Alekseevich, the war is not a woman’s face to read. More about Alexievich’s book: War is not a woman’s face

Composition

Fifty-seven years ago our country was illuminated by the light of victory, victory in the Great Patriotic War. She got it at a difficult price. For many years, the Soviet people walked the paths of war, walked to save their Motherland and all of humanity from fascist oppression.
This victory is dear to every Russian person, and this is probably why the theme of the Great Patriotic War not only does not lose its relevance, but every year finds more and more new incarnations in Russian literature. In their books, front-line writers trust us with everything they personally experienced during the war. firing lines, in front-line trenches, in partisan detachments, in fascist dungeons - all this is reflected in their stories and novels. “Cursed and Killed”, “Overtone” by V. Astafiev, “Sign of Trouble” by V. Bykov, “Blockade” by M. Kuraev and many others - a return to the “kroshevo” wars, to the nightmarish and inhuman pages of our history.
But there is another topic that deserves special attention - the topic of the difficult lot of women in war. Such stories as “The Dawns Here Are Quiet...” by B. Vasiliev and “Love Me, Soldier” by V. Bykov are devoted to this topic. But the novel by the Belarusian writer and journalist S. Alexievich “War Has Not a Woman’s Face” makes a special and indelible impression.
Unlike other writers, S. Alexievich made the heroes of her book not fictional characters, but real women. The clarity, accessibility of the novel and its extraordinary external clarity, the apparent simplicity of its form are among the merits of this wonderful book. Her novel has no plot, it is built in the form of a conversation, in the form of memories. For four long years, the writer walked “burnt kilometers of other people’s pain and memory,” recording hundreds of stories of nurses, pilots, partisans, and paratroopers who recalled the terrible years with tears in their eyes.
One of the chapters of the novel, entitled “I don’t want to remember...” tells about those feelings that live in the hearts of these women to this day, which I would like to forget, but there is no way. Fear, along with a true sense of patriotism, lived in the hearts of the girls. This is how one of the women describes her first shot: “We lay down and I watched. And then I see: one German stood up. I clicked and he fell. And so, you know, I was shaking all over, I was pounding all over. I started crying. When I was shooting at targets - nothing, but here: how did I kill a man?
The women's memories of the famine, when they were forced to kill their horses in order not to die, are also shocking. In the chapter “It Wasn’t Me,” one of the heroines, a nurse, recalls her first meeting with the fascists: “I bandaged the wounded, a fascist was lying next to me, I thought he was dead... but he was wounded, he wanted to kill me. I felt someone push me, and I turned to him. I managed to kick the machine gun with my foot. I didn’t kill him, but I didn’t bandage him either, I left. He was wounded in the stomach."
War is, first of all, death. Reading the memories of women about the death of our soldiers, someone’s husbands, sons, fathers or brothers, it becomes scary: “You can’t get used to death. To death... We were with the wounded for three days. They are healthy, strong men. They didn't want to die. They kept asking for something to drink, but they couldn’t drink because they were wounded in the stomach. They died before our eyes, one after another, and we could do nothing to help them.”
Everything we know about a woman fits into the concept of “mercy.” There are other words: “sister”, “wife”, “friend” and the highest - “mother”. But mercy is present in their content as the essence, as the purpose, as the ultimate meaning. A woman gives life, a woman protects life, the concepts “woman” and “life” are synonymous. Roman S. Alexievich is another page of history, presented to readers after many years of forced silence. This is another one terrible truth about war. In conclusion, I would like to cite the phrase of another heroine of the book “War Has Not a Woman’s Face”: “A woman in war... This is something about which there are no human words yet.”

© Svetlana Alexievich, 2013

© “Time”, 2013

– When did women first appear in the army in history?

– Already in the 4th century BC, women fought in the Greek armies in Athens and Sparta. Later they took part in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

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

- And in new times?

– For the first time, in England in the years 1560–1650, hospitals began to be formed in which female soldiers served.

– What happened in the twentieth century?

– Beginning of the century... To the First world war in England women were already accepted into 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, and France, many women also began to serve in military hospitals and ambulance trains.

