The Unwomanly Face of War

by Svetlana Alexievich

  “What’s this? You have hired hands in the guardhouse?” they asked.

  I said calmly, “Comrade Colonel, write a report to headquarters. That’s your business. But I have to fight for discipline. And I have exemplary order here.”

  With that they left.

  The discipline was strict. Once I met a captain. He passed by my house just as I came out. He even stopped.

  “My God! You’re coming out of there, but do you know who lives there?”

  “Yes.”

  “The political commissar lives there. Do you know how nasty she is?”

  I told him I had never heard that.

  “My God! She’s so mean she never smiles.”

  “Would you like to make her acquaintance?”

  “My God, no!”

  Well, at that point I confessed, “Let me introduce myself, I’m the commissar!”

  “No, it can’t be! The things they’ve told me about her…”

  I took care of my girls. We had a beautiful girl named Valya. I was once summoned away for ten days to headquarters. I came back and they told me that all those days Valya had come home late, that she was with some captain. If she was, she was, it’s a bygone thing. Two months went by, I found out that Valya was pregnant. I summoned her. “Valya, how could this happen? Where are you going to go? Your stepmother” (she had no mother, she had a stepmother) “lives in a dugout.” She cried and said to me, “It’s your fault, if you hadn’t gone away, nothing would have happened.” I was like a mother, like an older sister to them.

  She had a light coat, it was already cold, so I gave her my overcoat. Off she went, my Valya…

  March 8, 1945. We organized a party for Women’s Day. Tea. Some sort of candies we managed to get. My girls came out of their house and suddenly saw two Germans coming from the woods, dragging their submachine guns…Wounded…My girls surrounded them. Well, as the commissar, I wrote in a report that “today, May 8, the laundry women captured two Germans.”

  The next day we had a meeting of the commanders. The head of the political section said first thing, “Well, comrades, I want to give you some good news: the war will soon be over. Yesterday the laundry women from the 21st Field Laundry Unit captured two Germans.”

  Everybody applauded.

  While the war went on, we received no awards, but when it was over, they told me, “Present two people for awards.” I was indignant. I took the floor and said that I was the political commissar of the laundry unit, that the work of the laundresses was very hard, that many of them had ruptures and eczema on their hands and so on, that the girls were all young and worked more than trucks, than tractors. They asked me, “Can you present award-worthy material by tomorrow? We’ll give more awards.” And the commander of the unit and I sat all night over the lists. Many girls received medals “For Valor,” “For Military Services,” and one laundress was awarded the Order of the Red Star. She was the best laundress, she never left the tub: everybody was exhausted, falling off their feet, and she went on laundering. She was an older woman, her whole family had been killed.

  When I had to send the girls home, I wanted to give them something. They were all from Belorussia and Ukraine, where everything was devastated, destroyed. How could I let them go empty-handed? We were stationed in some German village, and there was a sewing workshop in it. I went to look: luckily, the sewing machines were there, untouched. And so we prepared a present for each girl who was leaving. I was so glad, so happy. That was all I could do for my girls.

  They all wanted to go home, and they were afraid to go. No one knew what awaited them there…

  Tamara Lukyanovna Torop

  PRIVATE, CONSTRUCTION ENGINEER

  My papa…My beloved papa was a Communist, a holy man. I never met a better man in my life. He educated me: “Well, who would I be without Soviet power? A poor man. I’d be a hired hand for some rich kulak. Soviet power gave me everything. I received an education, I became an engineer, I build bridges. I owe everything to our own power.”

  I loved Soviet power. I loved Stalin. And Voroshilov. All our leaders. So my papa taught me.

