The Unwomanly Face of War

by Svetlana Alexievich

  I’ve just remembered it…At the time we were all still people of the war, we lived by the laws of wartime. Are they human at all?

  —

  —The Red Army came back…

  We were allowed to dig up the graves, to search for where our families had been shot. By an old custom you have to wear white next to death—a white kerchief, a white shirt. I’ll remember it to my last breath! People went with white embroidered towels…Dressed all in white…Where did they get it?

  We dug…Whatever we found and recognized we took. One brought an arm in a wheelbarrow, another a head in a cart…A man doesn’t stay whole in the ground for long, they were all mixed up together. With clay, with sand.

  I didn’t find my sister, but I thought that a scrap of a dress was hers, it looked familiar…Grandfather also said, “Take it, there’ll be something to bury.” We put this piece of a dress into a little coffin…

  We got a notice that my father was “missing in action.” Others got something for those who had been killed, but my mother and I got a scare in the village council: “You’re not entitled to any aid. It may be he’s living in clover with some German Frau. An enemy of the people.”

  I began to look for my father under Khrushchev.*12 Forty years later, under Gorbachev, I received an answer: “Not listed in the records…” But his regimental comrade wrote to me and I found out that my father had died a hero. He had thrown himself with a grenade under a tank at Mogilev*13….

  It’s a pity my mother didn’t live to get this news. She died branded as the wife of an enemy of the people. A traitor. There were many like her. They didn’t live to learn the truth. I went to mother’s grave with this letter. Read it…

  —

  —Many of us believed…

  We thought that after the war everything would change…Stalin would trust his people. But the war was not yet over, and the troop trains were already going to Magadan.*14 Troop trains with the victors…Those who had been captured, those who had survived the German camps, those whom the Germans had taken along to work for them—all those who had seen Europe—were arrested. Those who could tell how people there lived. Without Communists. What kind of houses they had and what kind of roads. And that there were no kolkhozes…

  After the Victory everybody became silent. Silent and afraid, as before the war…

  —

  —I’m a history teacher…Within my memory the history textbook has been rewritten three times. I taught children with three different textbooks…

  Ask us while we’re alive. Don’t rewrite afterward without us. Ask…

  Do you know how hard it is to kill a human being? I worked in the underground. After six months I was sent on a mission—to take a job as a waitress in a German officers’ mess…I was young, beautiful…They hired me. I was supposed to put poison into the soup cauldron and leave for the partisans the same day. I had already grown used to them; they were the enemy, but I saw them every day, they said, “Danke schön…Danke schön…” It was hard…To kill is hard…To kill is more terrible than to die…

  I’ve taught history all my life…And I never knew how to tell about that…In what words…

  —

  I HAD MY OWN war…I went a long way together with my heroines. Just like them, for a long time I did not believe that our Victory had two faces—one beautiful and the other terrible, all scars—unbearable to look at. “In hand-to-hand combat, when you kill a man, you look him in the eye. It’s not like throwing bombs or shooting from a trench,” they told me.

  Listening to how a person killed or died is the same—you look him in the eye…

  * * *

  *1 Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) was one of the greatest Russian poets of the twentieth century. The epigraph comes from “Lines on the Unknown Soldier” (1937–1938). Mandelstam died in transit to one of Stalin’s hard-labor camps.

  *2 A participant in a voluntary resistance movement fighting a guerrilla war against the Germans during World War II.

  *3 The novel I Am from a Burning Village (also known in English as Out of the Fire), by the Belorussian writers Ales Adamovich (1927–1994), Yanka Bryl (1917–2006), and Vladimir Kolesnik (1922–1994), chronicles the Nazi destruction of Belorussian villages during World War II. Adamovich was a novelist, critic, and philosopher who had fought as a partisan in 1942–1943 and became a forceful antiwar activist.

  *4 Gulag is the Russian acronym for “Main Administration of Camps,” i.e., the system of “corrective” forced labor camps instituted in the Soviet Union beginning in 1918.

