and youth, since the Germans were already near Moscow, for everyone to come to the defense of the Motherland. How will Hitler take Moscow? We won't allow it! I’m not the only one... All the girls expressed a desire to go to the front. My father already fought. We thought that we would be the only ones... Special... But we came to the military registration and enlistment office - there were a lot of girls there. I gasped! My heart caught fire, so much so. And the selection was very strict. The first thing, of course, was to have good health. I was afraid that they wouldn’t take me, because I was often sick as a child, and my bones, as my mother said, were weak. Because of this, other children bullied me as a little girl. Then, if there were no other children in the house except the girl who was going to the front, they were also refused, since it was impossible to leave the mother alone. Oh, our mothers! They never dried up from their tears... They scolded us, they asked... But I also had two sisters and two brothers, although all of them were much smaller than me, but it still counted. There’s one more thing - everyone left the collective farm, there was no one to work in the field, and the chairman didn’t want to let us go. In a word, we were refused. We went to the district Komsomol committee, and there was a refusal. Then we, as a delegation from our region, went to the regional committee of the Komsomol. Everyone had a great impulse, their hearts were burning. We were sent home there again. And we decided, since we were in Moscow, to go to the Komsomol Central Committee, to the very top, to the first secretary. To achieve to the end... Who will report, which of us is brave? We thought that we would definitely be alone here, but there it was impossible to squeeze into the corridor, let alone reach the secretary. There are young people from all over the country, many who were in the occupation and were eager to take revenge for the death of their loved ones. From all over the Union. Yes, yes... In short, we were even confused for a while...
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About life and being
“We dreamed... We wanted to fight...
They placed us in the carriage and classes began. Everything was not what we imagined at home. You had to get up early, and you were on the run all day. But the old life still lived within us. We were indignant when the squad commander, junior sergeant Gulyaev, who had a four-year education, taught us the regulations and pronounced certain words incorrectly. We thought: what can he teach? And he taught us how not to die...
After quarantine, before taking the oath, the sergeant-major brought uniforms: overcoats, caps, tunics, skirts, instead of a combination - two shirts with sleeves sewn in men's style from calico, instead of windings - stockings and American heavy boots with metal horseshoes in the entire heel and on the toes . In the company, in terms of my height and build, I was the smallest, height one hundred and fifty-three centimeters, shoes size thirty-five and, naturally, the military industry did not sew such tiny sizes, and even more so America did not supply them to us. I got shoes of size forty-two, I put them on and took them off without unlacing them, and they were so heavy that I walked, dragging my feet on the ground. My march on the stone pavement sparked sparks, and the walk looked like anything other than a march. It’s terrible to remember how terrible the first march was. I was ready to accomplish the feat, but I was not ready to wear size forty-two instead of thirty-five. It's so hard and so ugly! So ugly!
The commander saw me coming and called me out of formation:
– Smirnova, how do you march in combat? What, you weren't taught? Why don't you raise your feet? I announce three outfits out of turn...
I answered:
- There are, Comrade Senior Lieutenant, three squads out of turn! – she turned to walk and fell. Fell out of my shoes... My feet were bleeding...
Then it turned out that I could no longer walk. Company shoemaker Parshin was given the order to sew me boots from an old raincoat, size thirty-five...”
Nonna Aleksandrovna Smirnova, private, anti-aircraft gunner
“And how much was funny...
Discipline, regulations, insignia - all this military wisdom was not given at once. We stand guarding the planes. And the charter says that if someone is walking, they must be stopped: “Stop, who’s walking?” My friend saw the regiment commander and shouted: “Wait, who’s coming? Excuse me, but I will shoot!” Imagine this. She shouts: “Excuse me, but I will shoot!” Excuse me... Ha ha ha..."
Antonina Grigorievna Bondareva, guard lieutenant, senior pilot
“The girls came to school with long braids... With hairstyles... I also have braids around my head... How do I wash them? Dry where? You just washed them, and now you’re alarmed, you have to run. Our commander Marina Raskova ordered everyone to cut their braids. The girls cut their hair and cried. And Lilya Litvyak, later a famous pilot, did not want to part with her braid.
I'm going to Raskova:
- Comrade commander, your order has been carried out, only Litvyak refused.
Marina Raskova, despite her feminine softness, could be a very strict commander. She sent me:
- What kind of party organizer are you if you can’t get orders carried out! March all around!
Dresses, high-heeled shoes... How sorry we are for them, they were hidden in bags. During the day in boots, and in the evening at least a little in shoes in front of the mirror. Raskova saw - and a few days later an order: all women's clothing should be sent home in parcels. Like this! But we studied the new aircraft in six months instead of two years, as is the norm in peacetime.
In the first days of training, two crews died. They placed four coffins. All three regiments, we all cried bitterly.
Raskova spoke:
- Friends, dry your tears. These are our first losses. There will be many of them. Squeeze your heart into a fist...
Then, during the war, they buried us without tears. Stop crying.
They flew fighter planes. The height itself was a terrible burden for the entire female body, sometimes the stomach was pressed directly into the spine. And our girls flew and shot down aces, and what kind of aces! Like this! You know, when we walked, the men looked at us in surprise: the pilots were coming. They admired us..."