  The war was going on, I was growing up. In the evenings papa and I sang “The Internationale” and “The Holy War.” Papa accompanied on the accordion. When I turned eighteen, he went with me to the recruiting office…

  I wrote a letter home from the army telling him that I had built and defended bridges. What joy that was for our family. Papa made us all fall in love with bridges; we loved them from childhood. When I saw a destroyed bridge—bombed or exploded—I felt about it as about a living being, not a strategic object. I wept…On my way I encountered hundreds of destroyed bridges, big and small; during the war they were the first thing to be destroyed. Target number one. Whenever we went past the ruins, I always thought: how many years will it take to rebuild it all? War kills time, precious human time. I remembered well that papa spent several years building each bridge. He sat up nights over the drafts, even on weekends. The thing I was most sorry for during the war was the time. Papa’s time…

  Papa’s long gone, but I continue to love him. I don’t believe it when people say that men like him were stupid and blind—believing in Stalin. Fearing Stalin. Believing in Lenin’s ideas. Everyone thought the same way. Believe me, they were good and honest people, they believed not in Lenin or Stalin, but in the Communist idea. In socialism with a human face, as they would call it later. In happiness for everybody. For each one. Dreamers, idealists—yes; blind—no. I’ll never agree with that. Not for anything! In the middle of the war Russia began to produce excellent tanks and planes, good weapons, but even so, without faith we would never have overcome such a formidable enemy as Hitler’s army—powerful, disciplined, which subjugated the whole of Europe. We wouldn’t have broken its back. Our main weapon was faith, not fear. I give you my honest Party-member’s word (I joined the Party during the war and am a Communist to this day). I’m not ashamed of my Party card and have not renounced it. My faith has never changed since 1941…

  Elena Ivanovna Babina

  MILITIA FIGHTER

  The German troops were stopped at Voronezh…They were unable to take Voronezh for a long time. They kept bombing and bombing it. The planes flew over our village, Moskovka. I still hadn’t seen the enemy, I had only seen their planes. But very soon I learned what war was…

  Our hospital was informed that a train had been bombed near Voronezh. We came to the place and saw…What did we see? Nothing but ground meat…I can’t even talk about it…Aie, aie! The first one to come to his senses was our head doctor. He shouted loudly, “Stretchers!” I was the youngest, I had just turned sixteen, and everybody kept an eye on me in case I fainted.

  We walked along the rails, went inside the cars. There was no one to put on the stretchers: the cars were burning, there was no moaning or screaming. There were no whole people. I clutched my heart, my eyes were closing from fright. When we returned to the hospital, we all collapsed wherever: one put her head on a table, another on a chair—and we fell asleep like that.

  I finished my shift and went home. I came all in tears, lay down, and as soon as I closed my eyes, I saw it all again…Mama came home from work, Uncle Mitya came.

  I hear mama’s voice: “I don’t know what will become of Lena. Look what’s happened to her face since she went to work in the hospital. She doesn’t look herself, she’s quiet, doesn’t speak to anyone, and she cries out during the night. Where’s her smile, where’s her laughter? You know how cheerful she used to be. Now she never jokes.”

  I listened to my mother and my tears poured down.

  …When Voronezh was liberated in 1943, I joined the defense militia. There were only girls in it. They were all from seventeen to twenty years old. Young, beautiful, I’ve never seen so many beautiful girls together. The first one I got to know was Marusya Prokhorova; she was friends with Tanya Fedorova. They were from the same village. Tanya was a serious girl, she liked neatness and order. And Marusya
liked to sing and dance. She sang naughty couplets. Most of all she liked to put on makeup. She’d spend hours sitting in front of the mirror. Tanya scolded her: “Instead of painting your face, you’d do better to iron your uniform and tidy up your bed.” We also had Pasha Litavrina, a very feisty girl. She was friends with Shura Batishcheva. This Shura was shy and modest, the quietest of us all. Liusya Likhacheva liked to have her hair curled. She’d put her hair in curlers and take her guitar. She went to bed with the guitar and woke up with the guitar. The oldest of us was Polina Neverova; her husband was killed at the front, and she was always sad.

  We all wore military uniforms. When mama saw me in uniform for the first time, she turned pale. “Have you decided to join the army?”

  I set her at ease. “No, mama. I told you I keep watch on the bridges.”

  Mama wept. “Soon the war will be over. And you’ll take off the army coat at once.”

  I thought so, too.