  *5 In Soviet legal terminology the phrase “without the right of correspondence” usually meant the prisoner had been executed.

  *6 Golodomor (“holodomor” in Ukrainian) means “death by hunger.” The term refers to the deliberately created famine of 1932–1933 in Ukraine, which cost many millions of lives.

  *7 The Soviet acronym for “collective farm.”

  *8 Gorbachev’s perestroika: The “restructuring” begun in 1986 under Mikhail Gorbachev (1933–), the last General Secretary of the Communist Party and head of state until the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991.

  *9 The German novelist Erich Maria Remarque (1898–1970) is best known for his novel All Quiet on the Western Front (1928), about the harsh experiences of German soldiers during World War I. His works were banned and publicly burned by the Nazis in 1933.

  *10 German for “police,” but the term was also applied to Russian collaborators.

  *11 Originally a term for wealthy independent peasant farmers; under the Soviets it became a derogatory label for any peasants who resisted the forced collectivization of agriculture. Kulaks were arrested and either shot or sent to hard labor in Siberia.

  *12 Nikita Khrushchev (1894–1971), who became First Secretary of the Communist Party in 1953, at Stalin’s death, and later served as premier, instituted the process of “de-Stalinization” of the Soviet Union, beginning with the 20th Party Congress in 1956.

  *13 Mogilev, an old city in Belorussia, was taken by the Nazis in 1941 and retaken by the Soviets in 1944. Its large Jewish population was exterminated

  *14 A city and territory in the far east of Russia, which became the center for a vast labor-camp system established by Stalin in 1932.

  An old three-story house on the outskirts of Minsk, one of those built hastily just after the war and, as it then seemed, not meant to last, now cozily overgrown with old jasmine bushes. With it began a search that went on for seven years, seven extraordinary and tormenting years, during which I was to discover for myself the world of war, a world the meaning of which we cannot fully fathom. I would experience pain, hatred, temptation. Tenderness and perplexity…I would try to understand what distinguishes death from murder and where the boundary is between the human and the inhuman. How does a human being remain alone with the insane thought that he or she might kill another human being? Is even obliged to? And I would discover that in war there is, apart from death, a multitude of other things; there is everything that is in our ordinary life. War is also life. I would run into countless human truths. Mysteries. I would ponder questions the existence of which I had never suspected. For instance, why is it that we are not surprised at evil, why this absence in us of surprise in the face of evil?

  A road and many roads…Dozens of trips all over the country, hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of yards of tape. Five hundred meetings, after which I stopped counting; faces left my memory, only voices remained. A chorus resounds in my memory. An enormous chorus; sometimes the words almost cannot be heard, only the weeping. I confess: I did not always believe that I was strong enough for this path, that I could make it. Could reach the end. There were moments of doubt and fear, when I wanted to stop or step aside, but I no longer could. I fell captive to evil, I looked into the abyss in order to understand something. Now I seem to have acquired some knowledge, but there are still more questions, and fewer answers.

  But then, at the very beginning of the
path, I had no suspicion of that…

  What led me to this house was a short article in the local newspaper about a farewell party given at the Udarnik automobile factory in Minsk for the senior accountant Maria Ivanovna Morozova, who was retiring. During the war, the article said, she had been a sniper, had eleven combat decorations, and her total as a sniper was seventy-five killings. It was hard to bring together mentally this woman’s wartime profession with her peacetime occupation. With the routine newspaper photograph. With all these tokens of the ordinary.

  —

  …A small woman with a long braid wound in a girlish crown around her head was sitting in a big armchair, covering her face with her hands.

  “No, no, I won’t. Go back there again? I can’t…To this day I can’t watch war movies. I was very young then. I dreamed and grew, grew and dreamed. And then—the war. I even feel sorry for you…I know what I’m talking about…Do you really want to know that? I ask you like a daughter…”

  Of course she was surprised.