Claudia Ivanovna Terekhova, aviation captain
“In the fall, I was called to the military registration and enlistment office... I received him as a military commissar and asked: “Do you know how to jump?” I admitted that I was afraid. For a long time he campaigned for the airborne troops: beautiful uniform, chocolate every day. But since childhood I was afraid of heights. “Do you want to join the anti-aircraft artillery?” Do I really know what it is - anti-aircraft artillery? Then he suggests: “Let's send you to a partisan detachment.” - “How can mom write to Moscow from there?” He takes it and writes in red pencil in my direction: “Steppe front...”
On the train, a young captain fell in love with me. He stayed in our carriage all night. He was already burned by the war, wounded several times. He looked and looked at me and said: “Verochka, just don’t lower yourself, don’t become rude. You are so tender now. I’ve already seen it all!” And then something like this, saying that it is difficult to come out of the war clean. From hell.
It took my friend and I a month to get to the Fourth Guards Army of the Second Ukrainian Front. Finally caught up. The chief surgeon came out for a few minutes, looked at us, led us into the operating room: “Here is your operating table...”. Ambulances arrive one after another, large cars, Studebakers, the wounded are lying on the ground, on stretchers. We only asked: “Who should we take first?” - “Those who are silent...” An hour later I was already standing at my table, operating. And off it goes... You operate for days, after that you take a short nap, quickly rub your eyes, wash your face - and go back to your desk. And after two people the third is dead. We didn’t have time to help everyone. The third one is dead...
At the station in Zhmerinka they came under terrible bombing. The train stopped and we ran. Our political officer, yesterday he had his appendicitis cut out, but today he has already escaped. We sat in the forest all night, and our train was blown to pieces. In the morning, at low level, German planes began to comb the forest. Where are you going? You can't crawl into the ground like a mole. I grabbed the birch tree and stood: “Oh, mommy! Am I really going to die? I will survive, I will be the happiest person in the world.” I later told whomever I told about how I held on to the birch tree, everyone laughed. After all, what was there to hit me? I’m standing upright, white birch... Amazing!
I celebrated Victory Day in Vienna. We went to the zoo, we really wanted to go to the zoo. You could go and see a concentration camp. They took everyone around and showed them around. I didn’t go... Now I’m wondering: why didn’t I go? I wanted something joyful. Funny. See something from another life..."
Vera Vladimirovna Shevaldysheva, senior lieutenant, surgeon
“There were three of us... Mom, dad and I... Father was the first to go to the front. Mom wanted to go with her father, she is a nurse, but he was sent in one direction, she was sent in another. And I was only sixteen years old... They didn’t want to take me. I went and went to the military registration and enlistment office, and a year later they took me.
We traveled by train for a long time. Soldiers were returning from hospitals with us, and there were also young guys there. They told us about the front, and we sat with our mouths open and listened. They said that we would be shelled, and we are sitting and waiting: when will the shelling start? Like, we’ll come and say that we’ve already been fired upon.
We've arrived. And we were not assigned to rifles, but to boilers, to troughs. The girls are all my age, before that our parents loved us and spoiled us. I was the only child in the family. And here we haul wood and light the stoves. Then we take this ash and use it in the cauldrons instead of soap, because they will bring soap, and then it runs out. The linen is dirty and lousy. In the blood... In winter, heavy with blood..."
Svetlana Vasilyevna Katykhina, soldier of the field bath and laundry detachment
“I still remember my first wounded man... I remember his face... He had an open fracture of the middle third of his thigh. Imagine, a bone is sticking out, a shrapnel wound, everything is turned inside out. This bone... I knew theoretically what to do, but when I crawled up to him and saw this, I felt bad, I felt nauseous. And suddenly I hear: “Sister, drink some water.” This wounded man is telling me this. He regrets. I can see this picture now. As he said this, I came to my senses: “Oh, I think, Turgenev’s damn young lady! The man dies, and she, a gentle creature, you see, is sick.” She unwrapped the individual package, closed the wound with it - and I felt better, and provided assistance as needed.
Now I watch films about the war: a nurse on the front line, she walks neatly, cleanly, not in padded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a cap on her crest. Well, that's not true! How could we pull out a wounded man if there were people like that... It’s not very easy to crawl around in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, skirts were only given to us at the end of the war as elegant ones. At the same time, we also received underwear instead of men's underwear. We didn’t know where to go from happiness. The gymnasts were unbuttoned so that you could see..."
Sofya Konstantinovna Dubnyakova, senior sergeant, medical instructor
“Bombing... Bombing and bombing, bombing and bombing, and bombing. Everyone rushed to run somewhere... And I run. I hear someone moaning: “Help... Help...”. But I’m running... A few minutes later something dawns on me, I feel a medical bag on my shoulder. And yet – shame. Where did the fear go? I run back: a wounded soldier is moaning. I rush to him to bandage him. Then the second, third...
The battle ended at night. And in the morning fresh snow fell. Below him are the dead... Many have their hands raised up... To the sky... Ask me: what is happiness? I will answer... Suddenly find a living person among the dead..."
