Aleksievich is not feminine in war. "War has no woman's face

When was the first time in history that women appeared in the army?

- Already in the IV century BC, women fought in the Greek troops in Athens and Sparta. Later they participated in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote about our ancestors: “Slav women sometimes went to war with their fathers and spouses without fear of death: thus, during the siege of Constantinople in 626, the Greeks found many female corpses among the killed Slavs. Mother, raising children, prepared them to be warriors.

- And in the new time?

- For the first time - in England in 1560-1650 they began to form hospitals in which female soldiers served.

What happened in the 20th century?

- The beginning of the century ... In the First World War in England, women were already taken to the Royal Air Force, the Royal Auxiliary Corps and the Women's Legion of Motor Transport were formed - in the amount of 100 thousand people.

In Russia, Germany, France, many women also began to serve in military hospitals and hospital trains.

And during World War II, the world witnessed a female phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the military already in many countries of the world: in the British army - 225 thousand, in the American - 450-500 thousand, in the German - 500 thousand ...

About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most "male" ones. There was even a language problem: the words “tanker”, “infantryman”, “submachine gunner” did not have a feminine gender until that time, because this work had never been done by a woman. Women's words were born there, in the war ...

From a conversation with a historian

A man greater than war (from the book's diary)

Millions killed cheaply

Trampled a path in the dark...

Osip Mandelstam

1978–1985

I'm writing a book about the war...

I, who did not like to read military books, although in my childhood and youth it was everyone's favorite reading. All my peers. And this is not surprising - we were children of the Victory. Children of the winners. The first thing I remember about the war? His childhood longing among incomprehensible and frightening words. The war was always remembered: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, on holidays and at wakes. Even in children's conversations. A neighbor boy once asked me: “What are people doing underground? How do they live there? We also wanted to unravel the mystery of the war.

Then I thought about death ... And I never stopped thinking about it, for me it became the main secret of life.

Everything for us led from that terrible and mysterious world. In our family, the Ukrainian grandfather, my mother's father, died at the front, was buried somewhere in the Hungarian land, and the Belarusian grandmother, my father's mother, died of typhus in the partisans, her two sons served in the army and went missing in the first months of the war, from three returned one. My father. Eleven distant relatives, along with their children, were burned alive by the Germans - some in their hut, some in the village church. It was like that in every family. Everyone has.

The village boys played "Germans" and "Russians" for a long time. German words were shouting: “Hyundai hoch!”, “Tsuryuk”, “Hitler kaput!”.

We did not know a world without war, the world of war was the only world we knew, and the people of war were the only people we knew. Even now I do not know another world and other people. Have they ever been?

The village of my childhood after the war was female. Babia. I don't remember male voices. This is how it remained with me: women talk about the war. They cry. They sing like they cry.

The school library contains half of the books about the war. Both in the countryside and in the regional center, where my father often went for books. Now I have an answer - why. Is it by chance? We were always at war or preparing for war. They remembered how they fought. We have never lived differently, probably, and we do not know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently, we will have to learn this for a long time someday.

In school we were taught to love death. We wrote essays about how we would like to die in the name of ... We dreamed ...

For a long time I was a bookish person, who was frightened and attracted by reality. From ignorance of life appeared fearlessness. Now I think: if I were a more real person, could I rush into such an abyss? From what all this was - from ignorance? Or from a sense of the way? After all, there is a sense of the way ...

I have been looking for a long time ... What words can convey what I hear? I was looking for a genre that would correspond to the way I see the world, how my eye, my ear works.

Once the book “I am from a fiery village” by A. Adamovich, Ya. Bryl, V. Kolesnik fell into the hands. I experienced such a shock only once, while reading Dostoevsky. And here - an unusual form: the novel is assembled from the voices of life itself. from what I heard as a child, from what is now heard on the street, at home, in a cafe, in a trolleybus. So! The circle is closed. I found what I was looking for. I had a presentiment.

Ales Adamovich became my teacher...

For two years, I didn’t so much meet and record as I thought. Read. What will my book be about? Well, another book about the war... Why? There have already been thousands of wars - small and large, known and unknown. And more has been written about them. But... Men also wrote about men - it became clear right away. Everything that we know about the war, we know from the "male voice". We are all captive to "male" ideas and "male" feelings of war. "Male" words. And the women are silent. Nobody but me asked my grandmother. My mom. Even those who were at the front are silent. If they suddenly begin to remember, then they tell not a “female” war, but a “male” one. Adjust to the canon. And only at home or, having cried in the circle of front-line girlfriends, they begin to talk about their war, which is unfamiliar to me. Not just me, all of us. In her journalistic trips she was a witness, the only listener of completely new texts. And she was shocked, as in childhood. In these stories, a monstrous grin of the mysterious was visible ... When women speak, they have little or no what we are used to reading and hearing about: how some people heroically killed others and won. Or lost. What was the technique and what generals. Women's stories are different and about something else. The "women's" war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting and its own space of feelings. Your words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are just people who are engaged in inhuman human deeds. And not only they (people!) suffer there, but also the earth, and birds, and trees. All who live with us on earth. They suffer without words, which is even worse.

But why? I asked myself more than once. - Why, having defended and taken their place in the once absolutely male world, women did not defend their history? Your words and your feelings? They didn't believe themselves. The whole world is hidden from us. Their war remained unknown...

I want to write the history of this war. Women's history.

After the first meeting...

Surprise: these women have military professions - medical instructor, sniper, machine gunner, anti-aircraft gun commander, sapper, and now they are accountants, laboratory assistants, tour guides, teachers ... Mismatch of roles - here and there. They seem to remember not about themselves, but about some other girls. Today they surprise themselves. And in front of my eyes, history “humanizes” and becomes like ordinary life. Another light appears.

There are amazing storytellers, they have pages in their lives that can compete with the best pages of the classics. A person sees himself so clearly from above - from the sky, and from below - from the earth. Before him all the way up and down - from the angel to the beast. Memories are not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a vanished reality, but a rebirth of the past when time turns back. First of all, it is creativity. By telling, people create, "write" their lives. It happens that they “add” and “rewrite”. Here you have to be alert. On guard. At the same time, pain melts, destroys any falseness. Temperature too high! Sincerely, I was convinced, simple people behave - nurses, cooks, laundresses ... They, how to put it more accurately, get words from themselves, and not from newspapers and read books - not from someone else's. But only from their own suffering and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, oddly enough, are often more subject to processing by time. His general encryption. Infected with secondary knowledge. Myths. Often you have to walk for a long time, in different circles, in order to hear a story about a “female” war, and not about a “male” one: how they retreated, how they advanced, on which sector of the front ... It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter.

Svetlana ALEKSIEVICH

WAR IS NOT A FEMALE FACE…

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained in the word "mercy." There are other words - sister, wife, friend, and the highest - mother. But isn't mercy also present in their content as an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? A woman gives life, a woman protects life, a woman and life are synonyms.

In the most terrible war of the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She not only rescued and bandaged the wounded, but also fired from a "sniper", bombed, undermined bridges, went on reconnaissance, took language. The woman killed. She killed the enemy, who fell with unprecedented cruelty on her land, on her house, on her children. “It’s not a woman’s lot to kill,” one of the heroines of this book will say, accommodating here all the horror and all the cruel necessity of what happened. Another will sign on the walls of the defeated Reichstag: "I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came to Berlin to kill the war." That was the greatest sacrifice they made on the altar of Victory. And an immortal feat, the full depth of which we comprehend over the years of peaceful life.

In one of the letters of Nicholas Roerich, written in May-June 1945 and stored in the fund of the Slavic Anti-Fascist Committee in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution, there is such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary legalized some Russian words now accepted in the world: for example, add one more the word is an untranslatable, meaningful Russian word "feat". Strange as it may seem, but not a single European language has a word of at least an approximate meaning ... "If the Russian word" feat "is ever included in the languages of the world, it will be the share of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders who saved the kids and defended the country along with the men.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, paratroopers, sailors, traffic controllers, drivers, ordinary field bath and laundry detachments, cooks, bakers, testimonies of partisans and underground workers. “There is hardly at least one military specialty that our brave women would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls there were Komsomol members of the tank battalion, and heavy tank drivers, and in the infantry - machine-gun company commanders, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

Only on the mobilization of the Lenin Komsomol, about 500 thousand girls were sent to the army, of which 200 thousand were Komsomol members. Seventy percent of all the girls sent by the Komsomol were in the active army. In total, over 800 thousand women served in various branches of the military during the war years ...

The partisan movement became popular. Only in Belarus in partisan detachments there were about 60 thousand courageous Soviet patriots. Every fourth person on Belarusian soil was burned or killed by the Nazis.

Those are the numbers. We know them. And behind them are destinies, whole lives, turned upside down, twisted by war: the loss of loved ones, lost health, female loneliness, the unbearable memory of the war years. We know less about this.

“Whenever we were born, we were all born in 1941,” anti-aircraft gunner Klara Semyonovna Tikhonovich wrote to me in a letter. And I want to talk about them, the girls of the forty-first, or rather, they themselves will talk about themselves, about “their” war.

“I lived with this in my heart all the years. You wake up at night and lie with your eyes open. Sometimes I think that I will take everything with me to the grave, no one will know about it, it was scary ... ”(Emilia Alekseevna Nikolaeva, partisan).

“... I am so glad that I can tell someone that our time has come ...” (Tamara Illarionovna Davydovich, senior sergeant, driver).

“When I tell you everything that happened, I will again not be able to live like everyone else. I will become sick. I came back from the war alive, only wounded, but I was sick for a long time, I was sick until I told myself that all this must be forgotten, or I will never recover. I even feel sorry for you that you are so young, but you want to know this ... ”(Lyubov Zakharovna Novik, foreman, medical instructor).