  “But why me? You should talk to my husband, he likes to remember…The names of the commanders, the generals, the numbers of units—he remembers everything. I don’t. I only remember what happened to me. My own war. There were lots of people around, but you were always alone, because a human being is always alone in the face of death. I remember the terrifying solitude.”

  She asked me to take the tape recorder away.

  “I need your eyes in order to tell about it, and that will hinder me.”

  But a few minutes later she forgot about it…

  Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina)

  CORPORAL, SNIPER

  This will be a simple story…The story of an ordinary Russian girl, of whom there were many then…

  The place where my native village, Diakovskoe, stood is now the Proletarian District of Moscow. When the war began, I was not quite eighteen. Long, long braids, down to my knees…Nobody believed the war would last, everybody expected it to end any moment. We would drive out the enemy. I worked on a kolkhoz, then finished accounting school and began to work. The war went on…My girlfriends…They tell me: “We should go to the front.” It was already in the air. We all signed up and took classes at the local recruitment office. Maybe some did it just to keep one another company, I don’t know. They taught us to shoot a combat rifle, to throw hand grenades. At first…I’ll confess, I was afraid to hold a rifle, it was unpleasant. I couldn’t imagine that I’d go and kill somebody, I just wanted to go to the front. We had forty people in our group. Four girls from our village, so we were all friends; five from our neighbors’; in short—some from each village. All of them girls…The men had all gone to the war already, the ones who could. Sometimes a messenger came in the middle of the night, gave them two hours to get ready, and they’d be carted off. They could even be taken right from the fields. (Silence.) I don’t remember now—whether we had dances; if we did, the girls danced with girls, there were no boys left. Our villages became quiet.

  Soon an appeal came from the central committee of Komsomol*1 for the young people to go and defend the Motherland, since the Germans were already near Moscow. Hitler take Moscow? We won’t allow it! I wasn’t the only one…All our girls expressed the wish to go to the front. My father was already fighting. We thought we were the only ones like that…Special ones…But we came to the recruitment office and there were lots of girls there. I just gasped! My heart was on fire, so intensely. The selection was very strict. First of all, of course, you had to have robust health. I was afraid they wouldn’t take me, because as a child I was often sick, and my frame was weak, as my mother used to say. Other children insulted me because of it when I was little. And then, if there were no other children in a household except the girl who wanted to go to the front, they also refused: a mother should not be left by herself. Ah, our darling mothers! Their tears never dried…They scolded us, they begged…But in our family there were two sisters and two brothers left—true, they were all much younger than me, but it counted anyway. There was one more thing: everybody from our kolkhoz was gone, there was nobody to work in the fields, and the chairman didn’t want to let us go. In short, they refused us. We went to the district committee of Komsomol, and there—refusal. Then we went as a delegation from our district to the regional Komsomol. There was great inspiration in all of us; our hearts were on fire. Again we were sent home. We decided, since we were in Moscow, to go to the central committee of Komsomol, to the top, to the first secretary. To carry through to the end…Who would be our spokesman? Who was brave enough? We thought we would surely be the only ones there, but it was impossible even to get into the corridor, let alone to reach the secretary. There were young people from all over the country, many of whom had been under occupation, spoiling to be revenged for the death of their near ones. From all over the Soviet Union. Yes, yes…In short, we were even taken aback for a while…

  By evening we got to the secretary after all. They asked us: “So, how can you go to the front if you don’t know how to shoot?” And we said in a chorus that we had already learned to shoot…“Where?…How?…And can you apply bandages?” You know, in that group at the recruiting office our local doctor taught us to apply bandages. That shut them up, and they began to look at us more seriously. Well, we had another trump card in our hands, that we weren’t alone, there were forty of us, and we could all shoot and give first aid. They told us: “Go and wait. Your question will be decided in the affirmative.” How happy we were as we left! I’ll never forget it…Yes, yes…

  And literally in a couple of days we received our call-up papers…

  We came to the recruiting office; we went in one door at once and were let out another. I had such a beautiful braid, and I came out without it…Without my braid…They gave me a soldier’s haircut…They also took my dress. I had no time to send the dress or the braid to my mother…She very much wanted to have something of mine left with her…We were immediately dressed in army shirts, forage caps, given kit bags and loaded into a freight train—on straw. But fresh straw, still smelling of the field.