Anna Ivanovna Belyay, nurse
“I saw the first dead man... I stood over him and cried... I mourned... Then the wounded man called: “Bandage your leg!” His leg is dangling from his trouser leg, his leg has been torn off. I cut off my pant leg: “Put my leg down!” Put it next to it.” I put it down. If they are conscious, they do not allow you to leave either your arm or your leg. They take it away. And if they die, they ask to be buried together.
During the war I thought: I will never forget anything. But it is forgotten...
Such a young, interesting guy. And he lies dead. I imagined that all the dead were buried with military honors, and they took him and dragged him to the hazel tree. They dug a grave... Without a coffin, without anything, they buried him in the ground, and just fell asleep. The sun was shining brightly, and on him too... A warm summer day... There was no raincoat, nothing, they put him in a tunic, riding breeches, as he was, and all this was still new, he apparently had recently arrived. So they laid it down and buried it. The hole was shallow, just enough for him to lie down. And the wound is small, it is fatal - in the temple, but there is little blood, and the person lies as if alive, only very pale.
The shelling was followed by bombing. This place was bombed. I don’t know what’s left there...
How were they buried surrounded by people? Right there, next to us, next to the trench where we ourselves were sitting, they buried us - and that was all. The lump only remained. Of course, if the Germans or tanks follow him, they will immediately trample him. Ordinary land remained, no trace. They were often buried in the forest under the trees... Under these oaks, under these birches...
I still can’t go into the forest. Especially where old oaks or birches grow... I can’t sit there..."
Olga Vasilievna Korzh, medical instructor of the cavalry squadron
I went to the front as a materialist. An atheist. She left as a good Soviet schoolgirl, who was taught well. And there... There I began to pray... I always prayed before the battle, I read my prayers. The words are simple... My words... The meaning is one, that I return to mom and dad. I didn’t know real prayers and didn’t read the Bible. No one saw me pray. I am secretly. She secretly prayed. Carefully. Because... We were different then, different people lived then. You understand? We thought differently, we understood... Because... I'll tell you a case... Once among the new arrivals there was a believer, and the soldiers laughed when he prayed: “Well, did your God help you? If he exists, how does he endure everything?” They did not believe, like the man who shouted at the feet of the crucified Christ, saying, if He loves you, why doesn’t He save you? After the war, I read the Bible... Now I’ve been reading it all my life... And this soldier, he was no longer a young man, did not want to shoot. He refused: “I can’t! I won't kill!" Everyone agreed to kill, but he didn’t. What about time? What a time... A terrible time... Because... They were court-martialed and shot two days later... Bang! Bang!
The time is different... The people are different... How can I explain it to you? How…
Fortunately, I... I didn’t see the people I killed... But... All the same... Now I understand that I killed. I think about it... Because... Because it has become old. I pray for my soul. I told my daughter that after my death, all my orders and medals should not be taken to a museum, but to a church. I gave it to my father... They come to me in my dreams... Dead... My dead... Although I haven’t seen them, they come and look at me. I search and search with my eyes, maybe someone is wounded, even seriously wounded, but they can still be saved. I don’t know how to say it... But they are all dead..."
Vera Borisovna Sapgir, sergeant, anti-aircraft gunner
“The most unbearable thing for me were amputations... Often they did such high amputations that they would cut off my leg, and I could barely hold it, I could barely carry it to put it in the pelvis. I remember that they are very heavy. You take it quietly, so that the wounded person does not hear, and carry it like a child... A small child... Especially if it is a high amputation, far behind the knee. I couldn't get used to it. The wounded under anesthesia moan or curse. Three-story Russian obscenities. I've always had blood... It's cherry... Black...
I didn’t write anything to my mother about this. I wrote that everything was fine, that I was warmly dressed and wearing shoes. She sent three of them to the front, it was hard for her...”
Maria Selivestrovna Bozhok, nurse
“I was born and raised in Crimea... Near Odessa. In the forty-first year, she graduated from the tenth grade of the Sloboda school in the Kordym region. When the war began, I listened to the radio in the first days. I understand - we are retreating... I ran to the military registration and enlistment office, they sent me home. I went there twice more and was refused twice. On the twenty-eighth of July, retreating units were moving through our Slobodka, and I went to the front with them without any agenda.
When I first saw the wounded man, I fainted. Then it passed. When I first climbed under the bullets after a fighter, I screamed so much that it seemed to drown out the roar of the battle. Then I got used to it. Ten days later I was wounded, I pulled out the shrapnel myself, bandaged myself...
The twenty-fifth of December forty-two... Our three hundred and thirty-third division of the fifty-sixth army occupied the heights on the outskirts of Stalingrad. The enemy decided to return her at any cost. A fight ensued. Tanks moved towards us, but they were stopped by artillery. The Germans rolled back, leaving a wounded lieutenant, artilleryman Kostya Khudov, in no man's land. The orderlies who tried to carry him out were killed. Two shepherd nurses crawled (I saw them there for the first time), but they were also killed. And then, taking off my earflaps, I stood up to my full height, first quietly, and then louder, and sang our favorite pre-war song “I accompanied you to your feat.” Everything fell silent on both sides - both ours and the Germans. She went up to Kostya, bent down, put him on a sled and took him to ours. I’m walking, but I’m thinking: “If only they wouldn’t shoot you in the back, it’s better if they shoot you in the head.” Right now... now... The last minutes of my life... Now! I wonder: will I feel pain or not? How scary, mommy! But not a single shot was fired...