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

About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most “masculine” ones. Even a language problem arose: the words “tanker”, “infantryman”, “machine 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, during the war...

From a conversation with a historian

Millions killed for cheap

We trampled the path in the dark...

Osip Mandelstam

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

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

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

Everything for us began from that terrible and mysterious world. In our family, the Ukrainian grandfather, my mother’s father, died at the front and was buried somewhere in Hungarian soil, 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 alone. My father. Eleven distant relatives The Germans burned them and their children alive – some in their hut, some in the village church. This was the case in every family. Everyone has.

The village boys played “Germans” and “Russians” for a long time. Screamed german words: “Hyunde 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 don’t know another world and other people. Have they ever existed?

The village of my childhood after the war was all women's. Babya. I don't remember male voices. This is how it remains with me: women talk about the war. They're crying. They sing as if they are crying.

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 to buy books. Now I have an answer - why. Is it by chance? We were always at war or preparing for war. We remembered how we fought. We have never lived differently, and we probably don’t know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently; we will have to learn this for a long time.

At 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 came fearlessness. Now I think: if I were a more real person, could I throw myself into such an abyss? What was all this due to – ignorance? Or from a sense of the way? After all, there is a sense of the way...

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

One day I came across the book “I am from the village of fire” by A. Adamovich, Y. Bryl, V. Kolesnik. I experienced such a shock only once, while reading Dostoevsky. And here is 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, on 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 meet and write so much as I thought. I read it. 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 even more has been written about them. But... Men also wrote about men - this became clear immediately. Everything we know about the war comes from a “male voice.” We are all captive of “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 start to remember, they tell not a “women’s” war, but a “men’s” one. Adapt to the canon. And only at home or after crying in the circle of friends at the front, they begin to talk about their war, which is unfamiliar to me. Not just me, all of us. In my journalistic trips, I was more than once a witness and the only listener of completely new texts. And I felt shocked, just like in childhood. In these stories, a monstrous grin of the mysterious was visible... When women speak, they do not have or almost do not have what we are used to reading and hearing about: how some people heroically killed others and won. Or they lost. What kind of equipment was there and what kind of generals were they? Women's stories are different and about different things. “Women’s” war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting and its own space of feelings. Your own words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are just people who are busy with inhumanly human work. And not only they (people!) suffer there, but also the earth, the birds, and the trees. Everyone who lives 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, did women 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 meetings...

Surprise: these women’s military professions are medical instructor, sniper, machine gunner, anti-aircraft gun commander, sapper, and now they are accountants, laboratory assistants, tour guides, teachers... There is a mismatch of roles here and there. It’s as if they remember not about themselves, but about some other girls. Today they surprise themselves. And before my eyes the story “humanizes”, it becomes like ordinary life. Another lighting appears.

There are amazing storytellers who have pages in their lives that can rival the best pages of the classics. A person sees himself so clearly from above - from heaven, and from below - from earth. Before him is the whole way up and the way 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 stories, people create, “write” their lives. It happens that they “add on” and “rewrite”. You have to be careful here. On guard. At the same time, pain melts and destroys any falsehood. Temperature too high! Sincerely, I was convinced, they behave simple people- nurses, cooks, laundresses... They, how to define it more precisely, get words from themselves, and not from newspapers and books they read - not from someone else’s. But only from my own suffering and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, oddly enough, are often more susceptible to the processing of time. Its general encryption. Infected with secondary knowledge. Myths. Often you have to walk for a long time, in different circles, to hear a story about a “women’s” war, and not about a “men’s” one: how they retreated, advanced, on what part of the front... It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. As a persistent portrait painter.

The Soviet and Belarusian writer received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2015 for her documentary and essay collection of stories “War Has Not a Woman’s Face.” The book itself was written in 1983, but some of the memories were crossed out by censors who accused Svetlana Alexievich of “pacifism, naturalism and debunking the heroic image of the Soviet woman.”

“Will I find such words? I can tell you how I shot. But about how she cried, no. It will remain unspoken. I know one thing: in war a person becomes terrible and incomprehensible. How to understand it? You are a writer. Come up with something yourself. Something beautiful. Without lice and dirt, without vomit... Without the smell of vodka and blood... Not as scary as life...”