  Two days after learning that the war was over, we had a meeting in the reading room. The head of the militia, Comrade Naumov, took the floor. “My dear combatants,” he said, “the war is over. But yesterday I received an order saying that militia combatants are needed for the Western Road.”

  Someone in the audience shouted, “But Bandera’s men are there!”*1

  Naumov paused and then said, “Yes, girls, Bandera’s men are there. They’re fighting against the Red Army. But an order is an order, it has to be carried out. Whoever wants to go, please apply to the head of the militia. Only volunteers will go.”

  We returned to the barrack, and each lay down on her bed. It became very, very quiet. No one wanted to go far from their native places. And no one wanted to die after the war was over. The next day they gathered us again. I sat at the presiding table; the table was covered with a red cloth. And I thought that this was the last time I’d be sitting at this table.

  The head of the militia made a speech: “I knew, Babina, that you’d be the first to volunteer. And you are all fine girls, no cowards. The war is over, you could go back home, but you go to defend your Motherland.”

  Two days later we were leaving. They put us on a freight train. There was hay on the floors, and it smelled of grass.

  I had never heard of the town of Stryy before, but that was where we were stationed now. I didn’t like the town—it was small and frightening. Every day music played and someone was buried: a policeman, or a Communist, or a Komsomol member. Again we saw death.

  I made friends with Galya Korobkina. She was killed there. And another girl…She too was stabbed in the night…There I completely stopped joking and smiling…

  * * *

  OF MELTED BEARINGS AND RUSSIAN CURSES

  * * *

  Antonina Mironovna Lenkova

  CAR MECHANIC IN A FIELD-CAR AND TANK REPAIR SHOP

  I’m all my father…His daughter…

  My father, Miron Lenkov, made his way from a simple illiterate lad to commander of a platoon in the Civil War. He was a real Communist. When he died, mama and I stayed in Leningrad. What is best in me I owe to this city. My passion was books. I sobbed over the novels of Lidia Charskaya,*2 read and reread Turgenev. I loved poetry…

  The summer of 1941…At the end of June we went to the Don to visit my grandmother. The war overtook us on the road. On the steppes mounted messengers immediately appeared, racing at breakneck speed, delivering summonses from the recruiting office. Cossack women sang, drank, and sobbed as they saw the Cossacks off to war. I went to the village of Bokovskaya, to the regional recruiting office. They said curtly and severely, “We don’t take children to the front. Are you a Komsomol member? Excellent. Help the collective farm.”

  We shoveled piles of grain to save it from rotting inside. Then we harvested vegetables. Calluses hardened on my hands, my lips were cracked, my face was covered with a steppe tan. And if I was in any way different from the farm girls, it was only in that I knew many poems and could recite them by heart all the long way home from the fields.

  The war was coming closer. On October 17, the Germans occupied Taganrog. People began to evacuate. My grandmother stayed, but she sent me and my sister off: “You’re young. Save yourselves.” We spent five days walking to the Oblivskaya station. We had to throw out our sandals, and we entered the village barefoot. The stationmaster warned us, “Don’t wait for a passenger train, get onto the flatcars, we’ll bring the locomotive at once and send you to Stalingrad.” We were lucky—we got onto a flatcar with oats. We sank our bare feet into the grain, covered ourselves with a shawl…Clinging close to each other, we dozed off. We’d long been out of bread and out of honey, too. The last few days Cossack women gave us food. We were embarrassed, we had no money to pay them, but they insisted, “Eat, poor things. It’s bad for everybody now, we must help each other.” I made a vow never to forget this human kindness. Never! Not for anything! And I haven’t.

  From Stalingrad we went by steamboat and then again by train, and reached the Medveditskoe station at two o’clock in the morning. A human wave carried us out onto the platform. Having turned into a pair of icicles, we were unable to move. We stood, supporting each other so as not to fall down, not to break into smithereens, as a frog did once in front of my eyes, taken out of liquid oxygen and thrown on the floor. Fortunately, someone we had traveled with remembered us. A carriage filled with people came, and we were tied behind it. They gave us padded jackets. They said, “Walk, otherwise you’ll freeze. You won’t be able to get warm. You can’t be driven…” At first we kept falling, but we walked, then even ran. Ten miles…

  The Frank settlement, the “First of May” kolkhoz. The chairman was very glad when he learned that I was from Leningrad and had finished ninth grade. “That’s good. You’ll help me here. With the accounting.”