“Man, he could bear it. He's still a man. But how a woman could, I myself do not know. Now, as soon as I remember, I am terrified, but then I could do anything: I could sleep next to the dead, and I myself shot, and I saw blood, I remember very well that in the snow the smell of blood is somehow especially strong ... So I say, and I already feel bad ... And then nothing, then everything could. She began to tell her granddaughter, and my daughter-in-law pulled me up: why would a girl know this? This, they say, woman is growing ... Mother is growing ... And I have no one to tell ...

This is how we protect them, and then we are surprised that our children know little about us ... ”(Tamara Mikhailovna Stepanova, sergeant, sniper).

“... My friend and I went to the cinema, we have been friends with her for forty years now, we were underground together during the war. We wanted to get tickets, but the queue was long. She just had a certificate of a participant in the Great Patriotic War with her, and she went to the cash register and showed it. And some girl, about fourteen years old, probably says: “Did you women fight? It would be interesting to know for what such feats you were given these certificates?

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking like in a fever…” (Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers' trenches swam, the dugouts "in three runs" collapsed, and the soldiers' helmets abandoned in the forest turned red. But didn't she touch my life with her mortal breath? We still belong to generations, each of which has its own account for the war. Eleven people were missing from my clan: the Ukrainian grandfather Petro, mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, the Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, father’s mother, died of starvation and typhus during the partisan blockade, the Nazis burned two families of distant relatives with their children in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, his father's brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years and "my" war. Many times I was scared. I have been hurt many times. No, I will not tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to and couldn't. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decide to include in the story. It contains what I felt, experienced, it also contains the geography of the search - more than a hundred cities, towns, villages in various parts of the country. True, I doubted for a long time whether I have the right to write in this book “I feel”, “I suffer”, “I doubt”. What are my feelings, my torments next to their feelings and torments? Will anyone be interested in a diary of my feelings, doubts and searches? But the more material accumulated in the folders, the more persistent the conviction became: a document is only a document that has full force when it is known not only what is in it, but also who left it. There are no dispassionate testimonies, each contains the explicit or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion after many years is also a document.

Svetlana Aleksievich

War has no woman's face

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained in the word "mercy." There are other words - sister, wife, friend and the highest - mother. But isn't mercy also present in their content as an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? A woman gives life, a woman protects life, a woman and life are synonyms.

In one of the letters of Nicholas Roerich, written in May-June 1945 and stored in the fund of the Slavic Anti-Fascist Committee in the Central State Archive of the October Revolution, there is such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary legalized some Russian words now accepted in the world: for example, the word add more one word - an untranslatable, meaningful Russian word "feat". Strange as it may seem, but not a single European language has a word of at least an approximate meaning ... "If the Russian word" feat "is ever included in the languages of the world, it will be the share of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders who saved the kids and defended the country along with the men.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, paratroopers, sailors, traffic controllers, drivers, ordinary field bath and laundry detachments, cooks, bakers, testimonies of partisans and underground workers. “There is hardly at least one military specialty that our brave women would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls there were Komsomol members of the tank battalion, and mechanics-drivers of heavy tanks, and in the infantry - commanders of a machine-gun company, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

The partisan movement became popular. “Only in Belarus, there were about 60 thousand courageous Soviet patriots in partisan detachments.” Every fourth person on Belarusian soil was burned or killed by the Nazis.

“... I am so glad that I can tell someone that our time has come ...” (Tamara Illarionovna Davydovich, senior sergeant, driver).

This is how we protect them, and then we are surprised that our children know little about us ... ”(Tamara Mikhailovna Stepanova, sergeant, sniper).

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking like in a fever…” (Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers' trenches swam, the dugouts "in three runs" collapsed, and the soldiers' helmets abandoned in the forest turned red. But didn't she touch my life with her mortal breath? We still belong to generations, each of which has its own account for the war. Eleven people were missing from my family: the Ukrainian grandfather Petro, mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, the Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, father’s mother, died of starvation and typhus during the partisan blockade, the Nazis burned two families of distant relatives with their children in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, his father's brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years and "my" war. Many times I was scared. I have been hurt many times. No, I will not tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to and couldn't. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decide to include in the story. It contains what I felt, experienced, it also contains the geography of the search - more than a hundred cities, towns, villages in various parts of the country. True, I doubted for a long time whether I have the right to write in this book “I feel”, “I suffer”, “I doubt”. What are my feelings, my torments next to their feelings and torments? Would anyone be interested in a diary of my feelings, doubts and searches? But the more material accumulated in the folders, the more persistent the conviction became: a document is only a document that has full force when it is known not only what is in it, but also who left it. There are no dispassionate testimonies, each contains the explicit or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion after many years is also a document.

It just so happens that our memory of the war and all our ideas about the war are masculine. This is understandable: it was mostly men who fought, but this is also an acknowledgment of our incomplete knowledge of the war. Although hundreds of books have been written about women who participated in the Great Patriotic War, there is considerable memoir literature, and it convinces us that we are dealing with a historical phenomenon. Never before in the history of mankind have so many women participated in war. In the past, there were legendary units, like the cavalry girl Nadezhda Durova, the partisan Vasilisa Kozhana, during the civil war there were women in the ranks of the Red Army, but mostly sisters of mercy and doctors. The Great Patriotic War gave the world an example of the mass participation of Soviet women in the defense of their Fatherland.

Collective farm girls of the village of N., who joined the partisan detachment. Photo by D. Chernov, 1941

Very briefly

Memoirs of women who went through the war: gunners, snipers, sappers, pilots, laundresses, bakers, nurses, partisans.

The main narrative is on behalf of Svetlana Aleksievich, the stories of the heroines - on their behalf.

Women have participated in wars since the 4th century BC. During the First World War, hundreds of thousands of women already served in the armies of Europe. But during the Second World War there was a "female phenomenon" - millions of women left to fight. They served in all, even the most "male" branches of the military.

How was the book intended?

The original title of the chapter is "A man greater than war (from the book's diary)"

Svetlana Aleksievich grew up on stories and memories of the war. All the books she read "were written by men about men," so she decided to collect military memoirs of women, without heroes and exploits, about people "who are engaged in inhuman human deeds," about the little things in life.

Memories are not a passionate or dispassionate retelling of a vanished reality, but a rebirth of the past when time turns back.

Aleksievich collected the material for seven years. Many did not want to remember, they were afraid to tell too much, but the author became more and more convinced - "after all, he was a Soviet man." Yes, “they had Stalin and the Gulag, but they also had the Victory,” which they won and deserved.

After the release of the first version of the book, already during Perestroika, people finally started talking. Aleksievich began to receive thousands of letters, and the book had to be completed. The corrected version included much of what Soviet censorship crossed out.

Start

The original title of the chapter is "I don't want to remember...".

The search for Aleksievich began with a three-story house on the outskirts of Minsk, where the recently retired accountant Maria Morozova lived. This little woman with a peaceful profession was a sniper, has eleven awards, and she has 75 dead Germans on her account.

“I don’t want to remember…,” Maria refused, but then she got into conversation and even introduced the author to a front-line girlfriend, sniper Claudia Krokhina.

Why did the girls go to war

The original title of the chapter is "Grow up, girls ... you are still green ...".

Dozens of stories revealed to the author the truth about the war, which “could no longer fit into a short and familiar formula from childhood - we won”, because she collected not stories about exploits and battles, but stories of little people thrown “out of simple life into the epic depths of a huge event ".

The author wanted to understand where these girls in 1941 came from, what made them go to war and kill on an equal basis with men. Sixteen-year-old, eighteen-year-old girls rushed to the front, willingly went to courses for nurses and signalmen. They were told: “Grow up, girls, you are still green,” but they insisted and went to the front as traffic controllers. Many ran away from home without telling their parents. They forgot about love, cut their braids, put on men's clothes, realizing that “the Motherland is everything, the Motherland must be defended”, and if not them, then who ...

The first days of the war, the endless retreat, burning cities ... When they saw the first invaders, a feeling of hatred woke up - “how can they walk on our land!”. And they went to the front or to the partisans without hesitation, with joy.

The old man is afraid of death, but the young man laughs. He is immortal!

They went not for the sake of Stalin, but for the sake of their future children, they did not want to submit to the enemy and live on their knees. We walked light, believing that the war would be over by autumn, and thinking about outfits and perfumes.

In the early days of military life, girls were taught to fight. Discipline, tiredness, early rises and exhausting marches were not given immediately. The load on the female body was very high - the pilots from the height and overloads "pressed their stomach right into the spine", and in the kitchen they had to wash the boilers with ashes and wash the soldiers' underwear - lousy, heavy from blood.

The girls wore cotton trousers, and skirts were given to them only at the end of the war. The nurses pulled the wounded from the battlefield, twice as heavy as themselves. Maria Smirnova pulled 481 wounded out of the fire during the war, "an entire rifle battalion."

Sanitary instructor of the tank brigade

The original title of the chapter is "Alone I returned to my mother ...".

Soon Aleksievich ceases to write down everyone in a row, chooses women of different military professions. Nina Vishnevskaya participated in one of the battles of the Kursk Bulge as a tank brigade medical instructor. A medical orderly girl in tank troops is a rarity, usually men served there.

Each of us sees life through our work, through our place in life or in the event in which we participate.

On the way to Moscow, where Vishnevskaya lived, the author got into a conversation with her neighbors in the compartment. Two of them fought, one - a sapper, the second - a partisan. Both believed that a woman had no place in the war. They could still accept a life-saving nurse, but not a woman with a rifle.

The soldiers saw front-line girls as friends, sisters, but not women. After the war, "they were terribly unprotected." The women who remained in the rear saw them as a spinster who went to the front for suitors, walking girls, most often, were honest, clean. Many of them never married.

