Publisher's Weekly Review
In this moving work of oral history, originally published in 1985 and appearing in English for the first time, Nobel-winning journalist Alexievich collages together WWII survivors' accounts. The book brings together engrossing and frequently graphic testimonies from 101 Russians who were under the age of 15 at the time of the events described. Absent a historical timeline-or, indeed, any prose in Alexievich's voice-there is a subtle chronological and geographic movement; the memories move from town to town between the German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the Nazi surrender in May 1945. The interviewees recall the hunger not assuaged by grass or potatoes, the sounds and the smells of war, the abuse they suffered (one was used to detect mines and another, then six, suffered "nine bullet wounds"), the crushing losses ("I never found my mama and papa, I don't even know my real last name"), and the horrifying events ("Our neighbors... were hanging from the well pole," one recounts; another remembers seeing his mother shot to death in the street). This disturbing and inspiring literary monument to the human, humane spirit that survives unimaginable horror brings to life the devastation of war. Agent: Galina Dursthoff, Literary Agency Galina Dursthoff. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
No war, nor any drama of state, is worthwhile if it results in one tear from a child, says one of the epigraphs which begin this oral history of the lives of Soviet children during WWII. The narrators of Last Witnesses endured far more than tears, and this book provides a wrenching glimpse of the war's impact on civilians in what is now Belarus and its neighbors, where more than four-million people were killed. Alexievich (The Unwomanly Face of War, 2017), awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 2015 for her work in this genre, presents their memories individually and chronologically, but the stories form a single narrative of suffering. Children lose parents to the front or the partisans, death or capture, permanently or temporarily. They are then raised by relatives, neighbors, orphanages, nobody. They eat dogs and fear the human-eating dogs left by the Nazis. They are captured, tortured, imprisoned. They join the struggle. Alexievich's narrators were forever shaped by the war. The sole evidence of Alexievich's presence is in her witnesses' retrospective attempts to explain their worlds. By the age of ten or eleven, one woman explains, we were men and women. --Sara Jorgensen Copyright 2019 Booklist
Choice Review
In 2015 Alexievich won the Nobel prize for literature for her "polyphonic writings." For this book, she gathered the stories of approximately one hundred individuals who were children in the Soviet Union in June 1941, and who were shaped by the experience of Nazi occupation, the siege in Leningrad, or as refugees in the east. Most of her subjects were between the ages of 4 and 14 when the war began. Their stories, some as short as one page, have a few common themes. Many speak of hunger or the loss of parents and siblings either to Nazi violence or disease, and many describe the long-term impact of the war on their psyches. Alexievich does not provide an introduction or even an explanation of the questions she asked. The reader does not even know how she choose the individuals whose stories are included. What the book provides is an unfiltered view of experiences that were burned into the memories of children and recalled more than 70 years later by adults who could never leave the war behind. Summing Up: Essential. Lower-division undergraduates through faculty; general readers. --Frederic Krome, University of Cincinnati--Clermont College
Guardian Review
From Chernobyl to the experience of children during the second world war... Alexievich has produced her own remarkable version of Soviet history In 1993, two years after Svetlana Alexievich published Boys in Zinc , her oral history of Russia's war in Afghanistan, she was sued by a number of the people she had interviewed. They accused her of offending their "honour and dignity" and of portraying their soldier sons as "soulless killer-robots, pillagers, drug addicts and racists". Though the case was in part thrown out, it said much about the fickleness of memory and the way that the rawness of grief - conveyed to Alexievich during the interviews - had quickly been overlaid by a more bearable narrative, in which the war had been a heroic venture to help Afghanistan create a new society: their sons and husbands had not died uselessly but for a noble cause. Alexievich would not have attended the court hearing, she wrote later, except that she felt it her duty to confront her accusers, not to apologise to them, but to "ask their forgiveness for the fact that it is not possible to get at the truth without pain". All non-fiction writers are vulnerable to charges of invention and distortion, and none more so than Alexievich, who has spent more than 40 years producing her own remarkable version of recent Soviet history, one based exclusively on interviews, strung together as a series of monologues, unmediated by commentaries. Oral history was not recognised as professional research by the Russian Academy of Sciences, and Alexievich's books have attracted repeated criticism in a country where