The Captive Reader

Of all the books I read this year, Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich was the most harrowing.  Yes, I read other tales of war, and stories of tragedies, but it was this that left me the most upset and the most unsettled – something Alexievich has a talent for doing.  Why?  Because of its simplicity in describing the most devastating of things: children’s lives upset by a long and bloody war.

Originally published in 1985 (alongside The Unwomanly Face of War, my favourite book of 2018), this history of Soviet children’s experiences of the Second World War was finally translated into English (by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky) in 2019.  Like all of Alexievich’s books, it is an oral history where her subjects speak for themselves.  Now adults, Alexievich gives us their age at the time they were remembering and, most intriguingly, their job.  Sometimes it’s easy to see how childhood experiences led to future careers, and sometimes it is a tale of how something – something we will never know – went wrong along the way.  It is always fascinating.

For the Soviets, the Second World War was devastating. Something like 25 million people died in only a few years, infrastructure and huge parts of the country were destroyed, and everyone’s lives were changed.  For children, who could barely understand what was going on, it was a particularly fraught period and Alexievich leads her interview subjects in ways that reveal how most of them were still living – decades later – with the consequences of what they had been through as children.

For an unsettling large number of her subjects, the war meant a chaotic evacuation from cities, the loss of parents, and a lonely childhood in orphanages.  Some arrived traumatized, knowing their parents were dead (perhaps having seen them die), while others found themselves displaced and in orphanages as, they hoped, a temporary measure:

What’s left in me from the orphanage?  An uncompromising character.  I don’t know how to be gentle and careful with words. I’m unable to forgive.  My family complains that I’m not very affectionate.  Can one grow up affectionate without a mother?

Ira Mazur (Five years old.  Now a construction worker)

But the farther we moved away from home, the more we expected our parents to come and take us, and we didn’t suspect that many of us no longer had any parents.  This thought couldn’t even occur to us.  We talked about the war, but we were still children of peace.

Marlen Robeichikov (Eleven years old.  Now section head in a town council)

There are moments of happiness in the book and they were a welcome relief from the overwhelming trauma of so much loss.  Memories of fathers coming home or the announcement of the end of the war provided a necessary contrast and glimmer of hope.  But even happiness was not uncomplicated after so much suffering:

I was the last to find out that our troops were in the village.  I was sick.  When I heard about it, I got up and ran to school.  I saw a soldier and clung to him.  I remember that his army shirt was wet.

He had been embraced, and kissed, and wept over so much.

Valia Matiushkova (Five years old.  Now an engineer)

In the end, what the book left me with was a deeper understanding of the post-war USSR/Russia and, to some extent, its relations with the rest of the world.  Diplomacy is really the art of repairing the damage done by the last war.  But when a nation has endured so much collective trauma, when all of its people are faced but such bleak memories, how can anyone else understand where they have come from and how they now view the world?

Even now I…All my life I’ve cried in the happiest moments of my life.  Drowning in tears.  All my life…My husband…We’ve lived in love for many years.  When he proposed to me: “I love you.  Let’s get married” – I burst into tears.  He was frightened: “Did I upset you?”  “No!  No!  I’m happy!”  But I can never be completely happy.  Totally happy.  It somehow doesn’t come out.  I’m afraid of happiness.  It always seems that it’s just about to end.  This “just about” always lives in me.  That childhood fear…

Tamara Parkhimovich (Seven years old.  Now a secretary-typist)