The Unwomanly Face of War

by Svetlana Alexievich

  Olga Vasilyevna

  The last days of the war…I remember this…We were driving and suddenly there was music somewhere. A violin…For me the war ended that day…It was such a miracle: suddenly music. Different sounds…As if I woke up…We all imagined that after the war, after such oceans of tears, there would be a wonderful life. Beautiful. After the Victory…after that day…We imagined that all people would be very kind, would only love each other. They would all become brothers and sisters. How we waited for that day…

  * * *

  * For Budenny, see note here. Kliment Voroshilov (1881–1969) was a prominent military figure, one of the first five Marshals of the Soviet Union, and a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party from 1921 to 1961. He played a major role in Stalin’s Great Purge.

  There are many people in war…And many duties in war…

  There is much work not only around death, but also around life. There is not only shooting and killing people, mining and demining, bombing and exploding, going into hand-to-hand combat—there is also laundering, cooking kasha, baking bread, cleaning cauldrons, tending horses, repairing machinery, planing and nailing down coffins, delivering mail, mending boots, supplying tobacco. Even during war life consists by more than half of banal things. And of trifles, too. It’s unusual to think so, isn’t it? “There are mountains of our ordinary women’s work there,” recalls nurse-aide Alexandra Iosifovna Mishutina. The army marched first, and behind it “the second front”—laundresses, cooks, auto mechanics, mailmen…

  One of them wrote to me, “We’re not heroes, we were backstage.” What was there backstage?

  * * *

  OF NICE LITTLE SHOES AND A CURSED WOODEN LEG

  * * *

  Tatyana Arkadyevna Smelyanskaya

  MILITARY JOURNALIST

  We walk through the mud. Horses sink into this mud or fall down dead. Big trucks stall…Soldiers drag artillery by themselves. Pull wagons with bread and linen. Boxes of tobacco. I see one box of tobacco tumble into the mud, followed by a well-rounded Russian curse…They cherish ammunition, they cherish tobacco…

  My husband says to me, he repeats all the time, “Keep your eyes peeled! This is epic! Epic!”

  Irina Nikolaevna Zinina

  PRIVATE, COOK

  Before the war I had a happy life…With papa and mama. My papa fought in the Finnish War. He came back with a finger missing on his right hand, and I asked him, “Papa, why is there war?”

  War soon came, and I still wasn’t quite grown up. We were evacuated from Minsk. They brought us to Saratov. There I worked on a kolkhoz. The chairman of the village council summoned me: “I think about you all the time, girl.”

  I was surprised. “What do you think, Uncle?”

  “If it weren’t for this cursed wooden leg! It’s all this cursed wooden leg…”

  I stood there; I didn’t understand anything.

  He said, “There’s this letter, I have to send two people to the front, and I have nobody to send. I would’ve gone myself, except there’s this cursed wooden leg. I can’t send you, you’re not local. But maybe you’ll go? I’ve got two young girls here: you and Maria Utkina.”

  Maria was such a tall one, a fine girl, but not me. I was so-so.

  “Will you go?”

  “Will they give me footwraps there?”

  We were all ragged, because we had no time to take anything with us!

  “You’re such a pretty one, they’ll give you nice little shoes.”

  I agreed.

  …They unloaded us from the train, and a fellow came to pick us up, sturdy, mustached, but nobody went with him. I don’t know why, I didn’t ask, I wasn’t an activist and never pushed myself forward. We didn’t like the fellow. Then a handsome officer came. A doll! He talked us into it, and we went. We arrived at the unit, and that mustached one was there, laughing. “So you snub-noses didn’t want to come with me?”

  The major invited us one by one and asked, “What can you do?”

  One girl said, “Milk cows.” Another: “At home I boiled potatoes and helped mama.”

  He calls me up: “And you?”

  “I can do laundry.”

  “I see you’re a good girl. Can you cook?”

  “I can.”

