The Unwomanly Face of War

by Svetlana Alexievich

  Copyright © 2017 by Svetlana Alexievich

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Originally published in Russian as У войны не женское лицо by Mastatskaya Litaratura, Minsk, in 1985. Copyright © 1985 by Svetlana Alexievich.

  Originally published in English as War’s Unwomanly Face by Progress Publishers, Moscow, in 1988. This English translation is published in the United Kingdom by Penguin, London.

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  NAMES: Aleksievich, Svetlana, author. | Pevear, Richard, translator. | Volokhonsky, Larissa, translator.

  TITLE: The unwomanly face of war : an oral history of women in World War II / Svetlana Alexievich; translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

  OTHER TITLES: U voæiny—ne zhenskoe liëtìso—. English

  DESCRIPTION: New York : Random House, 2017

  IDENTIFIERS: LCCN 2016036099 | ISBN 9780399588723 | ISBN 9780399588730 (ebook)

  SUBJECTS: LCSH: World War, 1939–1945—Women—Soviet Union. | World War, 1939–1945—Personal narratives, Russian. | World War, 1939–1945— Participation, Female. | Women and war—Soviet Union.

  CLASSIFICATION: LCC D810.W7 A5313 2017 | DDC 940.53/4709252—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2016036099

  Ebook ISBN 9780399588730

  randomhousebooks.com

  Book design by Barbara M. Bachman, adapted for ebook

  Cover design: Anna Bauer Carr

  Cover photograph: female Soviet snipers (Lyudmila Pavlichenko, left), 1944

  v4.1

  ep

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  From a Conversation with a Historian

  A Human Being Is Greater Than War

  “I Don’t Want to Remember…”

  “Grow Up, Girls…You’re Still Green…”

  “I Alone Came Back to Mama…”

  “Two Wars Live in Our House…”

  “Telephones Don’t Shoot…”

  “They Awarded Us Little Medals…”

  “It Wasn’t Me…”

  “I Remember Those Eyes Even Now…”

  “We Didn’t Shoot…”

  “They Needed Soldiers…but We Also Wanted to Be Beautiful…”

  “Young Ladies! Do You Know: The Commander of a Sapper Platoon Lives Only Two Months…”

  “To See Him Just Once…”

  “About Tiny Potatoes…”

  “Mama, What’s a Papa?”

  “And She Puts Her Hand to Her Heart…”

  “Suddenly We Wanted Desperately to Live…”

  By Svetlana Alexievich

  About the Author

  About the Translators

  —At what time in history did women first appear in the army?

  —Already in the fourth century B.C. women fought in the Greek armies of Athens and Sparta. Later they took part in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

  The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin* wrote about our ancestors: “Slavic women occasionally went to war with their fathers and husbands, not fearing death: thus during the siege of Constantinople in 626 the Greeks found many female bodies among the dead Slavs. A mother, raising her children, prepared them to be warriors.”

  —And in modern times?

  —For the first time in England, where from 1560 to 1650 they began to staff hospitals with women soldiers.

  —What happened in the twentieth century?

  —The beginning of the century…In England during World War I women were already being taken into the Royal Air Force. A Royal Auxiliary Corps was also formed and the Women’s Legion of Motor Transport, which numbered 100,000 persons.

  In Russia, Germany, and France many women went to serve in military hospitals and ambulance trains.

  During World War II the world was witness to a women’s phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military in many countries of the world: 225,000 in the British army, 450,000 to 500,000 in the American, 500,000 in the German…

  About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most “masculine” ones. A linguistic problem even emerged: no feminine gender had existed till then for the words “tank driver,” “infantryman,” “machine gunner,” because women had never done that work. The feminine forms were born there, in the war…

  * * *

  * The Russian poet and writer Nikolai Karamzin (1766–1826) was the author of a masterful twelve-volume History of the Russian State.

  Millions of the cheaply killed

  Have trod the path in darkness…

  —OSIP MANDELSTAM*1

  FROM THE JOURNAL OF THIS BOOK

  1978–1985

  I am writing a book about war…

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

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

  For us everything took its origin from that frightening and mysterious world. In our family my Ukrainian grandfather, my mother’s father, was killed at the front and is buried somewhere in Hungary, and my Belorussian grandmother, my father’s mother, was a partisan*2 and died of typhus; two of her sons served in the army and were reported missing in the first months of the war; of three sons only one came back. My father. The Germans burned alive eleven distant relations with their children—some in their cottage, some in a village church. These things happened in every family. With everybody.

  For a long time afterward the village boys played “Germans and Russians.” They shouted German words: Hände hoch! Zurück! Hitler kaputt!