There was no shortage of uniforms for us: they gave us a new one, and a couple of days later she was covered in blood. My first wounded was Senior Lieutenant Belov, my last wounded was Sergei Petrovich Trofimov, sergeant of the mortar platoon. In 1970, he came to visit me, and I showed my daughters his wounded head, which still has a large scar on it. In total, I carried out four hundred and eighty-one wounded from under fire. One of the journalists calculated: a whole rifle battalion... They were carrying men two to three times heavier than us. And they are even more seriously wounded. You are dragging him and his weapon, and he is also wearing an overcoat and boots. You put eighty kilograms on yourself and drag it. You lose... You go after the next one, and again seventy-eighty kilograms... And so five or six times in one attack. And you yourself have forty-eight kilograms - ballet weight. Now I can’t believe it anymore... I can’t believe it myself..."
Maria Petrovna Smirnova (Kukharskaya), medical instructor
“Forty-second year... We’re going on a mission. We crossed the front line and stopped at some cemetery. The Germans, we knew, were five kilometers away from us. It was night, they kept throwing flares. Parachute. These rockets burn for a long time and illuminate the entire area for a long time. The platoon commander led me to the edge of the cemetery, showed me where the rockets were being thrown from, where the bushes were from which the Germans could appear. I’m not afraid of the dead, I haven’t been afraid of cemeteries since childhood, but I was twenty-two years old, I stood on duty for the first time... And in those two hours I turned gray... I discovered my first gray hair, a whole stripe, in the morning. I stood and looked at this bush, it rustled, moved, it seemed to me that the Germans were coming from there... And someone else... Some kind of monsters... And I was alone...
Is it a woman’s job to stand guard at a cemetery at night? The men had a simpler attitude to everything, they were already ready for the idea that they had to stand at the post, they had to shoot... But for us it was still a surprise. Or make a trek of thirty kilometers. With combat gear. In the heat. The horses were falling..."
Vera Safronovna Davydova, private infantryman
“Are you asking what is the worst thing in war? You expect from me... I know what you expect... You think: I will answer: the worst thing in war is death. Die.
Well, like this? I know your brother... Journalist stuff... Ha-ha-a-ah... Why don't you laugh? A?
But I’ll say something else... The worst thing for me in war is wearing men’s underpants. That was scary. And this somehow... I can’t express myself... Well, first of all, it’s very ugly... You’re at war, you’re going to die for your Motherland, and you’re wearing men’s underpants. Overall, you look funny. Ridiculous. Men's underpants were long then. Wide. Sewed from satin. Ten girls in our dugout, and all of them are wearing men's underpants. Oh my God! In winter and summer. Four years.
We crossed the Soviet border... We finished off, as our commissar said during political classes, the beast in its own den. Near the first Polish village they changed our clothes, gave us new uniforms and... And! AND! AND! They brought women's panties and bras for the first time. For the first time throughout the war. Haaaa... Well, I see... We saw normal lingerie...
Why don't you laugh? Are you crying... Well, why?
Lola Akhmetova, private, rifleman
“They didn’t take me to the front... I’m only sixteen years old, I’m still far from seventeen. They hired a paramedic from us and brought her a summons. She cried a lot; the little boy remained at her house. I went to the military registration and enlistment office: “Take me instead.” Mom wouldn’t let me in: “Nina, how old are you? Maybe the war will end there soon.” Mom is mom.
Fighters, some will give me a cracker, some will leave me a piece of sugar. Protected. I didn’t know that we had a Katyusha that was behind us as cover. She started shooting. She shoots, there is thunder all around, everything is on fire. And it amazed me so much, I was so frightened by this thunder, fire, noise that I fell into a puddle and lost my cap. The soldiers laugh: “What are you, Ninotchek? What are you doing, honey?
Hand-to-hand attacks... What do I remember? I remember the crunch... The hand-to-hand combat begins: and immediately this crunch - cartilage breaks, human bones crack. Animal cries... When there is an attack, I walk with the soldiers, well, a little behind, consider it next to me. Everything is before my eyes... Men stab each other to death. They are finishing off. They break it down. They hit you with a bayonet in the mouth, in the eye... In the heart, in the stomach... And this... How to describe it? I’m weak... I’m weak to describe... In a word, women don’t know such men, they don’t see them like that at home. Neither women nor children. It's a terrible thing to do...
After the war she returned home to Tula. At night she screamed all the time. At night, my mother and sister sat with me... I woke up from my own scream..."
Nina Vladimirovna Kovelenova, senior sergeant, medical instructor of a rifle company
“We arrived at Stalingrad... There were mortal battles. The deadliest place... The water and the ground were red... And now we need to cross from one bank of the Volga to the other. Nobody wants to listen to us: “What? Girls? Who the hell needs you here! We need riflemen and machine gunners, not signalmen.” And there are many of us, eighty people. By the evening, the girls who were bigger were taken, but they didn’t take us together with one girl. Small in stature. They haven't grown up. They wanted to leave it in reserve, but I made such a noise...
