SYNOPSIS

The long-awaited translation of the classic oral history of Soviet women's experiences in the Second World War - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature

"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? A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown... I want to write the history of that war. A women's history."

In the late 1970s, Svetlana Alexievich set out to write her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, when she realized that she grew up surrounded by women who had fought in the Second World War but whose stories were absent from official narratives. Travelling thousands of miles, she spent years interviewing hundreds of Soviet women - captains, tank drivers, snipers, pilots, nurses and doctors - who had experienced the war on the front lines, on the home front and in occupied territories. As it brings to light their most harrowing memories, this symphony of voices reveals a different side of war, a new range of feelings, smells and colours.

After completing the manuscript in 1983, Alexievich was not allowed to publish it because it went against the state-sanctioned history of the war. With the dawn of Perestroika, a heavily censored edition came out in 1985 and it became a huge bestseller in the Soviet Union - the first in five books that have established her as the conscience of the twentieth century.

PERSONAL ASSESSMENT

JUSTIFICATION

When I stepped into a bookstore in Warsaw (Poland) this book drew my attention. When I read the blurb, I decided that I had to buy this book because it was tailor-made for me and for satisfying my reading needs of this time, the tales of women who fight with the Soviet Union. That is the interesting thing, that they are stories of WOMEN that went to the war when they have always told us that war is a ‘men’s thing’. Luckily, we have these testimonies that help us to raise awareness about those forgotten women, who knows if consciously or unconsciously.

PLOT

This book is made up of millions of testimonies of women who suffered the horrors of war, fighting. They are wholly objective, because the writer does not give her opinion, even though that we already know it just because she decided to write this. They are heartbreaking tales about what it is to kill people (because among the nazis there were also people who were forced to fight), about what it is to be a nurse in the front… But the most heartbreaking thing was how they had to struggle to readapt to the society once the war was ended. Girls that went to the war and came back as women, women rejected because they have fought against fascism and when they had come back nobody wanted them because fighting ‘was not a women’s issue’.

WRITING STYLE

When she writes she does it the easy way and doesn’t decorate much what she is writing. Her main purpose is to transmit the testimonies and make them understandable and reachable for everybody.

In the end she only writes what they women told her, if she had modified the minimum thing, we would lose the essence of that woman, we would not see her when we read it.

Thanks to it we can see each woman, feel what they felt, suffer with them...

GENERAL COMMENT

I think that this is a great book. We always hear the history that is written by men (and for men somehow) and women are invisible, like if they didn’t have fought in the war (and not only regarding war). It was a time when being a woman was very stigmatized. Women had to wear dresses, ‘normal’ shoes, had to stay at home waiting for their husbands, taking care of the children, be fragile… And, of course, the women that went to the front defied all those stigmas. During the war it was convenient for the two parts, but once the war ended… Those women were condemned to the social exclusion, they were not women. They also won’t be recognized as soldiers, and people never called them, so they can participate in veteran acts until 30 years later.

One of the things that shocked me the most, besides the fact that every woman was between sixteen and twenty-something, is the tale of a woman that has practically grown up in the front, she spent (like everybody) about 5 o 6 years wearing military clothes, pants, boots, soaked in blood, enduring sub-zero temperatures. And once the war was ended she had to readapt to wearing dress and shoes, but she didn’t know how to do it, she cannot walk with them. Or how the blood froze in their uniforms and cut them, how after the war they cannot see the red color because it brought them bad memories, the feeling they get when kill a man for the first time…

It is a very hard book, it took me a lot of time because of the harshness of their tales, but in the end, like any other book about war. But it is quite beautiful, so to speak, to hear (read) the testimonies of women, silent witness and sufferers of all and every one of the cruel acts of the human being.

-Saru