We ran out of the house, ran somewhere down the streets … It seemed as if the city was no longer there, only ruins. I was no longer little-I remember my feelings. Terrible! Bombs rained down … There were sounds of ceaseless explosions. Planes flew over the city … Dozens of unfamiliar planes. Molotov said, “It’s war.” Still no one believed it yet. What?! Our army is at the border, our leaders are in the Kremlin! The country is securely protected, it’s invulnerable to the enemy! That was what I thought then … I was a young Pioneer. They were afraid … This is what I think now … And of course no one believed it. But they were afraid that they’d be called provocateurs. Everybody was afraid to say aloud what had happened, even when they already knew, since some had been informed. She whispered something to mama, but gestured that they had to be quiet. Our neighbor, an officer’s wife, came out to the yard all in tears. The morning of the first day of the war … In those moments I realized: she looks like my mama … How papa ran away from us and didn’t even look back … How mama lay … How the beetles crawled over the sand … I begin to speak … To tell about mama and papa. We came to a strange village and strangers took us all to different cottages. Some old man drove us, he gathered up everybody on the road. “And what’s your last name, little girl? What’s your mother’s name?” I didn’t remember … We sat by mama’s little mound till night, till we were picked up and put on a cart. One of the soldiers asked me: “What’s your name, little girl?” But I forgot. How would we find her afterward, how would we meet her? Who would write to our papa? She’ll wake up and we’ll go on.” Some big beetles crawled over the sand … I couldn’t imagine how mama was going to live with them under the ground. We shouted and begged: “Don’t put our mama in the ground. The soldiers wrapped mama in a tarpaulin and buried her in the sand, right there. Our mama lies by the road with her arms spread. Then I remember: the black sky and the black plane. It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa … I was very little, but I think I realized that I was seeing him for the last time. So warm … And even now I can’t believe that my father left that morning for the war. My little sister and brother Vasya woke up, my sister saw me crying, and she, too, shouted: “Papa!” We all ran out to the porch: “Papa!” Father saw us and, I remember it like today, covered his head with his hands and walked off, even ran. He tore free of her and ran, she caught up with him and again held him and shouted something. They went outside, they were holding hands, I ran to the window-mama hung on my father’s neck and wouldn’t let him go. I saw papa kiss mama for a long time, kiss her face and hands, and I kept wondering: he’s never kissed her like that before. Mama and papa thought we were asleep, but I lay next to my sister pretending to sleep. She asked differently: “By order of the pike, by my like … ” We wanted to go to our grandmother for the summer and have papa come with us. I also always asked something from the Golden Fish: “Golden Fish … Dear Golden Fish … ” My sister asked, too. The last thing I remember from the peaceful life was a fairy tale that mama read us at bedtime. I was very little, but I remember everything … Photo: RIA Novosti archive, image #137811 / Yaroslavtsev / CC-BY-SA 3.0 (CC BY-SA 3.0 ()). Soviet children during a German air raid in the first days of World War II. A selection of stories from the book appears below. “How did they live? What did they believe in? How did they die and how did they kill? And how hard did they pursue happiness, and did they fail to catch it?” Last Witnesses, Alexievich’s 1985 collection of memories from Soviets who were children during World War II, has just been translated into English for the first time by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. “It all forms a sort of small encyclopedia, the encyclopedia of my generation, of the people I came to meet,” Alexievich has said. Each of her “documentary novels,” as she calls them, is the result of hundreds of interviews with ordinary people, whose accounts she meticulously synthesizes and weaves into sweeping, coherent narratives. Over the course of her career, the Nobel Prize–winning writer Svetlana Alexievich has tirelessly chronicled some of the most monumental events of the twentieth century, including World War II, the Chernobyl disaster, and the collapse of the Soviet Union.
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