  The whole day long I cooked food, and in the evening I had to do laundry for the soldiers. I stood guard. They shout, “Sentry! Sentry!”—and I can’t respond. I don’t even have strength enough to speak…

  Svetlana Nikolaevna Liubich

  MEDICAL VOLUNTEER

  I went around on a hospital train…I remember I spent the whole first week crying: first, I missed mama, and also I wound up on the top shelf, where they put the luggage now. It was my “room.”

  How old were you when you went to the front?

  I was in the eighth grade, but I didn’t finish the school year. I ran away to the front. All the girls on the hospital train were my age.

  What did your work consist of?

  We took care of the wounded, gave them water, fed them, brought bedpans—all that was our job. I was on duty with an older girl. She tried to spare me at first: “If they ask for a bedpan, call me.” There were badly wounded men: one without an arm, another without a leg. The first day I kept calling her, and then I remained alone, because she couldn’t really stay with me day and night. So I stayed by myself. A wounded man called me, “Nurse, a bedpan.”

  I brought him a bedpan, and I saw he didn’t take it. I looked: he had no arms. My brain was in a whirl; somehow I figured out what had to be done, but for several minutes I stood not knowing what to do. You understand me? I had to help him…And I didn’t know what to do, I’d never seen it. They didn’t even teach it in the courses…

  Alexandra Semyonovna Masakovskaya

  PRIVATE, COOK

  I didn’t shoot…I cooked kasha for the soldiers. They gave me a medal for that. I don’t even remember about it: did I ever fight? I cooked kasha, soup for the soldiers. I carried cauldrons, pails. Very heavy…I remember our commander used to say, “I’d shoot all these pails…How are you going to give birth after the war?” And once he up and shot at all those pails. We had to find smaller ones in some village.

  The soldiers would come back from the front line for some rest. The poor things were all filthy, exhausted, their hands and feet frostbitten. The Uzbeks and Tajiks were especially afraid of frost. In their parts it’s always sunny, and here we had minus twenty to minus forty. The man couldn’t get warm, I had to feed him, he couldn’t bring the spoon to his mouth.

  Maria Stepanovna Detko

  PRIVATE, LAUNDRESS

  I did laundry…I went all through the war with a tub. We did it by hand. Padded jackets, army shirts…They would deliver underwear, so worn out, infested with lice. White robes, you know, those camouflage ones. All bloody, not white, but red. Black from old blood. The first water is red or black—you can’t launder in it…An army shirt without a sleeve, and with a big hole in the chest, trousers without a leg. You wash them with tears and rinse them with tears.

  Heaps and heaps of these army shirts…Padded coats…My hands ache now as I remember it. In winter these coats were heavy, with frozen blood on them. I often see it in dreams now…A black heap of them…

  Maria Nikolaevna Vasilevskaya

  SERGEANT, RADIO OPERATOR

  There were so many miracles during the war…I’ll tell you…

  Anya Kaburova is lying on the grass…Our radio operator. She’s dying—a bullet hit her heart. Just then a wedge of cranes flew over us. Everybody raised their heads to the sky, and she opened her eyes. She looked: “What a pity, girls.” Then paused and smiled: “Can it be, girls, that I’m going to die?” Just then our mailwoman, our Klava, comes running and shouting, “Don’t die! Don’t die! You’ve got a letter from home…” Anya doesn’t close her eyes, she waits…

  Our Klava sat next to her, opened the envelope. A letter from mama: “My dear, my beloved little daughter…” The doc
tor stands next to me, he says, “This is a miracle. A miracle! She lives contrary to all the laws of medicine…” They finished reading the letter…And only then did Anya close her eyes…

  Vasilisa Yuzhnina

  PRIVATE, HAIRDRESSER

  My specialty…My specialty is men’s haircuts…

  A girl comes…I don’t know how to cut her hair. She has luxuriant wavy hair. The commander enters the dugout. “Give her a man’s haircut.”

  “But she’s a woman.”

  “No, she’s a soldier. She’ll be a woman again after the war.”