Soldiers. (wikipedia.org)

Nonna Alexandrovna Smirnova, private, anti-aircraft gunner:

“Now I watch films about the war: a nurse on the front line, she walks neatly, clean, not in padded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a cap on her crest. Well, that's not true! How could we pull out a wounded man if there were people like that... It’s not very easy to crawl around in a skirt when there are only men around. But to tell the truth, skirts were only given to us at the end of the war as elegant ones. At the same time, we also received underwear instead of men's underwear. We didn’t know where to go from happiness. The gymnasts were unbuttoned so that you could see...

Anti-aircraft gunners. (wikipedia.org)

Zinaida Vasilievna Korzh, medical instructor of a cavalry squadron:

“People didn’t want to die... We responded to every groan, every cry. One wounded man, when he felt that he was dying, grabbed me by the shoulder like that, hugged me and did not let go. It seemed to him that if someone was near him, if his sister was nearby, then life would not leave him. He asked: “If only I could live for five more minutes. Just two more minutes..." Some died silently, slowly, others shouted: “I don’t want to die!” They swore: motherfucker... One suddenly began to sing... He sang a Moldavian song... A man dies, but still doesn’t think, doesn’t believe that he’s dying. And you see how the yellow-yellow color comes from under the hair, how the shadow first moves across the face, then under the clothes... He lies dead, and there is some kind of surprise on his face, as if he is lying and thinking: how did I die? Am I really dead?

Wounded. (wikipedia.org)

Klara Semenovna Tikhonovich, senior sergeant, anti-aircraft gunner:

“After the war... I lived in a communal apartment. The neighbors were all with their husbands and they insulted me. They mocked: “Ha-ha-a... Tell me how you are... with the men...”. Vinegar will be poured into my saucepan with potatoes. They'll add a spoonful of salt... Ha-ha-ah...

My commander was demobilized from the army. He came to me and we got married. We signed up at the registry office, and that’s it. No wedding. And a year later he left for another woman, the head of our factory canteen: “She smells of perfume, but you smell of boots and foot wraps.” So I live alone. I have no one in the whole wide world. Thank you for coming...”

To Berlin. (wikipedia.org)

Valentina Kuzminichna Bratchikova-Borshchevskaya, lieutenant, political officer of the field laundry detachment:

“They brought me to my platoon... The soldiers looked: some with mockery, some even with anger, and others would shrug their shoulders like that - everything was immediately clear. When the battalion commander presented that, supposedly, you new commander platoon, everyone immediately howled: “Uh-uh-uh...”. One even spat: “Ugh!”

And a year later, when I was awarded the Order of the Red Star, the same guys who survived carried me in their arms to my dugout. They were proud of me.

With awards. (wikipedia.org)

Ekaterina Nikitichna Sannikova, sergeant, gunner:

“How did the Motherland greet us? I can’t do without sobbing... Forty years have passed, and my cheeks are still burning. The men were silent, but the women... They shouted to us: “We know what you were doing there! They lured young p... our men. Frontline b... Military bitches...". They insulted me in every way... The Russian dictionary is rich...

A guy escorts me from the dance, I suddenly feel bad, my heart is pounding. I'll go and sit in a snowdrift. "What happened to you?" - "Never mind. I danced." And these are my two wounds... This is war... And we must learn to be gentle. To be weak and fragile, and your feet were worn out in boots - size forty.”

Nurses. (wikipedia.org)

Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva, private, nurse:

“I collected from my soldiers everything they had, what was left of their rations, any piece of sugar, and gave it to German children. Of course, I didn’t forget... I remembered everything... But I couldn’t look calmly into the hungry children’s eyes. Early in the morning there was already a line of German children near our kitchens, they were giving first and second courses. Each child has a bag for bread slung over his shoulder, a can for soup on his belt and something for the second - porridge, peas. We fed them and treated them. They even stroked me... I stroked it for the first time... I was scared... I... I! I am petting a German child... My mouth is dry from excitement. But I soon got used to it. And they got used to it...”