Nina Vishnevskaya told how they did not want to take her, small and fragile, into the tank troops, where they needed large and strong girls who could pull a man out of a burning tank. Nina made her way to the front as a hare, hiding in the back of a truck.

There was no place for medical instructors in the tank, the girls clung to the armor, risking falling under the tracks in order to notice the tank on fire in time. Of all her girlfriends, Nina "one returned to her mother."

Having rewritten the story from the tape, Aleksievich sent it to Vishnevskaya, but she crossed out all the funny stories, touching little things. She did not want her son to find out about this side of the war, she wanted to remain a heroine for him.

Spouses-front-line soldiers

The original title of the chapter is "Two wars live in our house ...".

Olga Podvyshenskaya and her husband Saul like to repeat: “There are two wars in our house…”. Olga, foreman of the first category, fought in the naval unit in the Baltic, her husband was an infantry sergeant.

Olga was not taken to the front for a long time - she worked at a rear factory, where people were worth their weight in gold. She received a summons only in June 1942 and ended up in besieged Leningrad, in a smoke masking detachment - the warships, which the Germans regularly fired at, were obscured by smoke. With their rations, the girls fed children dying of hunger.

Olga became the squad leader, spent whole days on a boat where there was no toilet, with a crew of only guys. It was very difficult for a woman. She still cannot forget how, after a big battle, the peakless caps of the dead sailors floated along the Sea Canal.

Olga did not wear medals, she was afraid of ridicule. Many front-line soldiers hid their participation in battles, injuries, out of fear that they would not be married. Only decades after the war did they pay attention.

Revenge for the dead father

The original title of the chapter is "The handset does not shoot ...".

Front-line soldiers go to contact with Aleksievich in different ways. Some start talking right away, right on the phone, others put it off for a long time. The author had been waiting for a meeting with Valentina Chudaeva for several months.

The war began after Valentine's graduation. The girl became a signalman in the anti-aircraft unit. Having learned about the death of her father, Valentina wanted to take revenge, but “the handset does not shoot,” and the girl broke through to the front line, completed a three-month course, and became a gun commander.

Then Valentina was wounded by a shrapnel in the back and thrown into a snowdrift, where she lay for several hours and froze her legs. In the hospital, they wanted to amputate the legs, but the young doctor tried a new method of treatment - he injected oxygen under the frostbitten skin - and the legs were saved.

Valentina refused the vacation after the hospital, returned to her unit and met Victory Day in East Prussia. She returned home to her stepmother, who was waiting for her, although she thought that her stepdaughter would return a cripple.

A house is something that is larger than the people who live in it and larger than the house itself.

Valentina hid that she fought and was shell-shocked, she married her own, a front-line soldier, moved to Minsk, gave birth to a daughter. “There was nothing in the house except love,” even furniture was picked up from landfills, but Valentina was happy.

Now, forty years after the war, women front-line soldiers began to be honored. Valentina is invited to meetings with foreigners... And all she has left is Victory.

Days of a military hospital

The original title of the chapter is "We were awarded with small medals ...".

Aleksievich's mailbox is full of letters. Everyone wants to tell because they have been silent for too long. Many people write about the post-war repressions, when war heroes ended up in Stalin's camps straight from the front.

It is impossible to cover everything, and suddenly unexpected help is an invitation from veterans of the 65th Army, General Batov, who gather once a year at the Moscow Hotel. Aleksievich writes down the memoirs of the military hospital staff.

"Green" girls who graduated from the three years of medical school, saved people. Many of them were "mother's daughters" and left home for the first time. They were so tired that they fell asleep on the go. Doctors operated for days, fell asleep at the operating table. The girls did not understand the awards, they said: "We were awarded small medals ...".

In the first months of the war, there were not enough weapons, people died without having time to shoot at the enemy. The wounded were crying not from pain, but from powerlessness. The front-line soldiers were led by the Germans in front of the formation of soldiers, “they showed: here, they say, not women, but freaks,” then they shot them. Nurses always kept two cartridges for themselves - the second in case of a misfire.

Sometimes the hospital was urgently evacuated, and the wounded had to be left behind. They asked not to give them alive into the hands of the Nazis, who mocked the wounded Russians. And during the offensive, wounded Germans got into the hospital, and they had to be treated, bandaged ...

Revenge for the "blood brother"

The original title of the chapter is "It Wasn't Me...".

People remember the war years with surprise - the past flashed by, and the person remained in ordinary life, as if divided in two: "It was not me ...". As they talk, they encounter themselves again, and Aleksievich thinks she hears two voices at the same time.

Olga Omelchenko, a medical officer in a rifle company, became a blood donor at the age of sixteen. On one of the bottles with her blood, the doctor glued a piece of paper with an address, and soon the blood "brother" came to the girl.

A month later, Olga received a funeral for him, wanted to take revenge and insisted on being sent to the front. The girl survived the Kursk salient. In one of the battles, two soldiers got scared, ran, and the whole chain followed them. The cowards were shot in front of the formation. Olga was one of those who carried out the sentence.

After the war, she became seriously ill. The old professor explained the illness as a mental trauma received in the war at a too young age, advised her to get married and have children, but Olga felt old.

A man's soul grows old in war.

She still got married. She gave birth to five boys, turned out to be a good mother and grandmother.

Hero's Daughters

The original title of the chapter is "I still remember these eyes ...".

The search brought Aleksievich with two daughters of the Hero of the Soviet Union Vasily Korzh, who became a Belarusian legend. Olga and Zinaida Korzh were medical instructors in a cavalry squadron.

Zina lagged behind her family during the evacuation, clung to a female doctor and remained in her medical unit. After a four-month nursing course, Zina returned to the medical unit. Near Rostov, during the bombing, she was wounded, ended up in the hospital. At the end of 1941, she received leave and found her mother, sister and younger brother on a collective farm near Stalingrad.

The sisters decided to join some military unit, but in Stalingrad no one wanted to listen to them. They went to the Kuban to the acquaintances of their father and ended up in the Cossack cavalry corps.

Zinaida recalls her first battle, when the corps was attacking German tanks. The Nazis could not stand the sight of this avalanche, threw down their weapons and fled. After this battle, the sisters realized that they could not fight together - "the heart will not stand if one dies in front of the other."

At the age of eighteen, Zina was discharged for health reasons - "three wounds, severe shell shock." After the war, the father helped his daughters get used to peaceful life. The sisters did not become doctors - there was too much blood in their lives.

Peaceful military professions

The original title of the chapter is "We did not shoot ...".

In the war, they not only shot, but also cooked, washed clothes, sewed shoes, repaired cars, looked after horses. Half of the war consisted of ordinary life driven by ordinary people. “We didn’t shoot…”, they recall.

Cooks spent whole days turning heavy boilers. The laundresses washed their hands in blood, washing clothes that were hardened with blood. Nurses looked after the seriously wounded - they washed, fed, brought the ship.

The girls were suppliers and postmen, builders and correspondents. Many have reached Berlin. Rewarding workers of the "second front" began only at the end of the war.

Valentina Bratchikova-Borshchevskaya, political officer of the laundry detachment, at the end of the war knocked out awards for many girls. In one German village, they stumbled upon a sewing workshop, and Valentina presented each washerwoman leaving home with a sewing machine.

Antonina Lenkova, fleeing from the Germans, settled on a collective farm near Stalingrad, where she learned to drive a tractor. She went to the front in November 1942, when she was eighteen, she began to assemble motors in an armored field workshop - a “factory on wheels”, where they worked for twelve hours, under bombardment.

Beautiful girls were pitied in the war, more pitied. ‹…› It was a pity to bury them... It was a pity to write out a funeral for my mother...

After the war, it turned out that the girl's entire autonomic nervous system was destroyed, but Antonina still graduated from the university, which became her second Stalingrad.

War and women's needs

The original title of the chapter is "A soldier was needed ... but I wanted to be even more beautiful ...".

Even in the war, women tried to decorate themselves, although it was forbidden - “a soldier was required ... but I wanted to be even more beautiful ...”. It was not easy to make warriors out of girls - they were more difficult than men to get used to discipline. Commanders did not always understand women's needs.

Navigator Alexandra Popova, who flew Po-2 planes made of wood and fabric, found out only after the war that her heart was full of scars - terrible night flights had an effect. And the girls-gunsmiths, who lifted heavy shells, stopped menstruating, after the war, many of them could not give birth.

During menstruation, the girls wiped their feet with grass and left a trail of blood behind them, and trousers with dried blood rubbed the skin. They stole excess linen from the soldiers.

Taisiya Rudenko from childhood dreamed of serving in the Navy, but she was accepted into the Leningrad Artillery School only by order of Voroshilov himself. In order not to stay on the shore after school, Taisiya pretended to be a guy, because a woman on a ship is a bad omen. She became the first female Navy officer.

They tried to protect women in the war. To get on a combat mission, you had to stand out, prove that you could handle it. But the women did it anyway.

Minesweeper is wrong once

The original title of the chapter is “Ladies! And you know: the commander of a sapper platoon lives only two months ... ".

Aleksievich tries to understand "how one can survive in the midst of this endless experience of dying." The commander of the sapper platoon, Stanislav Volkova, told how they didn’t want to let the girls who graduated from the sapper school go to the front line, they scared them: “Young ladies! And you know: the commander of a sapper platoon lives only two months ... ".

Appolina Litskevich, a miner officer, was not mistaken for a commander by experienced reconnaissance sappers for a long time. Apollina went through all of Europe, and two more years after the war she cleared cities, villages, fields.

Death after the Victory is the most terrible death. Twice death.

Love, military marriages and what is not told

The original title of the chapter is "Just look once ...".

Women are reluctant to talk about love in the war, as if defending themselves "from post-war insults and slander." Those who decide to tell everything are asked to change their surname.