the state has kept tight control of its history through the media, school books and anniversary celebrations, ensuring a shared, tidy and victorious collective memory of the past. Her subversive, anguished testimonies, taken from ordinary people, have not been appreciated. When, in 2015, she was awarded the Nobel prize for literature - the first journalist to be so honoured and credited with inventing a new literary genre - it was greeted with outrage in the state-controlled Russian media, which claimed that she had won it only on account of her anti-Putin views. Lost Witnesses , now published in English for the first time, and translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, first appeared in 1985. A logical sequel to her first book, The Unwomanly Face of War - interviews with the women who served in the Red Army, which sold more than 2m copies - it captures the memories of people who had been children, aged between three and 14, during the second world war. Many of her hundred or so testimonies open on the day the war broke out, a time recalled as cheerful: the weather was good and children were out playing with friends or picking mushrooms. All too soon, horrors accumulate. Safety is brutally replaced by fear, pain and hunger. With the arrival of the Germans, in their "stomping iron-shod boots", fathers are lined up and shot, mothers killed by bombs, houses set on fire. For most of these children, the war was spent in an orphanage, living with a grandparent, or being put to work in a hospital. They forgot that they were children. There are accounts of entire villages being torched, of people eating dirt and grass, or seeing the families of partisans hanging from trees and frozen stiff, so that the bodies tinkled when they swung in the wind. Like her Red Army female soldiers, who survived to return home in 1945, few of the people Alexievich interviewed found the end of the war easy. They came back to their villages in which all the men were dead, and where unexploded mines continued to cause casualties. The sense of loss, ever present in Alexievich's work, is the theme that binds these memories - loss of siblings, pets, possessions and above all mothers - along with an abiding feeling of being too afraid ever to be happy again, because happiness is something that cannot last. Alexievich is not the first person to draw on oral history in Russia. The writer she considers her mentor, the fellow Belarusian Ales Adamovich, put together in the 1970s a history of the siege of Leningrad, based on "epic choruses" provided by interviews and diaries. Like hers, his work was sufficiently unpopular with the authorities for them to delay publication for several years. But it differs from Alexievich's books in that she almost never intersperses her narrative with an authorial comment, preferring to see herself as a historian of the "untraceable", tracking not events but the feelings that people experienced during them, and reclaiming "the small, the personal and the specific". Like the great Russian novels, these testimonials ring with emotional truth. It is no coincidence that most of her witnesses have been women. Alexievich, who began her writing life as a reporter on a local paper in Belarus, realised early on that what she was looking for, the memory of what things felt like, is better conveyed by women, who feel little shame in expressing an unvarnished sense of remembered horror. The death of beloved sons is a constant refr, as is that of suicide, about which she has also written a number of short storiesain that runs through her books. Embittered by wars in which they have been tricked into fighting, maimed by wounds that never heal, revolted by killings in which they were forced to take part, Alexievich's male characters come home from war to take their own lives, leaving their desolate mothers to grieve anew. "They sent me back," one woman says bleakly in Boys in Zinc , "a different man." Alexievich has refused to allow Soviet history to be written without the voices of people who endured the catastrophes Perhaps not surprisingly, Alexievich was drawn to another relatively unchronicled "monstrous event", the day in April 1986 when a series of blasts brought down the nuclear reactor at Chernobyl. Though its effects were felt everywhere from Israel to China, 70% of the radioactive fallout descended on Belarus, where rates of cancer soon increased 74-fold. Over a period of 20 years, Alexievich returned repeatedly to the area, to interview former workers at the plant, along with doctors, scientists, soldiers and peasants who had defied the ban and returned to their homes. The explosion, she writes in Chernobyl Prayer , was the "beginning of a new history" and at times it seemed to her "as if I was recording the future" (the writers of the recent HBO series drew on her book). Animals and insects had vanished and it had become a place of "possessions without owners ... landscapes without people", and the few who had returned to their poisoned homes had resumed earlier ways, reaping by sickle, mowing by scythes. Where once for the Belarusians catastrophe had been war, now it had become the toxic grass and earth, an enemy that no one could see. Of all her books, her most ambitious, and at more than 700 pages her longest, is her most recent, Second hand Time , published in English in 2016 and about the