The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II

by Svetlana Alexievich

To ask Dostoevsky’s question: How much human being is in a human being, and how to protect this human being in oneself?

I write not about war, but about human beings in war. I write not the history of a war, but the history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul.

They say to me: Well, memories are neither history nor literature. They’re simply life, full of rubbish and not tidied up by the hand of an artist. The raw material of talk, every day is filled with it. These bricks lie about everywhere. But bricks don’t make a temple! For me it is all different…It is precisely there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is concealed and the insurmountable tragedy of life is laid bare. Its chaos and passion. Its uniqueness and inscrutability. Not yet subjected to any treatment. The originals.

There is a concept in optics called “light-gathering power”—the greater or lesser ability of a lens to fix the caught image. So, then, women’s memory of the war is the most “light-gathering” in terms of strength of feelings, in terms of pain. I would even say that “women’s” war is more terrible than “men’s.” Men hide behind history, behind facts; war fascinates them as action and a conflict of ideas, of interests, whereas women are caught up with feelings. And another thing: men are prepared from childhood for the fact that they may have to shoot. Women are not taught that…They are not prepared to do that work…And they remember other things, and remember differently. They are capable of seeing what is closed to men.

Who will go to fight after such books? You humiliate women with a primitive naturalism. Heroic women. You dethrone them. You make them into ordinary women, females. But our women are saints.

You’ve read too much Remarque…

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.

“you damned Turgenev young lady! A man is perishing and you, tender creature, feel nauseous…”

No…We’re used to thinking of women as mothers and brides. The beautiful lady, finally.

“Don’t be offended, Mrs. Chudaeva. For the French, World War I caused a greater shock than World War II. We remember it; there are graves and monuments everywhere. But we know little about you. Today many people, especially the young, think it was only America that defeated Hitler. Little is known about the price the Soviet people paid for the victory—twenty million human lives in four years. And about your sufferings. Immeasurable. I thank you—you have shaken my heart.”

There have been thousands of wars on earth (I read recently that they’ve counted up more than three thousand—big and small), but war remains, as it has always been, one of the chief human mysteries. Nothing has changed.