Some women went to the front after their beloved husband, found him on the front line to "just look once ...", and, if they were lucky, they returned home together. But more often they had to see the death of a loved one.

Most of the front-line soldiers claim that the men treated them like sisters, took care of them. The sanitary instructor Sofya K-vich was not afraid to admit that she was a "field wife". She did not know a careful attitude and does not believe the stories of other front-line soldiers. She loved her last "military husband", but his wife and children were waiting for him. At the end of the war, Sophia gave birth to a daughter from him, and he returned to his wife and forgot, as if nothing had happened. But Sophia does not regret - she was happy ...

Many nurses fell in love with the wounded, married them.

Our love was not divided into today and tomorrow, but was only - today.

Post-war marriages often broke up, because others were biased towards front-line soldiers. Sniper Claudia S-va, who married after the war, was abandoned by her husband because their daughter was born mentally retarded - she was in the war, she killed, and therefore "is not capable of giving birth to a normal child." Now her daughter lives in a lunatic asylum, Claudia visits her every day...

forest war

The original title of the chapter is "About the fractional bulb ...".

In addition to the “official” war, there was another war that was not marked on the map. There was no neutral zone, "no one could count all the soldiers there," they shot there from hunting rifles and Berdanok. “It was not the army that fought, but the people” - partisans and underground fighters.

The worst thing in this war was not to die, but to be ready to sacrifice your loved ones. Relatives of the partisans were calculated, taken to the Gestapo, tortured, used as a human barrier during raids, but hatred was stronger than fear for loved ones.

The enemy came with evil to our land... With fire and sword...

Scout guerrillas went on missions with their young children, carrying bombs in children's things. Hatred of the enemy overpowered even maternal love ...

The Germans dealt cruelly with the partisans, "they burned the village for one killed German soldier." People helped the partisans as best they could, gave away clothes, "the last tiny bulb."

Belarusian villages were especially hard hit. In one of them, Aleksievich writes down the stories of women about the war and the post-war famine, when there was only one potato on the table, in Belarusian - “bulba”.

Once the Germans drove prisoners to the village - "whoever recognizes his own there can take it away." The women came running, dismantled them into huts - some of their own, some of strangers. A month later, a bastard was found - he reported to the commandant's office that they had taken strangers. The prisoners were taken and shot. They were buried by the whole village and mourned for a year ...

Post-war children aged 13-14 had to take on adult work - to cultivate the land, harvest, cut down forests. And the wives did not believe the funeral, they waited, and their husbands dreamed of them every night.

From fascist camps to Stalin's

The original title of the chapter is "Mom, what is dad."

Aleksievich can no longer treat the war as history. She hears the stories of female soldiers, many of whom were mothers. They went to war, leaving small children at home, went to the partisans, taking them with them. The children did not recognize their mothers who returned from the front, and this was the most painful for the front-line soldiers, because often only the memories of the children helped them survive. So few men returned that the children asked: “Mom, what is dad”

Most of those who fought against the fascists in the rear did not expect honor and glory, but Stalin's camps and the stigma of "enemy of the people." Survivors are still afraid to speak.

Underground worker Lyudmila Kashechkina visited the Gestapo, suffered terrible torture, and was sentenced to hang. From the death row, she was transferred to the French concentration camp Croaset, from where she escaped and went to the "poppies" - the French partisans.

Returning to Minsk, Lyudmila found out that her husband was an “enemy of the people”, and she herself was a “French prostitute”. Under suspicion were all those who had been in captivity and occupation.

A Soviet officer does not surrender, we have no prisoners, we have traitors.

Lyudmila wrote to all authorities. Six months later, the husband was released, gray-haired, with a broken rib and broken kidney. But he considered all this a mistake: "the main thing ... we won."

Victory and memories of well-fed Germany

The original title of the chapter is "And she puts her hand where the heart is...".

For those who lived to see the Victory, life was divided into two parts. People had to learn to love again, to become "a man of no war." Those who reached Germany were ready to hate and take revenge in advance, but when they saw German children and women dying of hunger, they fed them soup and porridge from soldiers' kitchens.

Along the German roads there were self-made posters with the inscription “Here it is - damned Germany!”, And people released from concentration camps, prisoners of war, those who were sent here to work were walking along the roads. The Soviet army passed through the deserted villages - the Germans were convinced that the Russians would not spare anyone, and they themselves killed themselves, their children.

Telephone operator A. Ratkina recalls the story of a Soviet officer who fell in love with a German woman. There was an unspoken rule in the army: after the capture of a German settlement, it was allowed to rob and rape for three days, then a tribunal. And that officer did not rape, but fell in love, which he honestly admitted in a special department. He was demoted, sent to the rear.

The signalman Aglaya Nesteruk was shocked to see good roads, rich peasant houses. Russians huddled in dugouts, but here - white tablecloths and coffee in small cups. Aglaya did not understand "why they had to fight if they lived so well." And Russian soldiers broke into houses and shot this beautiful life.

But still we were not able to do to them what they did to us. Make them suffer the way we suffered.

Nurses and doctors did not want to bandage and treat the German wounded. They had to learn to treat them like ordinary patients. Many health workers could not see the red color so reminiscent of blood for the rest of their lives.

The story of an ordinary medical officer

The original title of the chapter is "Suddenly I wanted to live terribly ...".

Aleksievich, receives more and more new letters, finds addresses and cannot stop, "because every time the truth is unbearable." The last memory story belongs to the medical instructor Tamara Umnyagina. She recalls the retreat of her rifle division from Minsk, when Tamara almost got surrounded with the wounded, at the last moment she managed to take them out on a ride.

Then there was Stalingrad, the battlefield - the blood-soaked city "streets, houses, basements", and there was nowhere to retreat. Replenishment - young guys - Natalya tried not to remember, they died so quickly.

Natalya recalls how they celebrated the Victory, this word was heard from everywhere, "and suddenly I wanted to live terribly." In June 1945, Natalya married a company commander and went to his parents. She rode a heroine, but for the new relatives she turned out to be a front-line whore.

Returning to the unit, Natalya found out that they were being sent to clear the fields. Every day someone died. Natalya can't remember, she spends Victory Day doing laundry to distract herself, and she doesn't like military toys...

Human life is such a gift… A great gift! Man himself is not the master of this gift.

A person has one heart, for both love and hate. Even near Stalingrad, Natalya thought about how to save her heart, she believed that after the war, a happy life would begin for everyone. And then for a long time she was afraid of the sky and plowed land. Only the birds quickly forgot the war...

War has no woman's face

One of the world's most famous books about the war, which marked the beginning of the famous documentary series "Voices of Utopia". "For polyphonic creativity - a monument to suffering and courage in our time" Svetlana Aleksievich received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015. Before you is the latest author's edition: the writer, in accordance with her creative method, finalized the book, removing censorship, inserting new episodes, supplementing the recorded women's confessions with pages of her own diary, which she kept during the seven years of working on the book. “War does not have a woman's face” is the experience of a unique penetration into the spiritual world of a woman who survives in the inhuman conditions of war. The book has been translated into more than twenty languages, included in school and university programs in many countries, and received several prestigious awards: the Ryszard Kapuszczynski Prize (2011) for the best work in the reporting genre, the Angelus Prize (2010) and others.

Svetlana Aleksievich

War has no woman's face

When was the first time in history that women appeared in the army?

- Already in the IV century BC, women fought in the Greek troops in Athens and Sparta. Later they participated in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

- And in the new time?

- For the first time - in England in 1560-1650 they began to form hospitals in which female soldiers served.

What happened in the 20th century?

In Russia, Germany, France, many women also began to serve in military hospitals and hospital trains.

From a conversation with a historian

A man greater than war (from the book's diary)

Millions killed cheaply

Trampled a path in the dark...

Osip Mandelstam

1978–1985

I'm writing a book about the war...

Then I thought about death ... And I never stopped thinking about it, for me it became the main secret of life.

The village boys played "Germans" and "Russians" for a long time. German words were shouting: “Hyundai hoch!”, “Tsuryuk”, “Hitler kaput!”.

The village of my childhood after the war was female. Babia. I don't remember male voices. This is how it remained with me: women talk about the war. They cry. They sing like they cry.

In school we were taught to love death. We wrote essays about how we would like to die in the name of ... We dreamed ...

I have been looking for a long time ... What words can convey what I hear? I was looking for a genre that would correspond to the way I see the world, how my eye, my ear works.

Ales Adamovich became my teacher...

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equipment and what generals. Women's stories are different and about something else. The "women's" war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting and its own space of feelings. Your words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are just people who are engaged in inhuman human deeds. And not only they (people!) suffer there, but also the earth, and birds, and trees. All who live with us on earth. They suffer without words, which is even worse.

I want to write the history of this war. Women's history.

After the first meeting...

I sit for a long time in an unfamiliar house or apartment, sometimes all day long. We drink tea, try on recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and culinary recipes. We look at photos of grandchildren together. And then... After some time, you will never know when and why, suddenly that long-awaited moment comes when a person departs from the canon - plaster and reinforced concrete, like our monuments - and goes to himself. Into yourself. He begins to remember not the war, but his youth. A piece of my life ... We must catch this moment. Don't miss! But often after a long day filled with words, facts, tears, only one phrase remains in memory (but what a phrase!): “I went to the front so little that I even grew up during the war.” I leave it in my notebook, although dozens of meters are wound on the tape recorder. Four or five cassettes...

What helps me? It helps that we are used to living together. Together. Cathedral people. Everything in our world is both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and talk about suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and awkward life. For us, pain is art. I must admit, women boldly embark on this journey ...

How do they greet me?