In the first battle, the officers pushed me off the parapet, I stuck my head out to see everything for myself. There was some kind of curiosity, childish curiosity... Naive! The commander shouts: “Private Semyonova! Private Semyonova, you're out of your mind! She will kill such a mother!” I couldn’t understand this: how could this kill me if I had just arrived at the front? I didn’t yet know how ordinary and indiscriminate death was. You can’t beg her, you can’t persuade her.
They transported the people's militia in old lorries. Old men and boys. They were given two grenades and sent into battle without a rifle; the rifle had to be obtained in battle. After the battle there was no one to bandage... Everyone was killed..."
Nina Alekseevna Semenova, private, signalman
“I went through the war from end to end...
She was dragging the first wounded man, his legs gave way. I drag and whisper: “At least I wouldn’t die... At least I wouldn’t die...”. I bandage him, and cry, and say something kind to him. And the commander passed by. And he shouted at me, even something like that with obscenities...
- Why did he yell at you?
“You couldn’t be as sorry and cry as I was.” I’m exhausted, and there are many wounded.
We are driving, they are lying dead, shorn, and their heads are green, like potatoes from the sun. They are scattered like potatoes... Just as they ran, they lie on the plowed field... Like potatoes...”
Ekaterina Mikhailovna Rabchaeva, private, medical instructor
“I won’t say where it was... In what place... Once there were about two hundred wounded in the barn, and I was alone. The wounded were brought straight from the battlefield, a lot of them. It was in some village... Well, I don’t remember, so many years have passed... I remember that for four days I didn’t sleep, didn’t sit down, everyone shouted: “Sister! Sister! Help, dear!” I ran from one to the other, tripped and fell once, and immediately fell asleep. I woke up from a scream, the commander, a young lieutenant, also wounded, stood up on his good side and shouted: “Be silent! Silence, I order!” He realized that I was exhausted, and everyone was calling me, they were in pain: “Sister! Little sister!” I jumped up and ran - I don’t know where or what. And then for the first time, when I got to the front, I cried.
And so... You never know your heart. In winter, captured German soldiers were led past our unit. They walked frozen, with torn blankets on their heads and burnt overcoats. And the frost was such that the birds fell in flight. The birds were freezing. There was one soldier walking in this column... A boy... Tears were frozen on his face... And I was carrying bread in a wheelbarrow to the dining room. He can’t take his eyes off this car, he doesn’t see me, only this car. Bread... Bread... I take and break off one loaf and give it to him. He takes... He takes and doesn’t believe. He doesn’t believe... He doesn’t believe!
I was happy... I was happy that I couldn’t hate. I surprised myself then...”
Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva, private, nurse
“Will I find such words? I can tell you about how I shot. But I can’t talk about how I cried. It will remain unspoken. I know one thing: in war, a person becomes terrible and incomprehensible. How to understand him?
You are a writer. Come up with something yourself. Something beautiful. Without lice and dirt, without vomit... Without the smell of vodka and blood... Not as scary as life..."
Anastasia Ivanovna Medvedkina, private, machine gunner
“I reached Warsaw... And all on foot, the infantry, as they say, is the proletariat of war. They crawled on their belly... Don’t ask me anymore... I don’t like books about war. About the heroes... We walked sick, coughing, sleep-deprived, dirty, poorly dressed. Often hungry... But we won!”
Lyubov Ivanovna Lyubchik, commander of a platoon of machine gunners
“During the war, everyone dreamed of what: some to return home, some to reach Berlin, but I only dreamed of one thing - to live to see my birthday, so that I would turn eighteen years old. For some reason, I was afraid to die earlier, not even live to see eighteen. I walked around in trousers and a cap, always in tatters, because you are always crawling on your knees, and even under the weight of a wounded person. I couldn’t believe that one day it would be possible to stand up and walk on the ground instead of crawling. It was a dream!..
I reached Berlin. She signed on the Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill the war.”
Sofya Adamovna Kuntsevich, sergeant major, medical instructor of a rifle company
“It’s terrible to remember how terrible the first march was. I was ready to accomplish the feat, but I was not ready to wear size forty-two instead of thirty-five. It's so hard and so ugly! So ugly!
The commander saw me coming and called me out of formation:
Smirnova, how do you march in combat? What, you weren't taught? Why don't you raise your feet? I announce three outfits out of turn...
I answered:
There are, Comrade Senior Lieutenant, three squads out of turn! - turned to walk and fell. Fell out of my shoes... My feet were bleeding...
Then it turned out that I could no longer walk. The company shoemaker Parshin was given the order to sew me boots from an old raincoat, size thirty-five...”
Nonna Alexandrovna Smirnova, private, anti-aircraft gunner
“Now I watch films about the war: a nurse on the front line, she walks neatly, clean, not in padded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a cap on her crest. Well, that's not true! How could we pull out a wounded man if there were people like that... It’s not very easy to crawl around in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, skirts were only given to us at the end of the war as elegant ones. At the same time, we also received underwear instead of men's underwear. We didn’t know where to go from happiness. The gymnasts were unbuttoned so that you could see..."
Sofya Konstantinovna Dubnyakova, senior sergeant, medical instructor
“I close my eyes, I see everything in front of me again...
