My grandmother, a former artillery commander in the Red Army and one of the liberators of Auschwitz, talked little about her military service in World War II. When my grandfather's sister warned him that his bride-to-be was “a common war rag” he slapped her, earning my grandmother's loyalty for a lifetime. Year after year, when my grandfather donned his medals and marched in the Victory Day parade, my grandmother, like many female veterans, chose to stay at home. Not until I came across “The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II,” by the Belorussian writer Svetlana Alexievich, did I begin to make sense of my grandmother's complicated pride. “The men were the victors, the heroes; the grooms had made the war,” one of the book's narrators recounts. “But they looked at us with other eyes. We know what you did there!” Before she was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015, Alexievich produced four more books of collective oral history, including “Zinky Boys,” “Voices From Chernobyl” and “Secondhand Time,” each in its own way breaking long silences around Soviet-era taboos.
Now, 34 years after its initial publication, comes the English arrival of “Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II.” A chilling, enchanted naturalism fills the book's pages: Beloved horses are fed to unsuspecting orphans, cats become mute along with their child companions. Linden trees refuse to blossom on streets where houses have been burned to the ground. In a 2007 interview Alexievich stated that she wanted to capture the child's perspective because “a child is a completely free and innocent person. He is not yet involved in the system … and can return us to more normal sight.” In “Last Witnesses” Alexievich offers a war narrative that hues closer to the Brothers Grimm than to Homer. The book's gift is to allow the child's malleable perception to flash alongside the adult's somber recollections. In the opening story a girl of 6 is recounting her mother's burial to a strange woman stroking her head. No sooner is she done talking than she begins to notice the woman “looks like my mama.”
Separation between parent and child is a common thread in the book for a simple reason: The German bombing that jump-started the war in June 1941 caught people during the summer holiday, when a great many children had just started Pioneer camp. The chaos of evacuations that followed, along with the national draft, caused millions of parents to end up in different places from their children, with few ways to find one another. Throughout these pages, children are lost, found, reclaimed by relatives, but just as often taken in by strangers.
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