Last witnesses An oral history of the children of World War II

Review by Choice Review

In 2015 Alexievich won the Nobel prize for literature for her "polyphonic writings." For this book, she gathered the stories of approximately one hundred individuals who were children in the Soviet Union in June 1941, and who were shaped by the experience of Nazi occupation, the siege in Leningrad, or as refugees in the east. Most of her subjects were between the ages of 4 and 14 when the war began. Their stories, some as short as one page, have a few common themes. Many speak of hunger or the loss of parents and siblings either to Nazi violence or disease, and many describe the long-term impact of the war on their psyches. Alexievich does not provide an introduction or even an explanation of the questions she asked. The reader does not even know how she choose the individuals whose stories are included. What the book provides is an unfiltered view of experiences that were burned into the memories of children and recalled more than 70 years later by adults who could never leave the war behind. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Frederic Krome, University of Cincinnati--Clermont College

Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.

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Review by Booklist Review

No war, nor any drama of state, is worthwhile if it results in one tear from a child, says one of the epigraphs which begin this oral history of the lives of Soviet children during WWII. The narrators of Last Witnesses endured far more than tears, and this book provides a wrenching glimpse of the war's impact on civilians in what is now Belarus and its neighbors, where more than four-million people were killed. Alexievich (The Unwomanly Face of War, 2017), awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015 for her work in this genre, presents their memories individually and chronologically, but the stories form a single narrative of suffering. Children lose parents to the front or the partisans, death or capture, permanently or temporarily. They are then raised by relatives, neighbors, orphanages, nobody. They eat dogs and fear the human-eating dogs left by the Nazis. They are captured, tortured, imprisoned. They join the struggle. Alexievich's narrators were forever shaped by the war. The sole evidence of Alexievich's presence is in her witnesses' retrospective attempts to explain their worlds. By the age of ten or eleven, one woman explains, we were men and women. --Sara Jorgensen Copyright 2019 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

In this moving work of oral history, originally published in 1985 and appearing in English for the first time, Nobel-winning journalist Alexievich collages together WWII survivors' accounts. The book brings together engrossing and frequently graphic testimonies from 101 Russians who were under the age of 15 at the time of the events described. Absent a historical timeline-or, indeed, any prose in Alexievich's voice-there is a subtle chronological and geographic movement; the memories move from town to town between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Nazi surrender in May 1945. The interviewees recall the hunger not assuaged by grass or potatoes, the sounds and the smells of war, the abuse they suffered (one was used to detect mines and another, then six, suffered "nine bullet wounds"), the crushing losses ("I never found my mama and papa, I don't even know my real last name"), and the horrifying events ("Our neighbors... were hanging from the well pole," one recounts; another remembers seeing his mother shot to death in the street). This disturbing and inspiring literary monument to the human, humane spirit that survives unimaginable horror brings to life the devastation of war. Agent: Galina Dursthoff, Literary Agency Galina Dursthoff. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Review by Library Journal Review

Originally published in Russian in 1985, this newly translated work by Nobel laureate in literature Alexievich (Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets) highlights the wartime experiences of children in the Soviet Union during World War II. Alexievich has noted that the preferred label for her genre is "documentary literature," while a more mundane category might be "oral history." Within are stories from 100 people--short glimpses into their childhood that last only a few pages--with each vignette stating the age of the person during the story as well as their adult occupation. The myriad themes cover topics such as family relations, perceptions of war, death, food shortages, poverty, travel, schooling, entertainment, and how their childhood experience impacted their adult lives. VERDICT These stories are at once poignant and gut-wrenching, and given their scope within the longer interviews conducted by Alexievich, the author's overall literary intent becomes clearer throughout. Readers with an interest in World War II, oral history, 20th-century history, Russian and/or Soviet history would find this well worth reading. [See Prepub Alert, 1/7/19.]--Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