The shell hit an ammunition depot and a fire broke out. The soldier was standing nearby, guarding, and he was scorched. It was already a black piece of meat... He just jumps... Jumps in one place... And everyone is watching from the trenches, and no one will move, everyone is confused. I grabbed a sheet, ran up, covered this soldier and immediately lay down on him. Pinned to the ground. The ground is cold... Like this... He left until his heart broke and fell silent...
And then the battle began again... Near Sevsk, the Germans attacked us seven to eight times a day. And even that day I carried out the wounded with their weapons. I crawled up to the last one, and his arm was completely broken. Dangling in pieces... On the veins... Covered in blood... He urgently needs to cut off his hand to bandage it. No other way. And I have neither a knife nor scissors. The bag shifted and shifted on its side, and they fell out. What to do? And I chewed this pulp with my teeth. I chewed it up, bandaged it... I bandage it, and the wounded man: “Hurry, sister. I will fight again." In a fever..."
Olga Yakovlevna Omelchenko, medical instructor of a rifle company
“They gave me some special coupons for my orders and medals so that I could go to the military store and buy something. I bought myself rubber boots, the most fashionable at that time, I bought a coat, a dress, and boots. The overcoat decided to sell. I'm going to the market... I came in a light summer dress... With a hair clip in my hair... And what did I see there? Young guys without arms, without legs... All the people who fought... With orders, with medals... Those who have whole hands sell homemade spoons. Women's bras, panties. And the other... Without arms, without legs... He sits and washes himself with tears. He asks for a pretty penny... They didn’t have any wheelchairs, they rode on homemade boards, pushing them with their hands, whoever had them. Drunk. They sang "Forgotten, abandoned." These are the scenes... I left, I didn’t sell my overcoat. And for as long as I lived in Moscow, probably five years, I couldn’t go to the market. I was afraid that one of these cripples would recognize me and shout: “Why did you pull me out from under the fire then? Why did you save me?” I remembered one young lieutenant... His legs... One was cut off by shrapnel, the other was still hanging on something... I bandaged him... Under the bombs... And he shouted to me: “Don’t delay! Finish off! ! Finish off... I order you..." Do you understand? And so I was always afraid of meeting this lieutenant...”
Zinaida Vasilievna Korzh, medical instructor of a cavalry squadron
“People didn’t want to die... We responded to every groan, every cry. One wounded man, when he felt that he was dying, grabbed me by the shoulder like that, hugged me and did not let go. It seemed to him that if someone was near him, if his sister was nearby, then life would not leave him. He asked: “If only I could live for five more minutes. Just two more minutes...” Some died silently, slowly, others shouted: “I don’t want to die!” They swore: motherfucker... One suddenly began to sing... He sang a Moldavian song... A man dies, but still doesn’t think, doesn’t believe that he’s dying. And you see how the yellow-yellow color comes from under the hair, how the shadow first moves across the face, then under the clothes... He lies dead, and there is some kind of surprise on his face, as if he is lying and thinking: how did I die? Am I really dead?
“When the war was going on, we were not rewarded, but when it ended, they told me: “Reward two people.” I was indignant. She took the floor and spoke out that I was the political officer of the laundry detachment, and what hard work it is for laundresses, that many of them had hernias, eczema of the hands, and so on, that the young girls worked more than machines, like tractors. They ask me: “Can you present the award material by tomorrow? We will reward you again." And the detachment commander and I sat overnight over the lists. Many girls received medals “For Courage” and “For Military Merit,” and one laundress was awarded the Order of the Red Star. The best laundress, she did not leave the trough: it happened that everyone no longer had the strength, they fell, and she washed. It was an elderly woman, her whole family died.”
Valentina Kuzminichna Bratchikova-Borshchevskaya, lieutenant, political officer of the field laundry detachment
“They brought me to my platoon... The soldiers looked: some with mockery, some even with anger, and others would shrug their shoulders like that - everything was immediately clear. When the battalion commander introduced that, supposedly, you have a new platoon commander, everyone immediately howled: “Uh-uh-uh...” One even spat: “Ugh!”
And a year later, when I was awarded the Order of the Red Star, the same guys who survived carried me in their arms to my dugout. They were proud of me.
Appolina Nikonovna Litskevich-Bairak, junior lieutenant, commander of a sapper and mine platoon
“We were at logging sites, carrying boxes of ammunition. I remember I was dragging one box and I fell, it was heavier than me. This is one thing. And secondly, how many difficulties there were for us as women. For example, this. I later became a squad commander. The entire squad is made up of young boys. We're on the boat all day. The boat is small, there are no latrines. The guys can go overboard if necessary, and that’s it. Well, what about me? A couple of times I got so bad that I jumped straight overboard and started swimming. They shout: “The foreman is overboard!” They'll pull you out. This is such an elementary little thing... But what kind of little thing is this? I then received treatment... Can you imagine?
Petty Officer of the first article Olga Vasilievna Podvyshenskaya
“If you walked for a long time, you looked for soft grass. They also tore her legs... Well, you know, they washed them off with grass... We had our own characteristics, girls... The army didn’t think about it... Our legs were green... It’s good if the foreman was an elderly person and he understood everything, did not take any excess linen from his duffel bag, and if he was young, he would definitely throw away the excess. And what a waste it is for girls who need to change clothes twice a day. We tore the sleeves off our undershirts, and there were only two of them. These are only four sleeves..."