  All the same…All the same, as soon as the girls’ hair grew a little, I’d curl it during the night. We had cones instead of curlers…Dry pine cones…We could at least curl the forelock…

  Anna Zakharovna Gorlach

  PRIVATE, LAUNDRESS

  I hadn’t read many books…And I didn’t know any fancy talk…We clothed the soldiers, laundered, ironed for them—that was our heroism. We rode on horseback, less often by train. Our horses were exhausted, you could say we got to Berlin on foot. And since we’re remembering like this, we did everything that was necessary: helped to carry the wounded, delivered shells by hand at the Dnieper, because it was impossible to transport them. We carried them from several miles away. We made dugouts, built bridges…

  We fell into an encirclement, I ran, shot, like everybody else. Whether I killed or not, I can’t say. I ran and shot, like everybody else.

  It seems I’ve remembered very little. But there was so much of everything! I’ll remember…Come again…

  Natalya Mukhametdinova

  PRIVATE, BAKER

  My story is a short one…

  The sergeant major asks, “How old are you, girl?”

  “Sixteen, why?”

  “Because,” he says, “we don’t need minors.”

  “I’ll do whatever you like. Even bake bread.”

  They took me…

  Elena Vilenskaya

  SERGEANT, CLERK

  I was enlisted as a clerk…This is how they persuaded me to go work at headquarters…They told me: we know you worked as a photographer before the war, you’ll be our photographer.

  What I remember well was that I didn’t want to take pictures of death. Of the dead. I took pictures when the soldiers were at rest—smoking, laughing—when awards were handed out. It’s too bad I didn’t have color film then, only black-and-white. Carrying the regimental banner…I could have taken a beautiful picture of that…

  And today…Journalists come to me and ask, “Did you take pictures of the dead? The battlefield…” I began to look…I have few pictures of dead men…When someone was killed, the boys would ask me, “Have you got him alive?” We wanted to see him alive…Smiling…

  Zoya Lukyanovna Verzhbitskaya

  COMMANDER OF A UNIT IN A CONSTRUCTION BATTALION

  We built…Built railroads, pontoon bridges, blinds. The front was close by. We dug the ground at night, so as not to be seen.

  We cut down woods. My unit was mostly girls, all young. There were a few men, all from the reserves. How did we transport trees? We’d all pick one up and carry it. The whole unit carried one tree. We had bloody blisters…On our hands…on our shoulders…

  Maria Semyonovna Kulakova

  PRIVATE, BAKER

  I finished teacher training…I got my diploma when the war was already going on. Because of the war they did not assign us to jobs but sent us home. I came home and a few days later was summoned to the recruiting office. Mama, of course, didn’t want me to go. I was very young, only eighteen: “I’ll send you to my brother and tell them you aren’t home.” I said, “I’m a Komsomol member.” In the recruiting office they assembled us and said: Thus and so, we need women to bake bread at the front.

  This work was very hard. We had eight cast-iron ovens. We came to a devastated village or town and set them up. Having set up the ovens, we needed firewood, twenty or thirty buckets of water, five sacks of flour. We were eighteen-year-olds, and we carried hundred and fifty pound sacks of flour. Two of us would pick one up and carry it. Or forty loaves of bread on a plank. I, for instance, couldn’t lift it. Day and night by the oven, day and night. We’d finish kneading one tub, there’s the next one waiting. There’s a bombardment and we’re baking bread…

  Elena Nikiforovna Ievskaya

  PRIVATE, LOGISTICS

  And I spent the whole four years of the war on wheels…Went around following the signposts: “Shchukin Supply Corps,” “Kozhuro Supply Corps.” We would get tobacco, cigarettes, flints at the warehouse—all these things a soldier can’t do without at the front—and off we’d go. Sometimes in trucks, sometimes in wagons, and often on foot with one or two soldiers. We carried it on our backs. You couldn’t go to the trenches with a horse, the Germans would hear the creaking. We carried it. All on our backs, my dear…

  Maria Alexeevna Remneva

  SECOND LIEUTENANT, POSTAL WORKER

  At the beginning of the war…I was nineteen years old…I lived in the town of Murom, in the Vladimir region. In October 1941 we Komsomol members were sent to build the Murom-Gorki-Kulebaki highway. When we returned from the labor front we were mobilized.