  We were a cheerful cargo. Cocky. Full of jokes. I remember laughing a lot.

  Where were we going? We didn’t know. In the end it was not so important to us what we’d be. So long as it was at the front. Everybody was fighting—and we would be, too. We arrived at the Shchelkovo station. Near it was a women’s sniper school. It turned out we were sent there. To become snipers. We all rejoiced. This was something real. We’d be shooting.

  We began to study. We studied the regulations: of garrison service, of discipline, of camouflage in the field, of chemical protection. The girls all worked very hard. We learned to assemble and disassemble a sniper’s rifle with our eyes shut, to determine wind speed, the movement of the target, the distance to the target, to dig a foxhole, to crawl on our stomach—we had already mastered all that. Only so as to get to the front the sooner. In the line of fire…Yes, yes…At the end of the course I got the highest grade in the exam for combat and noncombat service. The hardest thing, I remember, was to get up at the sound of the alarm and be ready in five minutes. We chose boots one or two sizes larger, so as not to lose time getting into them. We had five minutes to dress, put our boots on, and line up. There were times when we ran out to line up in boots over bare feet. One girl almost had her feet frostbitten. The sergeant major noticed it, reprimanded her, and then taught us to use footwraps. He stood over us and droned: “How am I to make soldiers out of you, my dear girls, and not targets for Fritz?” Dear girls, dear girls…Everybody loved us and pitied us all the time. And we resented being pitied. Weren’t we soldiers like everybody else?

  Well, so we got to the front. Near Orsha…The 62nd Infantry Division…I remember like today, the commander, Colonel Borodkin, saw us and got angry: “They’ve foisted girls on me. What is this, some sort of women’s round dance?” he said. “Corps de ballet! It’s war, not a dance. A terrible war…” But then he invited us, treated us to a din
ner. And we heard him ask his adjutant: “Don’t we have something sweet for tea?” Well, of course, we were offended: What does he take us for? We came to make war…And he received us not as soldiers, but as young girls. At our age we could have been his daughters. “What am I going to do with you, my dears? Where did they find you?” That’s how he treated us, that’s how he met us. And we thought we were already seasoned warriors…Yes, yes…At war!

  The next day he made us show that we knew how to shoot, how to camouflage ourselves in the field. We did the shooting well, even better than the men snipers, who were called from the front for two days of training, and who were very surprised that we were doing their work. It was probably the first time in their lives they saw women snipers. After the shooting it was camouflage in the field…The colonel came, walked around looking at the clearing, then stepped on a hummock—saw nothing. Then the “hummock” under him begged: “Ow, Comrade Colonel, I can’t anymore, you’re too heavy.” How we laughed! He couldn’t believe it was possible to camouflage oneself so well. “Now,” he said, “I take back my words about young girls.” But even so he suffered…Couldn’t get used to us for a long time.

  Then came the first day of our “hunting” (so snipers call it). My partner was Masha Kozlova. We camouflaged ourselves and lay there: I’m on the lookout, Masha’s holding her rifle. Suddenly Masha says: “Shoot, shoot! See—it’s a German…”

  I say to her: “I’m the lookout. You shoot!”

  “While we’re sorting it out,” she says, “he’ll get away.”

  But I insist: “First we have to lay out the shooting map, note the landmarks: where the shed is, where the birch tree…”

  “You want to start fooling with paperwork like at school? I’ve come to shoot, not to mess with paperwork!”

  I see that Masha is already angry with me.

  “Well, shoot then, why don’t you?”