  We didn’t know a world without war; the world of war was the only one familiar to us, and the people of war were the only people we knew. Even now I don’t know any other world and any other people. Did they ever exist?

  —

  THE VILLAGE OF MY postwar childhood was a village of women. Village women. I don’t remember any men’s voices. That is how it has remained for me: stories of the war are told by women. They weep. Their songs are like weeping.

  In the school library half of the books were about the war. The same with the village library, and in the nearby town, where my father often drove to get books. Now I know the reason why. Could it have been accidental? We were making war all the time, or preparing for war. Remembering how we made war. We never lived any other way, and probably didn’t know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently, and it will take us a long time to learn, if we ever do.

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

  But the voices outside shouted about other more alluring things.

  For a long time I was a bookish person, both frightened and attracted by reality. My fearles
sness came from an ignorance of life. Now I think: If I were a more realistic person, could I throw myself into that abyss? What caused it all—ignorance? Or the sense of a path? For the sense of a path does exist…

  I searched for a long time…What words can convey what I hear? I searched for a genre that would correspond to how I see the world, how my eye, my ear, are organized.

  Once a book fell into my hands: I Am from a Burning Village, by A. Adamovich, Ya. Bryl, and V. Kolesnik.*3 I had experienced such a shock only once before, when I read Dostoevsky. Here was an unusual form: the novel was composed from the voices of life itself, from what I had heard in childhood, from what can be heard now in the street, at home, in a café, on a bus. There! The circle was closed. I had found what I was looking for. I knew I would.

  Ales Adamovich became my teacher…

  —

  FOR TWO YEARS I was not so much meeting and writing as thinking. Reading. What will my book be about? Yet another book about war? What for? There have been a thousand wars—small and big, known and unknown. And still more has been written about them. But…it was men writing about men—that much was clear at once. Everything we know about war we know with “a man’s voice.” We are all captives of “men’s” notions and “men’s” sense of war. “Men’s” words. Women are silent. No one but me ever questioned my grandmother. My mother. Even those who were at the front say nothing. If they suddenly begin to remember, they don’t talk about the “women’s” war but about the “men’s.” They tune in to the canon. And only at home or waxing tearful among their combat girlfriends do they begin to talk about their war, the war unknown to me. Not only to me, to all of us. More than once during my journalistic travels I witnessed, I was the only hearer of, totally new texts. I was shaken as I had been in childhood. The monstrous grin of the mysterious shows through these stories…When women speak, they have nothing or almost nothing of what we are used to reading and hearing about: How certain people heroically killed other people and won. Or lost. What equipment there was and which 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 range of feelings. Its own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are simply people who are busy doing inhumanly human things. And it is not only they (people!) who suffer, but the earth, the birds, the trees. All that lives on earth with us. They suffer without words, which is still more frightening.

  But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown…

  I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.

  —

  AFTER THE FIRST ENCOUNTERS…

  Astonishment: these women’s military professions—medical assistant, sniper, machine gunner, commander of an antiaircraft gun, sapper—and now they are accountants, lab technicians, museum guides, teachers…Discrepancy of the roles—here and there. Their memories are as if not about themselves, but some other girls. Now they are surprised at themselves. Before my eyes history “humanizes” itself, becomes like ordinary life. Acquires a different lighting.

  I’ve happened upon extraordinary storytellers. There are pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. The person sees herself so clearly from above—from heaven, and from below—from the ground. Before her is the whole path—up and down—from angel to beast. Remembering is not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a reality that is no more, but a new birth of the past, when time goes in reverse. Above all it is creativity. As they narrate, people create, they “write” their life. Sometimes they also “write up” or “rewrite.” Here you have to be vigilant. On your guard. At the same time pain melts and destroys any falsehood. The temperature is too high! Simple people—nurses, cooks, laundresses—behave more sincerely, I became convinced of that…They, how shall I put it exactly, draw the words out of themselves and not from newspapers and books they have read—not from others. But only from their own sufferings and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, strange as it may be, are often more subject to the working of time. Its general encrypting. They are infected by secondary knowledge. By myths. Often I have to go for a long time, by various roundabout ways, in order to hear a story of a “woman’s,” not a “man’s” war: not about how we retreated, how we advanced, at which sector of the front…It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter.