  I was sent to the school of communications in Gorki, to the courses for postal workers. On finishing the courses, I was appointed to the active army, to the 60th Infantry Division. I served as an officer in the regimental mail. With my own eyes I saw people weep, kiss envelopes, when they received a letter at the front line. Many of their relations had been killed or lived on territory occupied by the enemy. They couldn’t write. So we used to write letters from an Unknown Sender: “Dear soldier, it is an Unknown Girl writing to you. How is the fight with the enemy going? When will you come home with the Victory?” We sat at night writing…I wrote hundreds of those letters during the war…

  * * *

  OF THE SPECIAL “K” SOAP AND THE GUARDHOUSE

  * * *

  Valentina Kuzminichna Bratchikova-Borshchevskaya

  LIEUTENANT, POLITICAL COMMISSAR OF A FIELD LAUNDRY UNIT

  On May 1 I got married…And on June 22 the war began. The first German planes came flying. I worked in an orphanage for Spanish children who had been brought to Kiev. That was 1937…The civil war in Spain…We didn’t know what to do, but the Spanish children began to dig trenches in the yard. They already knew everything…They were sent to the rear, and I went to the Penza region. I was given an assignment to organize courses for nurses. By the end of 1941 I personally held the exams for these courses, because all the doctors had left for the front. I handed out the certificates and also asked to be sent to the front. They sent me to Stalingrad, to an army field hospital. I was the oldest of the girls. My friend Sonia Udrugova—I’m still friends with her—was sixteen then, she had just finished ninth grade, plus these medical courses. We’d been at the front for three days, and I see Sonia sitting in the woods and crying. I go up to her: “Sonechka, why are you crying?”

  “Don’t you understand? I haven’t seen mama for three days.”

  When I remind her of this incident now, she laughs.

  At the Kursk Bulge I was transferred from the hospital to the field laundry unit as a political commissar. The laundresses were all hired help. We used to go somewhere in carts: there were basins, tubs sticking out, samovars to heat up water, and on top of all that the girls sat in red, green, blue, gray skirts. Everybody laughed, “Hey, there goes the laundry army!” They called me the “laundry commissar.” Later on my girls got better dressed, “gussied themselves up,” as they say.

  The work was very hard. No mention of any washing machines. By hand…It was all done by women’s hands…We arrive, they give us some cottage, or a dugout. We wash the underwear, and before we dry it we soak it in the special “K” soap to prevent lice. We had insect powder, but it didn’t work. We used “K” soap, very stinky, it smelled awful. We used to dry the underwear in the same space where we did the laundry, and we also slept there. They gav
e us up to an ounce of soap to wash one soldier’s underwear. The underwear was black as earth. Many girls got ruptures from the work, from carrying heavy things, from strain. “K” soap caused eczema, nails came off, we thought they’d never grow back. But even so, after two or three days of rest the girls had to go back and launder.

  The girls obeyed me…

  Once we came to a place where a whole unit of pilots was staying. They saw us, and we were all wearing dirty old things, and these boys scornfully said, “Look at the laundresses…”

  My girls were almost crying. “Commissar, see what they…”

  “Never mind, we’ll show them.”

  We made an arrangement. In the evening my girls put on the best things they had and went to a meadow. One of our girls played the accordion, and they all danced. They had agreed, though, not to dance with the pilots. The pilots came and invited them to dance, but they didn’t; they danced with each other the whole evening. The boys finally pleaded, “One fool said something, and you took offense at all of us…”

  The rule was not to put hired hands in the guardhouse, but what could you do, if there were a hundred girls there together? We had curfew at eleven, and that was it. They tried to run away—well, girls will be girls. I used to send them to the guardhouse. Once some superiors came from another unit, and I had two girls in the guardhouse.