My name is: “girl”, “daughter”, “baby”, probably, if I were from their generation, they would behave differently with me. Calm and equal. Without the joy and amazement that the meeting of youth and old age gives. This is a very important point, that then they were young, and now they remember the old ones. Through life they remember - through forty years. They carefully open their world to me, they spare me: “I got married right after the war. She hid behind her husband. For life, for baby diapers. She willingly hid. And my mother asked: “Shut up! Be quiet! Don't confess." I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but I am sad that I was there. What do I know... And you are just a girl. I feel sorry for you…” I often see them sitting and listening to themselves. To the sound of your soul. Compare it with words. With long years, a person understands that there was a life, and now we must come to terms and prepare for departure. I don’t want to and it’s a shame to disappear just like that. Carelessly. On the run. And when he looks back, there is a desire in him not only to tell about his own, but also to reach the secret of life. Answer the question for yourself: why did this happen to him? He looks at everything with a slightly parting and sad look... Almost from there... There is no need to deceive and be deceived. It is already clear to him that without the thought of death, nothing can be seen in a person. Its secret exists above everything.

War is too intimate an experience. And as infinite as human life...

Once a woman (pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone: “I can’t ... I don’t want to remember. I was in the war for three years ... And for three years I did not feel like a woman. My body is dead. There was no menstruation, almost no female desires. And I was beautiful ... When my future husband proposed to me ... It was already in Berlin, at the Reichstag ... He said: “The war is over. We stayed alive. We were lucky. Marry me". I wanted to cry. scream. Hit him! How is it married? Now? In the midst of all this, getting married? Among black soot and black bricks... Look at me... Look at me! You first make a woman out of me: give flowers, take care, say beautiful words. I want it so much! So I'm waiting! I almost hit him... I wanted to hit him... And he had a burned, crimson one cheek, and I see: he understood everything, he had tears flowing down that cheek. For still fresh scars ... And I myself do not believe what I say: “Yes, I will marry you.”

Forgive me… I can’t…”

I understood her. But this is also a page or half a page of a future book.

Texts, texts. Texts are everywhere. In city apartments and village huts, on the street and on the train... I listen... More and more I turn into one big ear, all the time turned to another person. I read the voice.

Man is more than war...

It is remembered exactly where it is more. They are led there by something that is stronger than history. I need to take a wider view - to write the truth about life and death in general, and not just the truth about the war. Ask Dostoevsky's question: how many people are there in a person, and how can you protect this person in yourself? Undoubtedly, evil is seductive. It is more skillful than good. More attractive. Deeper and deeper I plunge into the endless world of war, everything else has slightly faded, it has become more ordinary than usual. A grandiose and predatory world. Now I understand the loneliness of a person who has returned from there. Like from another planet or from the other world. He has knowledge that others do not have, and it can only be obtained there, near death. When he tries to put something into words, he has a sense of disaster. The person is dumb. He wants to tell

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the rest would like to understand, but all are powerless.

They are always in a different space than the listener. They are surrounded by an invisible world. At least three people are involved in the conversation: the one who is telling now, the same person as he was then, at the time of the event, and me. My goal is first of all to get the truth of those years. Those days. Without forgery of feelings. Immediately after the war, a person would tell one war, after decades, of course, something changes with him, because he puts his entire life into memories. All of myself. The way he lived these years, what he read, saw, whom he met. Finally, is he happy or unhappy. We talk with him alone, or there is someone else nearby. Family? Friends - what are they? Front-line friends are one thing, everyone else is another. Documents are living beings, they change and fluctuate with us, you can get something from them endlessly. Something new and necessary for us right now. At this moment. What are we looking for? Most often, not feats and heroism, but small and human, the most interesting and close to us. Well, what would I like to know most of all, for example, from the life of Ancient Greece… The history of Sparta… I would like to read how and what people were talking about at home then. How did they go to war? What words were said on the last day and on the last night before parting with your loved ones. How the soldiers were seen off. How they were expected from the war ... Not heroes and commanders, but ordinary young men ...

History - through the story of its unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, I am interested in this, I would like to make it literature. But the narrators are not only witnesses, least of all witnesses, but actors and creators. It is impossible to approach reality closely, head-on. Between reality and us are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, everyone has their own version, and from them, from their number and intersections, an image of time and people living in it is born. But I would not want to be told about my book: its characters are real, and nothing more. This, they say, is history. Just a story.

I am not writing about the war, but about the man in the war. I am not writing a history of war, but a history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand, I study a specific person living at a specific time and participating in specific events, and on the other hand, I need to discern an eternal person in him. Tremor of eternity. What is always in a person.

They tell me: well, memories are neither history nor literature. It's just life, littered and not cleaned by the artist's hand. The raw material of speaking, every day is full of it. These bricks are all over the place. But bricks are not yet a temple! But everything is different for me... It is there, in a warm human voice, in a living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is hidden and the ineradicable tragedy of life is exposed. Her chaos and passion. Uniqueness and incomprehensibility. There they have not yet been subjected to any processing. Originals.

I build temples from our feelings... From our desires, disappointments. Dreams. Of what was, but can slip away.

Once again about the same thing... I am interested not only in the reality that surrounds us, but also in the one that is inside us. I am interested not in the event itself, but in the event of feelings. Let's just say - the soul of the event. For me, feelings are reality.

What about history? She is on the street. In crowd. I believe that each of us has a piece of history. One has half a page, the other has two or three. We are writing the book of time together. Everyone screams their own truth. Color nightmare. And you need to hear all this, and dissolve in all this, and become all this. And at the same time, don't lose yourself. Connect the speech of the street and literature. The difficulty lies in the fact that we speak about the past in today's language. How to convey to them the feelings of those days?

In the morning, a phone call: “We don’t know each other ... But I came from the Crimea, I’m calling from the railway station. Is it far from you? I want to tell you my war ... ".

And we gathered with my girl to go to the park. Ride the carousel. How to explain to a six-year-old man what I do. She recently asked me: “What is war?” How to answer ... I want to let her go into this world with a tender heart and teach that you can’t pick a flower just like that. It's a pity to crush a ladybug, tear off a dragonfly's wing. How do you explain war to a child? Explain death? Answer the question: why are they killed there? Even little ones like her are being killed. We adults are in cahoots. We understand what is at stake. What about children? After the war, my parents somehow explained this to me, but I can no longer explain it to my child. Find words. We like war less and less, we find it increasingly difficult to justify it. For us, it's just murder. In any case, for me it is.

To write such a book about the war that the war would make you sick, and the very thought of it would be disgusting. Mad. The generals themselves would be sick ...

My male friends (unlike girlfriends) are dumbfounded by such "feminine" logic. And again I hear the "male" argument: "You were not in the war." Or maybe this is good: I do not know the passion of hatred, I have normal vision. Non-military, non-male.

In optics, there is the concept of "aperture" - the ability of the lens to fix the captured image worse or better. So, the female memory of the war is the most “aperture-fast” in terms of tension of feelings, in terms of pain. I would even say that the "female" war is worse than the "male" one. Men hide behind history, behind facts, war captivates them as action and confrontation of ideas, different interests, and women are captured by feelings. And one more thing - men are trained from childhood that they may have to shoot. Women are not taught this ... they were not going to do this work ... And they remember something else, and they remember differently. Able to see what is closed to men. I repeat once again: their war is with smell, with color, with a detailed world of existence: “they gave us knapsacks, we sewed skirts out of them”; “In the military registration and enlistment office, she entered one door in a dress, and went out the other in trousers and a tunic, the braid was cut off, one forelock was left on her head ...”; "The Germans shot the village and left ... We came to that place: trampled yellow sand, and on top - one children's shoe ...". More than once I have been warned (especially by male writers): “Women are inventing you. They compose." But I was convinced that this could not be invented. Write off someone? If this can be written off, then only life, she alone has such a fantasy.

Whatever women talk about, they always have the thought: war is first of all murder, and then hard work. And then - and just an ordinary life: they sang, fell in love, twisted curlers ...

In the center there is always something unbearable and one does not want to die. And even more unbearable and more reluctant to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives. For a long time she carries it in herself, nurses her. I realized that it's harder for women to kill.

Men ... They are reluctant to let women into their world, into their territory.

She was looking for a woman at the Minsk Tractor Plant, she served as a sniper. She was a famous sniper. She was written about more than once in front-line newspapers. My home phone number was given to me in Moscow by her friends, but it's an old one. My last name was also my maiden name. I went to the factory where, as I knew, she works, in the personnel department, and heard from the men (the director of the plant and the head of the personnel department):

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“Are there not enough men? Why do you need these women's stories. Women's fantasies ... ". Men were afraid that women would tell some wrong war.

I was in the same family ... Husband and wife fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in a trench. Before the fight. And I made myself a white dress from a German parachute. He is a machine gunner, she is a messenger. The man immediately sent the woman to the kitchen: "You cook something for us." Already the kettle was boiling, and the sandwiches were cut, she sat down next to us, her husband immediately picked her up: “Where are the strawberries? Where is our country hotel? After my insistent request, he reluctantly gave up his place with the words: “Tell me how I taught you. Without tears and feminine trifles: I wanted to be beautiful, I cried when the braid was cut off. Later, she confessed to me in a whisper: “All night long I studied the volume of the History of the Great Patriotic War. Was afraid for me. And now I'm worried that I won't remember. Not the right way."

It happened more than once, not in one house.

Yes, they cry a lot. They scream. After I leave, they swallow heart pills. They call an ambulance. But they still ask: “You come. Be sure to come. We've been silent for so long. For forty years they were silent ... "

I understand that crying and screaming cannot be processed, otherwise the main thing will not be crying or screaming, but processing. Instead of life, there will be literature. This is the material, the temperature of this material. Constantly overshoots. A person is most visible and reveals himself in war and, perhaps, in love. To the very depths, to the subcutaneous layers. In the face of death, all ideas pale, and an incomprehensible eternity opens up, for which no one is ready. We are still living in history, not in space.