Klara Semenovna Tikhonovich, senior sergeant, anti-aircraft gunner
“After the war... I lived in a communal apartment. The neighbors were all with their husbands and they insulted me. They mocked me: “Ha-ha-a... Tell me how you are... with the men...” They will pour vinegar into my pan with potatoes. They'll add a spoonful of salt... Ha-ha-ah...
My commander was demobilized from the army. He came to me and we got married. We signed up at the registry office, and that’s it. No wedding. And a year later he left for another woman, the head of our factory canteen: “She smells of perfume, but you smell of boots and foot wraps.”
So I live alone. I have no one in the whole wide world. Thank you for coming..."
Ekaterina Nikitichna Sannikova, sergeant, gunner
“How did the Motherland greet us? I can’t do without sobbing... Forty years have passed, and my cheeks are still burning. The men were silent, but the women... They shouted to us: “We know what you were doing there! They lured young p... our men. Front-line b... Military bitches..." They insulted me in every way... The Russian dictionary is rich...
A guy escorts me from the dance, I suddenly feel bad, my heart is pounding. I'll go and sit in a snowdrift. "What happened to you?" - "Never mind. I danced." And these are my two wounds... This is war... And we must learn to be gentle. To be weak and fragile, and your feet were worn out in boots - size forty.”
Claudia S-va, sniper
“Do you understand this? Can this be understood now? I want you to understand my feelings... You won’t shoot without hatred. This is war, not hunting. I remember how during political classes we were read Ilya Ehrenburg’s article “Kill him!” The number of times you meet a German, the number of times you kill him. The famous article, everyone read it then, memorized it by heart. It made a strong impression on me, I had this article and my father’s “funeral” in my bag throughout the war... Shoot! Fire! I must take revenge..."
Valentina Pavlovna Chudaeva, sergeant, anti-aircraft gun commander
“You never know your heart. In winter, captured German soldiers were led past our unit. They walked frozen, with torn blankets on their heads and burnt overcoats. And the frost was such that the birds fell in flight. The birds were freezing. There was one soldier walking in this column... A boy... Tears were frozen on his face... And I was carrying bread in a wheelbarrow to the dining room. He can’t take his eyes off this car, he doesn’t see me, only this car. Bread... Bread... I take and break off one loaf and give it to him. He takes... He takes and doesn’t believe. He doesn’t believe... He doesn’t believe!
I was happy... I was happy that I couldn’t hate. I surprised myself then...”
Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva, private, nurse
“We came to some village, children were running around - hungry, unhappy. They are afraid of us... They are hiding... I, who swore that I hate them all... I collected from my soldiers everything that they had, what was left of the ration, any piece of sugar, and gave it to the German children. Of course, I didn’t forget... I remembered everything... But I couldn’t look calmly into the hungry children’s eyes. Early in the morning there was already a line of German children near our kitchens, they were giving first and second courses. Each child has a bag for bread slung over his shoulder, a can for soup on his belt and something for the second - porridge, peas. We fed them and treated them. They even stroked me... I stroked it for the first time... I was scared... I... I! I am petting a German child... My mouth is dry from excitement. But I soon got used to it. And they got used to..."
Sofya Adamovna Kuntsevich, medical instructor
“I don’t like military toys, children’s military toys. Tanks, machine guns... Who came up with this? It turns my soul... I have never bought or given military toys to children. Neither ours nor strangers. One day, someone brought a military airplane and a plastic machine gun into the house. I immediately threw it in the trash... Immediately!”
Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina, guard junior sergeant, medical instructor
Svetlana Alexievich’s book “War Doesn’t Have a Woman’s Face”
© Svetlana Alexievich, 2013
© “Time”, 2013
– When did women first appear in the army in history?
– Already in the 4th century BC, women fought in the Greek armies in Athens and Sparta. Later they took part in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.
Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote about our ancestors: “Slav women sometimes went to war with their fathers and spouses, without fear of death: during the siege of Constantinople in 626, the Greeks found many female corpses among the killed Slavs. The mother, raising her children, prepared them to be warriors.”
- And in new times?
– For the first time, in England in the years 1560–1650, hospitals began to be formed in which female soldiers served.
– What happened in the twentieth century?
- Beginning of the century... During the First World War in England, women were already taken into the Royal Air Force, the Royal Auxiliary Corps and the Women's Legion of Motor Transport were formed - in the amount of 100 thousand people.
In Russia, Germany, and France, many women also began to serve in military hospitals and ambulance trains.
And during World War II, the world witnessed a female phenomenon. Women have served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world: in the British army - 225 thousand, in the American army - 450-500 thousand, in the German army - 500 thousand...
About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most “masculine” ones. Even a language problem arose: the words “tanker”, “infantryman”, “machine gunner” did not have a feminine gender until that time, because this work had never been done by a woman. Women's words were born there, during the war...
From a conversation with a historian
A man greater than war (from the book's diary)
Millions killed for cheap
We trampled the path in the dark...
Osip Mandelstam
1978–1985
I'm writing a book about the war...
