The war is over for many; has become history and they have, to use that glib phrase, “moved on” but to these women, the war is very much in the present, and always with them, War is brutal and some of that brutality can carry over into post-war times. Jumps back on the bus. The latter seems to me to carry a greater emotional charge: the former evokes pride but the latter intense and abiding love. Female stereotypes are the construct of men; are conflicting and contradictory. When Charlotte Delbo – a French dramatist arrested by the Germans in Paris and sent to Auschwitz in 1943 – came home from the camps, her first thought was to write about the women with her who had survived, and the ones who had not. To quote from Durkheim’s classic study, On Suicide (1897), rather than religion conditioning social ideas and influencing social behaviour, it’s the social environment that creates religious ideas: see the difference between religious doctrine and teaching on the one hand, and public and political religious conduct on the other. “To see beauty in victory is to rejoice in the killing of others” (Art of War, Sun-tzu, BCE 380-316). […] when there is sorrow and bitterness he finds refuge in his motherland. The Unwomanly Face of War continues into the immediate postwar years, when Stalin was sending dissidents to labour camps in the east, and silence and secrecy became the sole means of survival. But that man is a fascist: “They were no longer enemies” but two wounded human beings lying next to each other (page 127). Yet war also produces camaraderie, courage and self-sacrifice. War is ubiquitous, universal and as old as human history. “How many years had she been looking for him? Anything can burn – even blood (page 127)! The standard refrain goes: women, bearers of life, should not kill. The poet adopts the persona of a soldier who has just shot someone and is now conducting an interior inquiry and dialogue. The baby was hungry, but the mother, half-starved, had no milk. For the rest, the women poured out their memories to her, not simply recounting them, but reimagining them. I jumped overboard and swam around (page 93). The rifles were old” (page 74). War is strange, concludes the persona: you kill a man whom, in peace time, you’d buy a drink or lend a coin. A dying soldier offers water to the nurse come to render first-aid: “Drink some water [yourself], dear nurse” (page 59). An older lady - probably the grandmother - brought a child of about six months old, who was slightly injured. In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. Given state neglect and social attitudes, the women do not speak openly about these matters. Alexievicvh’s Last Witnesses covers this ground but I haven’t read it as yet. Unwomanly Face consists of the accounts, of varying length, of women who had fought, either in the Soviet army or as partisans, in World War 11, that is, forty years earlier to the first publication of this book in 1985. The Unwomanly Face of War was first published in 1985 but in censored form, the authorities telling her that she should write not about “filth” but about victory. The mother took the baby, kissed it gently on the forehead, and offered her breast. An anti-aircraft defence soldier on the Moscow rooftops in 1941. hen Charlotte Delbo – a French dramatist arrested by the Germans in Paris and sent to Auschwitz in 1943 – came home from the camps, her first thought was to write about the women with her who had survived, and the ones who had not. A partisan group, about thirty in number, men and women, is betrayed; they take to a swamp which the fascists won’t enter and stay up to their necks in water. Churchill said that after hearing the news, he’d slept the sleep of one who had been saved: Hitler, he knew, had started down that road which would lead to certain defeat. For example, Alexievich visits a house to interview a former female fighter but her husband sends her to the kitchen to prepare something for their guest while he takes over the conversation. Unlike some other female fighters (for example, female Tamil-Tigers) these female fighters of the Soviet Union were victorious. A nurse captured by the fascists has her eyes “put out” and her breasts cut off before she was killed (p. 123). A hushed discussion ensued, then a decision. Beautiful” (page 157). To order a copy for £11.04 go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846 Topics A blind eye was turned by government and people to the looting indulged in by Soviet soldiers and junior officers; to rape or gang-rape. We don’t need your history (page XXXV). After a while, with the baby still drinking from her breast, Lokesan noticed the woman was dead. Stop thief! In 1937, Stalin conducted one of his major “purges” during which secret trials of Red Army commanders were carried out, decimating the best commanders, the military elite. cit. I recall reading somewhere a female Tamil Tiger saying that female cadres did everything that the men were doing. Her years of meticulous listening, her unobtrusiveness and her ear for the telling detail and the memorable story have made her an exceptional witness to modern times. The Nobel prize-winner’s astonishing oral history of the experience of Russian woman during the second world war finally appears uncensored, Belarus women who served on front lines of world war two – in pictures. Please, The subscription details associated with this account need to be updated. Alexievich herself was born in 1948 into a family scarred by the war. “I remember a German woman who had been raped. The chickens screamed. One former pilot, who turned her down, told her that she could not bear to return in her mind to the three years during which she had felt herself not to be a woman. 49. There were gang rapes… There were mass executions. That’s reason and justification enough, isn’t it? Alexievich was not the first writer to chronicle the Soviet participation in the second world war through oral history. All that lives on earth with us” (page X1V). As the author observes, courage in war and courage in thinking are entirely different (italics added by me). The accounts are distressing but not entirely one-sided. The Soviet Union paid the highest price in terms of the loss of human lives, estimated at between 8 to 11 million lives, while Germany lost 4 to 5 million. A little boy is lashed to a bicycle and forced to run after it. Very few of those she approached refused to talk to her. In the days of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, she has said, she would probably have written fiction. In this respect, Unwomanly Face is unusual, and welcome also because it presents English-language readers with the Russian perspectives of the war. After the war, I was never young” again (page 139). – breaks it in two. Dear sisters! The cows screamed. The Assignment -- Write a reading response based upon your reading of Unwomanly Face Of War (approximately 800-1200 words). (Another source estimates Soviet casualties at about 13 million soldiers plus 14 million civilians, making a rough total of 27 million. Then there’s the pain of abandoning the wounded who silently beg with their eyes: “Brothers! I killed him because he was my foe; the enemy. As often, significance is hidden in the minor and casual. Alexievich was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until she won the Nobel prize in 2015, in the face of objections that non-fiction of this kind was not literature.
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