The Nobel laureate brings her unique style of collecting firsthand memories to the stories of those who were children during World War II.Like all of Alexievich's (The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, 2017, etc.) books, this one makes for a difficult but powerful reading experience. The Nazis ruthlessly killed entire villages or took all the men who might be partisans out to be shot, transporting women and children to concentration camps. One universal memory of these children was the complete lack of color: Everything was gray or black; spring never arrived. Many raged that they never had a childhood, which was stolen from them. As one 13-year-old recounts, "I learned to be a good shot.But I forgot my math." The children were not immune to Nazi tortures, and the author does not hide that fact from readers. Even 70 years later, many couldn't bear to remember the horrors of separation, the killings, and the hunger, which was perpetualmany ate grass, bark, even dirt. One man said there were no tears in him; he didn't know how to cry. The ages of Alexievich's subjects range from 4 to 15 years, most in the younger range because the teenagers were usually taken for slave labor or shot. Children were sold as slaves to German farmers and worked to death, but one of the most heinous crimes has to be the Aryan-looking children's being taken to camps so their blood could be used for transfusions for injured soldiers. The stories of escaping to the East, many alone, are remarkable, especially as we see the total strangers who took them in and treated them as family. Strangers were all they knew, and it was strangers who saved them. There are some uplifting stories of parents finding their children after the war, but many never found anyone.As usual, Alexievich shines a bright light on those who were there; an excellent book but not for the faint of heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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"He was afraid to look back . . ." Zhenya Belkevich Six years old. Now a worker. June 1941 . . . I remember it. I was very little, but I remember everything . . . The last thing I remember from the peaceful life was a fairy tale that mama read us at bedtime. My favorite one--about the Golden Fish. I also always asked something from the Golden Fish: "Golden Fish . . . Dear Golden Fish . . ." My sister asked, too. She asked differently: "By order of the pike, by my like . . ." We wanted to go to our grandmother for the summer and have papa come with us. He was so much fun. In the morning I woke up from fear. From some unfamiliar sounds . . . Mama and papa thought we were asleep, but I lay next to my sister pretending to sleep. I saw papa kiss mama for a long time, kiss her face and hands, and I kept wondering: he's never kissed her like that before. They went outside, they were holding hands, I ran to the window--­mama hung on my father's neck and wouldn't let him go. He tore free of her and ran, she caught up with him and again held him and shouted something. Then I also shouted: "Papa! Papa!" My little sister and brother Vasya woke up, my sister saw me crying, and she, too, shouted: "Papa!" We all ran out to the porch: "Papa!" Father saw us and, I remember it like today, covered his head with his hands and walked off, even ran. He was afraid to look back. The sun was shining in my face. So warm . . . And even now I can't believe that my father left that morning for the war. I was very little, but I think I realized that I was seeing him for the last time. That I would never meet him again. I was very . . . very little . . . It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there's no papa . . . Then I remember: the black sky and the black plane. Our mama lies by the road with her arms spread. We ask her to get up, but she doesn't. She doesn't rise. The soldiers wrapped mama in a tarpaulin and buried her in the sand, right there. We shouted and begged: "Don't put our mama in the ground. She'll wake up and we'll go on." Some big beetles crawled over the sand . . . I couldn't imagine how mama was going to live with them under the ground. How would we find her afterward, how would we meet her? Who would write to our papa? One of the soldiers asked me: "What's your name, little girl?" But I forgot. "And what's your last name, little girl? What's your mother's name?" I didn't remember . . . We sat by mama's little mound till night, till we were picked up and put on a cart. The cart was full of children. Some old man drove us, he gathered up everybody on the road. We came to a strange village and strangers took us all to different cottages. I didn't speak for a long time. I only looked. Then I remember--­summer. Bright summer. A strange woman strokes my head. I begin to cry. I begin to speak . . . To tell about mama and papa. How papa ran away from us and didn't even look back . . . How mama lay . . . How the beetles crawled over the sand . . . The woman strokes my head. In those moments I realized: she looks like my mama . . . "My first and last cigarette . . ." Gena Yushkevich Twelve years old. Now a journalist. The morning of the first day of the war . . . Sun. And unusual quiet. Incomprehensible silence. Our neighbor, an officer's wife, came out to the yard all in tears. She whispered something to mama, but gestured that they had to be quiet. Everybody was afraid to say aloud what had happened, even when they already knew, since some had been informed. But they were afraid that they'd be called provocateurs. Panic-­mongers. That was more frightening than the war. They were afraid . . . This is what I think now . . . And of course no one believed it. What?! Our army is at the border, our leaders are in the Kremlin! The country is securely protected, it's invulnerable to the enemy! That was what I thought then . . . I was a young Pioneer. We listened to the radio. Waited for Stalin's speech. We needed his voice. But Stalin was silent. Then Molotov gave a speech. Everybody listened. Molotov said, "It's war." Still no one believed it yet. Where is Stalin? Planes flew over the city . . . Dozens of unfamiliar planes. With crosses. They covered the sky, covered the sun. Terrible! Bombs rained down . . . There were sounds of ceaseless explosions. Rattling. Everything was happening as in a dream. Not in reality. I was no longer little--­I remember my feelings. My fear, which spread all over my body. All over my words. My thoughts. We ran out of the house, ran somewhere down the streets . . . It seemed as if the city was no longer there, only ruins. Smoke. Fire. Somebody said we must run to the cemetery, because they wouldn't bomb a cemetery. Why bomb the dead? In our neighborhood there was a big Jewish cemetery with old trees. And everybody rushed there, thousands of people gathered there. They embraced the monuments, hid behind the tombstones. Mama and I sat there till nightfall. Nobody around uttered the word war. I heard another word: provocation. Everybody repeated it. People said that our troops would start advancing any moment. On Stalin's orders. People believed it. But the sirens on the chimneys in the outskirts of Minsk wailed all night . . . The first dead . . . The first dead I saw was a horse . . . Then a dead woman . . . That surprised me. My idea was that only men were killed in war. I woke up in the morning . . . I wanted to leap out of bed, then I remembered--­it's war, and I closed my eyes. I didn't want to believe it. There was no more shooting in the streets. Suddenly it was quiet. For several days it was quiet. And then all of a sudden there was movement . . . There goes, for instance, a white man, white all over, from his shoes to his hair. Covered with flour. He carries a white sack. Another is running . . . Tin cans fall out of his pockets, he has tin cans in his hands. Candy . . . Packs of tobacco . . . Someone carries a hat filled with sugar . . . A pot of sugar . . . Indescribable! One carries a roll of fabric, another goes all wrapped in blue calico. Red calico . . . It's funny, but nobody laughs. Food warehouses had been bombed. A big store not far from our house . . . People rushed to take whatever was left there. At a sugar factory several men drowned in vats of sugar syrup. Terrible! The whole city cracked sunflower seeds. They found a stock of sunflower seeds somewhere. Before my eyes a woman came running to a store . . . She had nothing with her: no sack or net bag--­so she took off her slip. Her leggings. She stuffed them with buckwheat. Carried it off. All that silently for some reason. Nobody talked. When I called my mother, there was only mustard left, yellow jars of mustard. "Don't take anything," mama begged. Later she told me she was ashamed, because all her life she had taught me differently. Even when we were starving and remembering these days, we still didn't regret anything. That's how my mother was. In town . . . German soldiers calmly strolled in our streets. They filmed everything. Laughed. Before the war we had a favorite game--­we made drawings of Germans. We drew them with big teeth. Fangs. And now they're walking around . . . Young, handsome . . . With handsome grenades tucked into the tops of their sturdy boots. Play harmonicas. Even joke with our pretty girls. An elderly German was dragging a box. The box was heavy. He beckoned to me and gestured: help me. The box had two handles, we took it by these handles. When we had brought it where we were told to, the German patted me on the shoulder and took a pack of cigarettes from his pocket. Meaning here's your pay. I came home. I couldn't wait, I sat in the kitchen and lit up a cigarette. I didn't hear the door open and mama come in. "Smoking, eh?" "Mm-­hmm . . ." "What are these cigarettes?" "German." "So you smoke, and you smoke the enemy's cigarettes. That is treason against the Motherland." This was my first and last cigarette. Excerpted from Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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