  I sit for a long time, sometimes a whole day, in an unknown house or apartment. We drink tea, try on the recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and recipes. Look at photos of the grandchildren together. And then…After a certain time, you never know when or why, suddenly comes this long-awaited moment, when the person departs from the canon—plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments—and goes on to herself. Into herself. Begins to remember not the war but her youth. A piece of her life…I must seize that moment. Not miss it! But often, after a long day, filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in my memory (but what a phrase!): “I was so young when I left for the front, I even grew during the war.” I keep it in my notebook, although I have dozens of yards of tape in my tape recorder. Four or five cassettes…

  What helps me? That we are used to living together. Communally. We are communal people. With us everything is in common—both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and how to tell about our suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and ungainly life. For us pain is art. I must admit, women boldly set out on this path…

  —

  HOW DO THEY RECEIVE ME?

  They call me “little girl,” “dear daughter,” “dear child.” Probably if I was of their generation they would behave differently with me. Calmly and as equals. Without joy and amazement, which are the gifts of the meeting between youth and age. It is a very important point, that then they were young and now, as they remember, they are old. They remember across their life—across forty years. They open their world to me cautiously, to spare me: “I got married right after the war. I hid behind my husband. Behind the humdrum, behind baby diapers. I wanted to hide. My mother also begged: ‘Be quiet! Be quiet! Don’t tell.’ I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but it makes me sad that I was there. That I know about it…And you are very young. I feel sorry for you…” I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of their own soul. They check it against the words. After long years a person understands that this was life, but now it’s time to resign yourself and get ready to go. You don’t want to, and it’s too bad to vanish just like that. Casually. In passing. And when you look back you feel a wish not only to tell about your life, but also to fathom the mystery of life itself. To answer your own question: Why did all this happen to me? You gaze at everything with a parting and slightly sorrowful look…Almost from the other side…No longer any need to deceive anyone or yourself. It’s already clear to you that without the thought of death it is impossible to make out anything in a human being. Its mystery hangs over everything.

  War is an all too intimate experience. And as boundless as human life…

  Once a woman (a pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone: “I can’t…I don’t want to remember. I spent three years at war…And for three years I didn’t feel myself a woman. My organism was dead. I had no periods, almost no woman’s desires. And I was beautiful…When my future husband proposed to me…that was already in Berlin, by the Reichstag…He said: ‘The war’s over. We’re still alive. We’re lucky. Let’s get married.’ I wanted to cry. To shout. To hit him! What do you mean, married? Now? In the midst of all this—married? In the midst of black soot and black bricks…Look at me…Look how I am! Begin by making me a woman: give me flowers, court me, say beautiful words. I want it so much! I wait for it! I almost hit him…
I was about to…He had one cheek burned, purple, and I see: he understood everything, tears are running down that cheek. On the still-fresh scars…And I myself can’t believe I’m saying to him: ‘Yes, I’ll marry you.’

  “Forgive me…I can’t…”

  I understood her. But this was also a page or half a page of my future book.

  Texts, texts. Texts everywhere. In city apartments and village cottages, in the streets and on the train…I listen…I turn more and more into a big ear, listening all the time to another person. I “read” voices.

  —

  A HUMAN BEING IS greater than war…

  Memory preserves precisely the moments of that greatness. A human being is guided by something stronger than history. I have to gain breadth—to write the truth about life and death in general, not only the truth about war. To ask Dostoevsky’s question: How much human being is in a human being, and how to protect this human being in oneself? Evil is unquestionably tempting. Evil is more artful than good. More attractive. As I delve more deeply into the boundless world of war, everything else becomes slightly faded, more ordinary than the ordinary. A grandiose and predatory world. Now I understand the solitude of the human being who comes back from there. As if from another planet or from the other world. This human being has a knowledge that others do not have, that can be obtained only there, close to death. When she tries to put something into words, she has a sense of catastrophe. She is struck dumb. She wants to tell, the others would like to understand, but they are all powerless.

  They are always in a different space than the listener. They are surrounded by an invisible world. At least three persons participate in the conversation: the one who is talking now, the one she was then, at the moment of the event, and myself. My goal first of all is to get at the truth of those years. Of those days. Without sham feelings. Just after the war this woman would have told of one war; after decades, of course, it changes somewhat, because she adds her whole life to this memory. Her whole self. How she lived those years, what she read, saw, whom she met. Finally, whether she is happy or unhappy. Do we talk by ourselves, or is someone else there? Family? If it’s friends, what sort? Friends from the front are one thing, all the rest are another. My documents are living beings; they change and fluctuate together with us; there is no end of things to be gotten out of them. Something new and necessary for us precisely now. This very moment. What are we looking for? Most often not great deeds and heroism, but small, human things, the most interesting and intimate for us. Well, what would I like most to know, for instance, from the life of ancient Greece? From the history of Sparta? I would like to read how people talked at home then and what they talked about. How they went to war. What words they spoke on the last day and the last night before parting with their loved ones. How they saw them off to war. How they awaited their return from war…Not heroes or generals, but ordinary young men…