Several times I received a text sent for reading with a note: “No need for trifles ... Write about our great Victory ...”. And the “little things” are what is most important for me - the warmth and clarity of life: the left forelock instead of braids, hot pots of porridge and soup that no one has to eat - out of a hundred people returned after the battle, seven; or how they couldn’t go to the bazaar after the war and look at the red meat rows ... Even at the red chintz ... “Oh, you are good, forty years have passed, and in my house you will not find anything red. I hate red after the war!”

I listen to the pain... Pain as proof of a past life. There is no other evidence, I do not trust other evidence. Words have led us astray more than once.

I think of suffering as the highest form of information that has a direct connection with the mystery. With the mystery of life. All Russian literature is about this. She wrote more about suffering than about love.

And they tell me more...

Who are they - Russian or Soviet? No, they were Soviet - both Russians, and Belarusians, and Ukrainians, and Tajiks ...

Still, he was a Soviet man. I think there will never be such people again, they themselves already understand this. Even we, their children, are different. We would like to be like everyone else. Similar not to their parents, but to the world. What about grandchildren...

But I love them. I admire them. They had Stalin and the Gulag, but they also had Victory. And they know it.

Received a letter recently:

“My daughter loves me very much, I am a heroine for her, if she reads your book, she will be very disappointed. Dirt, lice, endless blood - it's all true. I do not deny. But are memories of this capable of giving birth to noble feelings? Prepare for the feat ... "

I've convinced myself over and over again:

…our memory is far from being a perfect tool. She is not only arbitrary and capricious, she is also on the chain of time, like a dog.

… we look at the past from today, we cannot look from nowhere.

... and they are also in love with what happened to them, because this is not only a war, but also their youth. The first love.

I listen when they speak... I listen when they are silent... Both words and silence are text for me.

- This is not for printing, for you ... Those who were older ... They were sitting on the train thoughtful ... Sad. I remember how one major spoke to me at night, when everyone was asleep, about Stalin. He drank hard and became bolder, he admitted that his father had been in the camp for ten years, without the right to correspond. Whether he is alive or not is unknown. This major uttered terrible words: "I want to defend the Motherland, but I do not want to defend this traitor to the revolution - Stalin." I have never heard such words… I was frightened. Luckily, he disappeared in the morning. Probably out...

- I'll tell you a secret ... I was friends with Oksana, she was from Ukraine. For the first time I heard from her about the terrible famine in Ukraine. Holodomor. Already there was no frog or mouse to be found - they ate everything. Half of the people in their village died. All her younger brothers and dad and mom died, and she saved herself by stealing horse manure from the collective farm stable at night and eating. No one could eat it, but she ate: “Warm does not go into your mouth, but you can cold. Better frozen, it smells like hay. I said: “Oksana, Comrade Stalin is fighting. It destroys pests, but there are many of them. “No,” she answered, “you are stupid. My dad was a history teacher, he told me: “Someday Comrade Stalin will answer for his crimes…”

At night I lay and thought: what if Oksana is an enemy? Spy? What to do? She died in battle two days later. She did not have any of her relatives left, there was no one to send a funeral ...

This topic is touched upon with caution and infrequently. They are still paralyzed not only by Stalin's hypnosis and fear, but also by their former faith. They can't stop loving what they loved. Courage in war and courage in thought are two different kinds of courage. And I thought it was the same.

The manuscript has been lying on the table for a long time...

I've been getting rejections from publishers for two years now. The magazines are silent. The verdict is always the same: too terrible a war. Lots of horror. naturalism. There is no leading and guiding role of the Communist Party. In a word, not that war ... What is it - that one? With generals and a wise generalissimo? Without blood and lice? With heroes and deeds. And I remember from childhood: we are walking with my grandmother along a large field, she says: “After the war, nothing was born in this field for a long time. The Germans were retreating... And there was a battle, they fought for two days... The dead lay one next to one, like sheaves. Like sleepers at a railway station. Germans and ours. After the rain, they all had tear-stained faces. We buried them for a month with the whole village ... ".

How can I forget about this field?

I don't just write. I collect, track down the human spirit where suffering creates a big person from a small person. Where a person grows up. And then for me he is no longer a dumb and traceless proletariat of history. His soul is torn off. So what is my conflict with the authorities? I realized that a big idea needs a small person, it does not need a big one. For her, he is superfluous and uncomfortable. Laborious to process. And I'm looking for him. I'm looking for a little big man. Humiliated, trampled, insulted - having gone through the Stalinist camps and betrayals, he still won. Performed a miracle.

But the history of the war was replaced by the history of victory.

He will talk about it...

Seventeen years later

2002–2004

Reading my old diary...

Trying to remember the person I was when I wrote the book. That person no longer exists, and even the country in which we lived then does not exist. And it was she who was defended and in her name they died in the forty-first - forty

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fifth. Outside the window, everything is different: the new millennium, new wars, new ideas, new weapons, and the completely unexpectedly changed Russian (more precisely, Russian-Soviet) people.

Gorbachev's perestroika began... My book was immediately printed, it had an amazing circulation - two million copies. It was a time when a lot of amazing things happened, we again rushed somewhere furiously. Again, to the future. We did not yet know (or have forgotten) that revolution is always an illusion, especially in our history. But it will be later, and then everyone was intoxicated with the air of freedom. I began to receive dozens of letters daily, my folders swelled. People wanted to speak... to finish... They became both freer and more frank. I had no doubt that I was doomed to endlessly add to my books. Do not rewrite, but add. You put a dot, and it immediately turns into an ellipsis ...

I think that I would probably ask different questions today and hear different answers. And I would have written a different book, not quite different, but still different. Documents (with which I deal) are living evidence; they do not harden like cooled clay. They don't go numb. They move with us. What would I ask more about now? What would you like to add? I would be very interested in ... looking for a word ... biological man, and not just a man of time and ideas. I would try to look deeper into human nature, into the darkness, into the subconscious. Into the secret of war.

I would write about how I came to the former partisan ... A heavy, but still beautiful woman - and she told me how their group (she is the eldest and two teenagers) went on reconnaissance and accidentally captured four Germans. They circled the forest for a long time. We ran into an ambush. It is clear that they will not break through with the prisoners, they will not leave, and she made a decision - to put them into consumption. Teenagers will not be able to kill: for several days they have been walking through the forest together, and if you are with a person for so long, even a stranger, you still get used to him, he approaches - you already know how he eats, how he sleeps, what kind of eyes he has, arms. No, teenagers can't. This was immediately clear to her. So she must kill. And then she remembered how she killed them. I had to deceive both of them. With one German, she allegedly went for water and fired from behind. In the back of the head. She took another for brushwood ... I was shocked at how calmly she talked about it.

Those who were at war remember that a civilian turns into a military man in three days. Why is only three days enough? Or is that also a myth? More likely. The person there is much more unfamiliar and incomprehensible.

In all the letters I read: “I didn’t tell you everything then, because it was a different time. We are accustomed to keeping silent about many things…”, “I didn’t entrust everything to you. Until recently, it was impossible to talk about it. Or ashamed”, “I know the verdict of the doctors: I have a terrible diagnosis… I want to tell the whole truth…”.

And recently such a letter came: “It is difficult for us, old people, to live ... But it is not because of small and humiliating pensions that we suffer. What hurts the most is that we are driven out of a big past into an unbearably small present. No one is calling us to perform at schools, museums, we are no longer needed. In the newspapers, if you read, the fascists are getting nobler, and the red soldiers are getting more and more terrible.

Time is also a homeland ... But I still love them. I don't like their time, but I love them.

Anything can become literature...

What interested me most in my archives was a notebook where I wrote down those episodes that were crossed out by censorship. And also my conversations with the censor. There I found pages that I threw away myself. My self-censorship, my own prohibition. And my explanation is why I threw it away. Much of this and that has already been restored in the book, but I want to give these few pages separately - this is already a document. My way.

From what censorship threw away

“I’ll wake up at night now ... As if someone, well ... is crying nearby ... I’m at war ...

We are retreating ... Beyond Smolensk, a woman brings me her dress, I have time to change clothes. I'm walking alone... among the men. That I was in trousers, and that I go in a summer dress. All of a sudden, these things started happening to me… Women’s… Before, they started, probably, from unrest. From feelings, from resentment. Where are you going to find it? Ashamed! How ashamed I was! They slept on stumps under bushes, in ditches, in the forest. There were so many of us that there was not enough space for everyone in the forest. We walked bewildered, deceived, no longer trusting anyone ... Where is our aviation, where are our tanks? What flies, crawls, thunders - everything is German.

This is how I got captured. On the last day before the captivity, both legs were also broken ... She lay and urinated under herself ... I don’t know with what forces she crawled away into the forest at night. Randomly picked up by partisans ....

I feel sorry for those who will read this book, and who will not read it ... "

“I had night duty… I went into the ward for the seriously wounded. The captain is lying... The doctors warned me before duty that he would die at night. It won’t last until the morning ... I ask him: “Well, how? How can I help you?". I will never forget ... He suddenly smiled, such a bright smile on his exhausted face: "Unbutton your robe ... Show me your chest ... I haven't seen my wife for a long time ... ". I was confused, I had not even been kissed yet. I answered him something. She ran away and came back an hour later.

He lay dead. And that smile on his face...