  For a moment I was even glad. But then behind the chairman’s back I saw a poster saying, “Girls, to the steering wheel!”

  “I’m not going to sit in an office,” I answered the chairman. “If they teach me, I’ll be able to drive a tractor.”

  The tractors stood buried in snow. We dug them out, took them apart, burning our hands against the frozen metal, leaving pieces of skin stuck to them. The rusted, tightly screwed bolts seemed welded. When we didn’t succeed in unscrewing them counterclockwise, we tried to do it clockwise. As luck would have it…just at that moment…as if from under the earth, the foreman Ivan Ivanovich Nikitin appeared, the only real tractor driver and our instructor. He clutched his head and couldn’t keep from using good Russian foul language. Ah, fuck it all! His curses sounded like groans. But all the same I wept for once…

  I rode out to the field backward; most of the gears in the gearbox of my STZ were “toothless.” The thinking was simple: within fifteen miles, one of the tractors would break down and its gearbox would replace mine. That is what happened. A young tractor driver, a girl like me, Sarochka Gozenbuck, didn’t notice that there was no water left in the radiator, and she ruined her motor. Ah, fuck it all…

  Before the war I hadn’t even learned to ride a bicycle, but here was a tractor. We spent a long time heating the motors—with open flames, in violation of all the rules. I also found out what overwinding was. And how do you start the motor after such a procedure: you couldn’t turn the handle all the way, and halfway wasn’t enough…The lubricants and the fuel were rationed by the war norms. You answered with your head for every drop, as well as for melted bearings. Ah, fuck it all…For every drop…

  That day…Before going to the field I opened the crankcase to check the oil. Some sort of whey came out. I shouted to the foreman that I had to fill up with motor oil. He came, rubbed a drop in his hands, sniffed it for some reason, and said, “No fear! You can work one more day.” I objected, “No, you yourself said…” He flew off the handle: “I said it, so now it’s on my head—there’s no escaping you. City dolls! Much too educated. Ah, fuck it all…” Drive, devil take it…I drove off. It was hot, the tractor smoked, impossible to breathe
, but it was all nonsense. What about the bearings? I thought there was a bit of knocking. I stopped—there was nothing. I stepped on the pedal—there’s knocking! Then all of a sudden right under the seat: bam, bam, bam!

  I cut the motor, ran to the access hatch, opened it: two bearings on the connecting rod were completely melted!

  I sank on the ground, put my arms around the wheel and—for the second time during the war—burst into tears. It was my fault: I had seen what kind of oil I had! I got scared of his foul mouth. I should have answered him in kind, but no, I’m too genteel for that.

  I turned at some sounds. Well, well! The chairman of the kolkhoz, the director of the machine-tractor station, the head of the political section and, of course, our foreman. Who caused it all!

  And he stands there and can’t move. He understands it all. Says nothing. Ah, fuck it all…

  The director of the MTS asks, “How many?”

  “Two,” I reply.

  By the law of wartime I should go on trial for that. For negligence and sabotage.

  The head of the political section turns to the foreman. “Why don’t you look after your girls? How can I put this baby on trial!”

  So it got settled. With just talk. And the foreman never again used foul language in front of me. And I learned from it, too…Ah, fuck it all…I could make a scene…

  Then happiness came: we found our mama. She came, and we were a family again. Mama suddenly said, “I think you should go back to school.”

  I didn’t understand right away what she meant. “Go where?”

  “Who else is going to finish high school for you?”

  After all that I had lived through, it was strange to find myself at a school desk, solving problems, writing compositions, memorizing German verbs, instead of fighting the fascists! At a time when the enemy had reached the Volga!