I, who did not like to read military books, although in my childhood and youth this was everyone’s favorite reading. All my peers. And this is not surprising - we were children of Victory. Children of the winners. The first thing I remember about the war? Your childhood melancholy among incomprehensible and frightening words. People always remembered the war: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, on holidays and at funerals. Even in children's conversations. A neighbor boy once asked me: “What do people do underground? How do they live there? We also wanted to unravel the mystery of the war.
Then I started thinking about death... And I never stopped thinking about it; for me it became the main secret of life.
Everything for us began from that terrible and mysterious world. In our family, the Ukrainian grandfather, my mother’s father, died at the front and was buried somewhere in Hungarian soil, and the Belarusian grandmother, my father’s mother, died of typhus in the partisans, her two sons served in the army and went missing in the first months of the war, from three returned alone. My father. The Germans burned eleven distant relatives along with their children alive - some in their hut, some in the village church. This was the case in every family. Everyone has.
The village boys played “Germans” and “Russians” for a long time. They shouted German words: “Hende hoch!”, “Tsuryuk”, “Hitler kaput!”
We did not know a world without war, the world of war was the only world we knew, and the people of war were the only people we knew. Even now I don’t know another world and other people. Have they ever existed?
The village of my childhood after the war was all women's. Babya. I don't remember male voices. This is how it remains with me: women talk about the war. They're crying. They sing as if they are crying.
The school library contains half of the books about the war. Both in the countryside and in the regional center, where my father often went to buy books. Now I have an answer - why. Is it by chance? We were always at war or preparing for war. We remembered how we fought. We have never lived differently, and we probably don’t know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently; we will have to learn this for a long time.
At school we were taught to love death. We wrote essays about how we would like to die in the name of... We dreamed...
For a long time I was a bookish person who was frightened and attracted by reality. From ignorance of life came fearlessness. Now I think: if I were a more real person, could I throw myself into such an abyss? What was all this due to – ignorance? Or from a sense of the way? After all, there is a sense of the way...
I searched for a long time... What words can convey what I hear? I was looking for a genre that would correspond to how I see the world, how my eye and my ear work.
One day I came across the book “I am from the village of fire” by A. Adamovich, Y. Bryl, V. Kolesnik. I experienced such a shock only once, while reading Dostoevsky. And here is an unusual form: the novel is assembled from the voices of life itself. from what I heard as a child, from what is now heard on the street, at home, in a cafe, on a trolleybus. So! The circle is closed. I found what I was looking for. I had a presentiment.
Ales Adamovich became my teacher...
For two years I didn’t meet and write so much as I thought. I read it. What will my book be about? Well, another book about the war... Why? There have already been thousands of wars - small and large, known and unknown. And even more has been written about them. But... Men also wrote about men - this became clear immediately. Everything we know about the war comes from a “male voice.” We are all captive of “male” ideas and “male” feelings of war. "Male" words. And the women are silent. Nobody but me asked my grandmother. My Mom. Even those who were at the front are silent. If they suddenly start to remember, they tell not a “women’s” war, but a “men’s” one. Adapt to the canon. And only at home or after crying in the circle of friends at the front, they begin to talk about their war, which is unfamiliar to me. Not just me, all of us. In my journalistic trips, I was more than once a witness and the only listener of completely new texts. And I felt shocked, just like in childhood. In these stories, a monstrous grin of the mysterious was visible... When women speak, they do not have or almost do not have what we are used to reading and hearing about: how some people heroically killed others and won. Or they lost. What kind of equipment was there and what kind of generals were they? Women's stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting and its own space of feelings. Your own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are just people who are busy with inhumanly human work. And not only they (people!) suffer there, but also the earth, the birds, and the trees. Everyone who lives with us on earth. They suffer without words, which is even worse.
But why? – I asked myself more than once. – Why, having defended and taken their place in the once absolutely male world, did women not defend their history? Your words and your feelings? They didn't believe themselves. The whole world is hidden from us. Their war remained unknown...
I want to write the history of this war. Women's history.
After the first meetings...
Surprise: these women’s military professions are medical instructor, sniper, machine gunner, anti-aircraft gun commander, sapper, and now they are accountants, laboratory assistants, tour guides, teachers... There is a mismatch of roles here and there. It’s as if they remember not about themselves, but about some other girls. Today they surprise themselves. And before my eyes, history “humanizes” and becomes similar to ordinary life. Another lighting appears.
There are amazing storytellers who have pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. A person sees himself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from earth. Before him is the whole way up and the way down - from the angel to the beast. Memories are not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a vanished reality, but a rebirth of the past when time turns back. First of all, it is creativity. By telling stories, people create, “write” their lives. It happens that they “add on” and “rewrite”. You have to be careful here. On guard. At the same time, pain melts and destroys any falsehood. Temperature too high! I was convinced that ordinary people behave more sincerely - nurses, cooks, laundresses... They, how can I define this more accurately, pull words from themselves, and not from newspapers and books they read - not from someone else's. But only from my own suffering and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, oddly enough, are often more susceptible to the processing of time. Its general encryption. Infected with secondary knowledge. Myths. Often you have to walk for a long time, in different circles, to hear a story about a “women’s” war, and not about a “men’s” one: how they retreated, advanced, on what part of the front... It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. As a persistent portrait painter.