“Near Kerch… At night we were under fire on a barge. The bow caught fire ... The fire climbed the deck. Ammunition exploded... Powerful explosion! An explosion of such force that the barge tilted to its right side and began to sink. And the shore is not far away, we understand that the shore is somewhere nearby, and the soldiers rushed into the water. Machine guns rumbled from the shore. Shouts, groans, obscenities… I was a good swimmer, I wanted to save at least one. At least one wounded person... This is water, not earth - a wounded person will die immediately. It will go to the bottom ... I hear - someone next to it will either emerge up, then again go under the water. Above - under the water. I seized the moment, grabbed him… Something cold, slippery… I thought it was a wounded man, and his clothes were torn off by the explosion. Because I myself am naked ... I remained in my underwear ... Darkness. Gouge out the eye. Around: “Eh! Ai-i-i!”. And checkmate ... I somehow got to the shore with him ... A rocket flared up in the sky just at that moment, and I saw that I had pulled a large wounded fish on me. The fish is big, with human growth. Beluga… She is dying… I fell near her and broke such a three-story mat. I cried from resentment ... And from the fact that everyone suffers ... "

“We left the encirclement ... Wherever we rush, the Germans are everywhere. We decide: in the morning we will break through with a fight. We'll die anyway, so it's better to die with dignity. In battle. We had three girls. They came at night to everyone who could ... Not everyone, of course, was capable. Nerves, you know. Such a thing ... Everyone was preparing to die ...

Only a few escaped in the morning… Few… Well, there were seven people, and there were fifty, if not more. The Germans cut down with machine guns... I remember those girls with gratitude. Not a single morning found among the living ... Never met again ... "

From a conversation with a censor

- Who will go to war after such books? You humiliate a woman with primitive naturalism. The female heroine. You debunk. Make her an ordinary woman. female. And they are our saints.

- Our heroism

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- Where do you get these thoughts? Alien thoughts. Not Soviet. You laugh at those who are in mass graves. We have read the Remarque ... Remarqueism will not work with us. The Soviet woman is not an animal...

“Someone betrayed us… The Germans found out where the partisan detachment was stationed. They cordoned off the forest and approaches to it from all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by swamps, where the punishers did not go. The quagmire. Both equipment and people she tightened tightly. For several days, for weeks we stood up to our necks in water. We had a radio operator with us, she recently gave birth. The child is hungry... He asks for breasts... But the mother herself is hungry, there is no milk, and the child is crying. The punishers are nearby... With the dogs... If the dogs hear, we will all die. The whole group - thirty people ... Do you understand?

The commander decides...

No one dares to give the order to the mother, but she herself guesses. He lowers the bundle with the child into the water and keeps it there for a long time ... The child no longer screams ... Not a sound ... But we cannot raise our eyes. Neither mother, nor each other ... "

“We took prisoners, brought them to the detachment ... They were not shot, death was too easy for them, we stabbed them like pigs with ramrods, cut them into pieces. I went to watch it…waited! I waited a long time for the moment when their eyes would start to burst from pain... Pupils...

What do you know about it?! They burned my mother and sisters at the stake in the middle of the village…”

“I didn’t remember cats or dogs during the war, I remember rats. Large... With yellow-blue eyes... They were visible, invisible. When I recovered from my injury, I was sent back from the hospital to my unit. Part stood in the trenches near Stalingrad. The commander ordered: "Take her to the girl's dugout." I entered the dugout and the first thing I was surprised was that there were no things there. Empty beds of coniferous branches, and that's it. They didn't warn me... I left my backpack in the dugout and went out. When I returned half an hour later, I didn't find my backpack. No trace of things, no comb, no pencil. It turned out that the rats ate everything in an instant ...

And in the morning they showed me the gnawed hands of the seriously wounded ...

In none of the scariest films have I seen rats leave a city before shelling. It's not in Stalingrad... It was already near Vyazma... In the morning, herds of rats walked through the city, they went to the fields. They smelled death. There were thousands of them... Black, gray... People looked at this ominous sight in horror and huddled up to the houses. And exactly at the time when the rats disappeared from our eyes, the shelling began. Airplanes took off. Instead of houses and cellars, stone sand remained ... "

“There were so many dead near Stalingrad that the horses were no longer afraid of them. Usually scared. A horse will never step on a dead person. We collected our dead, and the Germans were lying everywhere. Frozen… Icy… I am a driver, I drove boxes with artillery shells, I heard their skulls cracking under the wheels… Bones… And I was happy…”

From a conversation with a censor

– Yes, the Victory was hard for us, but you should look for heroic examples. There are hundreds of them. And you show the dirt of war. Underwear. You have our terrible Victory... What are you trying to achieve?

- Truth.

- Do you think that the truth is what is in life. What's on the street. Under your feet. For you, it is so low. Earth. No, the truth is what we dream of. What we want to be!

“We are advancing ... The first German settlements ... We are young. Strong. Four years without women. Wine cellars. Snack. They caught German girls and... Ten people raped one... There were not enough women, the population fled from the Soviet army, they took the young. Girls… Twelve-thirteen years old… If she cried, they beat her, stuffed something into her mouth. She hurts, but we laugh. Now I don’t understand how I could… A boy from an intelligent family… But it was me…

The only thing we were afraid of was that our girls would not find out about it. Our nurses. They were embarrassed…”

“We were surrounded ... We wandered through the forests, through the swamps. They ate the leaves, they ate the bark of the trees. Some roots. There were five of us, one was just a boy, he had just been drafted into the army. At night, a neighbor whispers to me: “The boy is half-dead, he will die anyway. Do you understand…” – “What are you talking about?” - “One prisoner told me ... When they fled from the camp, they specially took the young with them ... Edible human meat ... This is how they escaped ...”

It wasn't enough to hit. The next day we met partisans ... "

“Partisans arrived in the village on horseback in the afternoon. They took the elder and his son out of the house. They flogged them on the head with iron rods until they fell. And on the ground they finished off. I was sitting by the window. I saw everything… My older brother was among the partisans… When he entered our house and wanted to hug me: “Sister!” I screamed, “Don't come! Don't come! You are a killer!" And then she went numb. I didn't speak for a month.

My brother died... And what would have happened if he had remained alive? And I would return home ... "

“In the morning, the punishers set fire to our village ... Only those people who fled into the forest were saved. They ran away without anything, empty-handed, they didn’t even take bread with them. No eggs, no lard. At night, Aunt Nastya, our neighbor, beat her girl because she was crying all the time. Aunt Nastya was with her five children. Yulechka, my girlfriend, is weak herself. She was always sick ... And four boys, all small, and all also asked for food. And Aunt Nastya went crazy: “Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuum…”. And at night I heard ... Yulechka asked: “Mommy, don’t drown me. I won't... I won't ask you for more food. I will not…”

In the morning, no one saw Yulechka ...

Aunt Nastya... We returned to the village for coals... The village burned down. Soon Aunt Nastya hanged herself from a black apple tree in her garden. She hung low. Children stood near her and asked for food ... "

From a conversation with a censor

- It's a lie! This is a slander against our soldier who liberated half of Europe. On our partisans. To our hero people. We don't need your little story, we need a big story. History of Victory. You don't like our heroes! You don't like our great ideas. Ideas of Marx and Lenin.

Yes, I don't like big ideas. I love the little man...

From what I threw myself

“Forty-first year… We are surrounded. Political instructor Lunin is with us ... He read out the order that Soviet soldiers did not surrender to the enemy. We have, as Comrade Stalin said, there are no prisoners, but there are traitors. The guys got their pistols… The political instructor ordered: “Don't. Live, lads, you are young.” And he shot himself...

And this is already the forty-third ... The Soviet army is advancing. We walked around Belarus. I remember a little boy. He ran out to us from somewhere out of the ground, from the cellar, and shouted: “Kill my mother ... Kill me! She loved the German ... ". His eyes were round with fear. A black woman ran after him. All in black. She ran and was baptized: “Do not listen to the child. The child deified…”

“They called me to school ... A teacher who returned from the evacuation was talking to me:

I want to transfer your son to another class. My class has the best students.

- But my son has only "fives".

- It does not matter. The boy lived under the Germans.

Yes, it was difficult for us.

- I'm not talking about that. Everyone who was in the occupation... They are under suspicion...

- What?

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I don't understand…

- He tells children about the Germans. And he stutters.

- He's got it from fear. He was beaten by a German officer who lived in our apartment. He was dissatisfied with how his son cleaned his boots.

- You see ... You yourself admit ... You lived next to the enemy ...

- And who allowed this enemy to reach Moscow itself? Who left us here with our children?

With me - hysteria ...

For two days I was afraid that the teacher would denounce me. But she left her son in her class…”

“During the day we were afraid of the Germans and policemen, and at night of the partisans. The partisans took the last cow from me, and we only have one cat left. The partisans are hungry, angry. They took my cow, and I followed them ... Ten kilometers walked. Prayed - give. She left three hungry children in the hut on the stove. "Go away, aunt! - threatened. “Then we’ll shoot.”

Try to find a good man in the war...

His went to his. The kulak children have returned from exile. Their parents died, and they served the German authorities. Revenge. One shot an old teacher in the hut. Our neighbour. He once denounced his father, dispossessed him of the kulaks. Was an ardent communist.

The Germans first dissolved the collective farms, gave people land. People sighed after Stalin. We paid quitrent... We paid it carefully... And then they began to burn us. Us and our houses. Cattle were stolen, and people were burned.

Oh, my daughter, I'm afraid of words. Terrible words ... I saved myself with good, I did not want harm to anyone. I felt sorry for everyone…”

“I reached Berlin with the army ...

She returned to her village with two Orders of Glory and medals. I lived for three days, and on the fourth, my mother picks me up early from bed while everyone is sleeping: “Daughter, I gathered a bundle for you. Go away... Go away... You have two more younger sisters growing up. Who will marry them? Everyone knows that you were at the front for four years, with men…”.

Don't touch my soul. Write, like others, about my awards ... "

“In war, as in war. This is not theater...

We lined up a detachment in the clearing, we became a ring. And in the middle - Misha K. and Kolya M. - our guys. Misha was a brave scout, he played the harmonica. No one sang better than Kolya ...