lives of people affected by the collapse of the Soviet Union. Alexievich wrote it during the 10 years she spent abroad in exile in France and Germany, having fallen out with the regime in Belarus in 2000. Based on interviews carried out over two decades, most of them with women, it deals with the years between Stalin's death in 1953 and the assassination of the opposition activist Boris Nemtsov in 2015. Second hand Time depicts a country in which people are poor and resentful and speak of the past, before perestroika, as the best and happiest time of their lives. When capitalism arrived to shatter their worlds into "dozens of colourful little pieces" and poverty became "shameful", it confused them. Mikhail Gorbachev, one woman tells her, "opened the door of the cage and we made a run for it". But freedom is not what they imagined, and in Putin's "overcast, grey, brutal" regime they have found little to content them. "People have started believing in God again," one man tells her, "because there is no other hope." Over almost half a century, Alexievich has recorded hundreds of monologues about what it is to be a human being, and for the most part a human being left behind. Given the speed with which memories alter and the way that perceptions of the past shift to reflect the mood of the present, they might have benefited from a little more context - the ages of the witnesses perhaps, or the dates of the interviews. But this is a small matter. What counts is that Alexievich has refused to allow Soviet history to be written without the voices of the people who endured the wars, calamities, famines, poverty and political persecutions that filled the 20th century. However grim and repetitive her books are, the cumulative effect, not least of Lost Witnesses , is extremely powerful. This is for the most part because her own views - that war is atrocious, and that the poor, the powerless, minorities and dissidents, and even people who simply happen to be at the wrong place at the wrong time, are readily disposed of by those in power - are explicit in her choice of excerpts and the craft with which she shapes them. Few people have ever conjured better the pain of loss.
Kirkus Review
The Nobel laureate brings her unique style of collecting firsthand memories to the stories of those who were children during World War II.Like all of Alexievich's (The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II, 2017, etc.) books, this one makes for a difficult but powerful reading experience. The Nazis ruthlessly killed entire villages or took all the men who might be partisans out to be shot, transporting women and children to concentration camps. One universal memory of these children was the complete lack of color: Everything was gray or black; spring never arrived. Many raged that they never had a childhood, which was stolen from them. As one 13-year-old recounts, "I learned to be a good shot.But I forgot my math." The children were not immune to Nazi tortures, and the author does not hide that fact from readers. Even 70 years later, many couldn't bear to remember the horrors of separation, the killings, and the hunger, which was perpetualmany ate grass, bark, even dirt. One man said there were no tears in him; he didn't know how to cry. The ages of Alexievich's subjects range from 4 to 15 years, most in the younger range because the teenagers were usually taken for slave labor or shot. Children were sold as slaves to German farmers and worked to death, but one of the most heinous crimes has to be the Aryan-looking children's being taken to camps so their blood could be used for transfusions for injured soldiers. The stories of escaping to the East, many alone, are remarkable, especially as we see the total strangers who took them in and treated them as family. Strangers were all they knew, and it was strangers who saved them. There are some uplifting stories of parents finding their children after the war, but many never found anyone.As usual, Alexievich shines a bright light on those who were there; an excellent book but not for the faint of heart. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Originally published in Russian in 1985, this newly translated work by Nobel laureate in literature Alexievich (Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets) highlights the wartime experiences of children in the Soviet Union during World War II. Alexievich has noted that the preferred label for her genre is "documentary literature," while a more mundane category might be "oral history." Within are stories from 100 people--short glimpses into their childhood that last only a few pages--with each vignette stating the age of the person during the story as well as their adult occupation. The myriad themes cover topics such as family relations, perceptions of war, death, food shortages, poverty, travel, schooling, entertainment, and how their childhood experience impacted their adult lives. VERDICT These stories are at once poignant and gut-wrenching, and given their scope within the longer interviews conducted by Alexievich, the author's overall literary intent becomes clearer throughout. Readers with an interest in World War II, oral history, 20th-century history, Russian and/or Soviet history would find this well worth reading. [See Prepub Alert, 1/7/19.]--Crystal Goldman, Univ. of California, San Diego Lib.