The verdict was read for a long time: in such and such a village they demanded two bottles of moonshine, and at night ... two master's girls were raped ... And in such and such a village: from a peasant ... they took away a coat and a sewing machine, which they immediately drank, from neighbors ...

They are sentenced to be shot... The verdict is final and not subject to appeal.

Who will shoot? The detachment is silent... Who? We are silent ... The commander himself carried out the sentence ... "

“I was a machine gunner. I have killed so many...

After the war, she was afraid to give birth for a long time. She gave birth when she calmed down. Seven years later...

But I still haven't forgiven. And I won't forgive... I was happy when I saw captured Germans. I was glad that it was a pity to look at them: footcloths instead of boots on their feet, footcloths on their heads ... They are led through the village, they ask: "Mother, give me bread ... Bread ...". I was amazed that the peasants came out of the huts and gave them - some a piece of bread, some a potato ... The boys ran after the column and threw stones ... And the women cried ...

It seems to me that I have lived two lives: one - male, the second - female ... "

“After the war… Human life was worth nothing. Let me give you one example… I was driving after work on the bus, suddenly shouts began: “Stop the thief! Stop the thief! My bag…” The bus stopped ... Immediately - a flea market. The young officer takes the boy outside, puts his hand on his knee and - bang! breaks it in half. He jumps back ... And we are going ... No one stood up for the boy, did not call the policeman. They didn't call a doctor. And the officer has all his chest in military awards ... I began to get off at my stop, he jumped off and gave me his hand: “Come in, girl ...”. Such a gallant…

I just remembered it now ... And then we were still military people, we lived according to the laws of wartime. Are they human?

The Red Army is back...

We were allowed to dig up graves, to look for where our relatives had been shot. According to old customs, next to death, one must be in white - in a white scarf, in a white shirt. Until my last minute, I will remember it! People were walking with white embroidered towels… Dressed in all white… Where did they get him?

They were digging... Whoever found something - admitted it, then took it. Who carries his hand on a wheelbarrow, who carries his head ... A person does not lie whole in the ground for a long time, they all mixed up with each other there. With clay, with sand.

I didn’t find my sister, it seemed to me that one piece of the dress was hers, something familiar ... Grandfather also said - we’ll take it, there will be something to bury. We put that piece of the dress in the coffin ...

On the father received a piece of paper "disappeared without a trace." Others received something for those who died, and in the village council they scared me and my mother: “You are not supposed to receive any help. Or maybe he lives happily ever after with a German Frau. Enemy of the people".

I began to look for my father under Khrushchev. Forty years later. They answered me under Gorbachev: “It doesn’t appear on the lists ...”. But his fellow soldier responded, and I learned that my father had died heroically. Near Mogilev, he threw himself under a tank with a grenade ...

Too bad my mom didn't get this news. She died with the stigma of the wife of an enemy of the people. Traitor. And there were many like her. Didn't live up to the truth. I went to my mother's grave with a letter. I read…”

“Many of us believed...

We thought that everything would change after the war… Stalin would believe his people. But the war has not yet ended, and the echelons have already gone to Magadan. Echelons with the winners... They arrested those who were in captivity, survived in German camps, who were taken by the Germans to work - everyone who saw Europe. I could tell you how people live there. No communists. What kind of houses are there and what kind of roads. About the fact that there are no collective farms anywhere ...

After the victory, everyone was silent. They were silent and afraid, as before the war ... "

“I am a history teacher... In my memory, the history textbook was rewritten three times. I taught children from three different textbooks ...

Ask us while we're alive. Do not rewrite later without us. Ask...

You know how hard it is to kill a man. I worked underground. Six months later I received a task - to get a job as a waitress in the officer's canteen ... Young, beautiful ... They took me. I was supposed to pour poison into the soup cauldron and go to the partisans the same day. And I'm already used to them, they are enemies, but every day you see them, they tell you: "Danke shon ... Danke shon ...". It's hard... It's hard to kill... It's worse to kill than to die...

I have taught history all my life... And I never knew how to talk about it. What words…”

I had my own war ... I went a long way with my heroines. Like them, for a long time I did not believe that our Victory had two faces - one beautiful, and the other terrible, all in scars - unbearable to look at. “In hand-to-hand combat, when killing a person, they look into his eyes. This is not to drop bombs or shoot from a trench,” they told me.

Listening to a person, how he killed and died, is the same thing - you look into the eyes ...

"I don't want to remember..."

An old three-story house on the outskirts of Minsk, one of those that hastily and, as it seemed then, not for long, was built immediately after the war, long and comfortably overgrown with jasmine bushes. It was from him that the search began, which will last seven years, amazing and painful seven years, when I will discover for myself the world of war, a world with a meaning that we have not fully figured out. I will experience pain, hate,

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temptation. Tenderness and bewilderment... I will try to understand how death differs from murder, and where is the border between human and inhuman. How does a person stay alone with this crazy idea that he can kill another person? Even have to kill. And I will find that in war, besides death, there are many other things, there is everything that is in our ordinary life. War is also life. Face the innumerable human truths. Secrets. I'm thinking about questions that I didn't know existed before. For example, about why we are not surprised at evil, we are not surprised at evil?

Road and roads... Dozens of trips across the country, hundreds of recorded cassettes, thousands of meters of tape. Five hundred meetings, and then she stopped counting, the faces left her memory, only voices remained. The choir is in my memory. A huge choir, sometimes the words are almost inaudible, only crying. I confess: I did not always believe that this path was within my power, that I could overcome it. I will reach the end. There were moments of doubt and fear, when I wanted to stop or step aside, but I could no longer. I became a prisoner of evil, looked into the abyss to understand something. Now, it seems to me, I have acquired some knowledge, but there are even more questions, and even fewer answers.

But then, at the very beginning of the journey, I did not suspect this ...

I was brought to this house by a small note in the city newspaper that the senior accountant Maria Ivanovna Morozova had recently been seen off at the Minsk plant of road machines "Drummer". And during the war, it was said in the same note, she was a sniper, she has eleven military awards, on her sniper account - seventy-five killed. It was difficult to combine in the mind the military profession of this woman with her peaceful occupation. With an everyday newspaper photo. With all these signs of commonness.

... A small woman with a girlish crown of a long braid around her head was sitting in a large chair, covering her face with her hands:

- No, no, I won't. Go back there again? I can’t… I still don’t watch war films. I was just a girl then. Dreamed and grew, grew and dreamed. And then there is the war. I even feel sorry for you... I know what I'm talking about... Do you really want to know? As I ask my daughter...

Of course I was surprised:

- Why to me? It is necessary to my husband, he likes to remember. What were the names of commanders, generals, unit numbers - he remembers everything. But not me. I only remember what happened to me. Your war. There are many people around, but you are always alone, because a person is always alone before death. I remember terrible loneliness.

She asked me to remove the tape recorder:

- I need your eyes to tell, and he will interfere.

But I forgot about it after a few minutes...

Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina), corporal, sniper:

“It will be a simple story ... The story of an ordinary Russian girl, of which there were many then ...

Where my native village of Dyakovskoye stood, now the Proletarsky district of Moscow. The war began, I was not yet eighteen years old. The braids are long, long, to the knees ... Nobody believed that the war would last for a long time, everyone was waiting - it was about to end. Let's drive off the enemy. I went to a collective farm, then I graduated from an accounting course and started working. The war continues... My girlfriends... My girls say: "We must go to the front." It was already up in the air. All signed up for courses at the military registration and enlistment office. Maybe someone for the company, I don’t know. We were taught there to shoot from a combat rifle, to throw grenades. At first ... I confess, I was afraid to take a rifle in my hands, it was unpleasant. I could not imagine that I would go to kill someone, I just wanted to go to the front and that's it. There were forty people in the circle. From our village - four girls, well, all of us, girlfriends, from the neighboring one - five, in a word, someone from each village. And some girls. The men have already all gone to war, who could. Sometimes the orderly came in the middle of the night, gave them two hours to pack, and they were taken away. Sometimes they were even taken from the field. (Silence.) Now I don’t remember if we had dances, if so, then the girl danced with the girl, there were no guys left. Our trees are silent.

Soon there was an appeal from the Central Committee of the Komsomol and youth, since the Germans were already near Moscow, to stand up for the defense of the Motherland. How will Hitler take Moscow? We do not allow! I'm not the only one... All the girls expressed their desire to go to the front. My father was already at war. We thought that we would be the only ones ... Special ones ... But we came to the military registration and enlistment office - there are a lot of girls. I gasped! My heart was on fire, so much so. And the selection was very strict. First, it was, of course, necessary to have good health. I was afraid that they would not take me, because as a child I was often sick, and the bone, as my mother said, was weak. Because of this, other children offended me little. Then, if there were no other children in the house, except for the girl who went to the front, they were also refused, since it was impossible to leave one mother. Oh our mothers! They didn’t dry out from tears ... They scolded us, they asked ... But I still had two sisters and two brothers, however, they were all much smaller than me, but it was still considered. There is one more thing - everyone left the collective farm, there was no one to work in the field, and the chairman did not want to let us go. In a word, we were denied. We went to the district committee of the Komsomol, and there - a refusal. Then we went with a delegation from our district to the regional committee of the Komsomol. Everyone had a big impulse, their hearts burned. We were sent home again. And we decided, since we are in Moscow, then go to the Central Committee of the Komsomol, to the very top, to the first secretary. Strive to the end ... Who will report which of us is brave? We thought that we would definitely be alone here, but there it was impossible to squeeze into the corridor, let alone reach the secretary. There, young people from all over the country, many of those who had been in the occupation, were eager to take revenge for the death of their loved ones. From all over the Union. Yes, yes ... In short - we were even confused for a while ...

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