Group portrait. (wikipedia.org)

Today, and next time, is the most difficult, most controversial, most shocking part of my project. We will talk about what was not customary to talk about before, about what censorship did not let through, and because of which Svetlana Alexievich’s book “War Has Not a Woman’s Face” was published with banknotes. But can there really be a war with banknotes, or our knowledge of it with banknotes?

Some of you may say that you shouldn’t bring to the surface literally everything that happened in the war, that, they say, “in war, just like in war,” all sorts of things happened, and now this “all sorts” should not be poked at face, saying: “After all, it happened! It happened!”

I'm not poking. I understand that it is difficult, and perhaps impossible, to accept the war to the end as it really was, and not as we know it from our favorite movies, books, and stories of our old people. Many of them, by the way, like my grandfather, did not like to talk about the war, apparently, they protected us from what could hurt us, painfully traumatize us.

Internally I am calm. I have long accepted for myself as an axiom that the old people will take the whole truth about the war with them to the grave, and we will only be left with what we have become accustomed to since childhood. But I don't want that! This is probably due to the fact that I am no longer a child, and am mentally ready to listen to these stories. I live and regret that my grandfather told me so little about the war, and now you can’t even ask him...

Two desires are fighting in me: to receive this forbidden knowledge about the war, the truth of it, through old man’s eyes, and the desire not to open this Pandora’s box. The first desire won, and having received a piece of this knowledge, I realized that it did not change me in any way, I remained the way I was. And my attitude towards Soviet soldier, to a woman in war, to the great Victory has not changed either. Although no, I understood, firstly, in a war you cannot remain the same as you were before it, and, secondly, we don’t even understand a hundredth part of how difficult it was there: it’s hard to survive, it’s hard to win, it’s hard not to become brutalized by blood, dirt, lice, constant death. And they, our old people, went through it all...

If you are not ready for this, better not read this...

“Everything can become literature...
What interested me most in my archives was the notebook where I wrote down those episodes that were crossed out by the censor. And also my conversations with the censor. There I also found pages that I had thrown away myself. My self-censorship, my own ban. And my explanation - why did I throw 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 also a document. My way...

Svetlana Alexievich

From what the censorship threw out

I’m going to wake up at night now... It’s as if someone is, well... crying next to me... I’m at war...

We are retreating... Outside Smolensk, some woman brings me her dress, I have time to change. I’m walking alone... Alone among men... Either I was in trousers, or I’m walking in a summer dress. I suddenly started having these things... Women's affairs... They started earlier, probably out of excitement. From worries, from resentment. Where will you find what here? They slept under bushes, in ditches, in the forest on stumps. There were so many of us that there wasn’t enough space for everyone in the forest. We walked, confused, deceived, no longer trusting anyone... Where are our aircraft, where are our tanks? What flies, crawls, rattles - everything is German.

This is how I was captured... On the last day before captivity, both legs were broken... I lay there and urinated on myself... I don’t know with what forces I crawled away at night. She crawled away to the partisans...

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

…………………………………….

“I was on night duty... I went into the ward of the seriously wounded. The captain is lying there... The doctors warned me before duty that he would die at night... He wouldn’t live until the morning... I asked him: “Well, how? How can I help you?" I’ll never forget... He suddenly smiled, such a bright smile on his exhausted face: “Unbutton your robe... Show me your breasts... I haven’t seen my wife for a long time...” I felt ashamed, I answered him something . She left and returned an hour later.

He lies dead. And that smile on his face..."

…………………………………….

“Near Kerch... At night we walked on a barge under fire. The bow part caught fire... And from the fire... The fire spread across the deck... The ammunition exploded... A powerful explosion! The explosion was so strong that the barge tilted to the 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. Mortars pounded from the shore... Screams, groans, swearing... I swam well, I wanted to save at least one... At least one wounded... This is water, not land - a person will die immediately. Water... I hear someone nearby, either coming up, then under again the water will go away. Up - under water. I seized the moment, grabbed it... Something cold, slippery...

I decided that he was wounded, and his clothes were torn off by the explosion. Because I myself am naked... I was left in my underwear... Darkness. Gouge out your eye. Around: “Eh! Ay-ya-ya!” And mate... I somehow got to the shore with him... Just at that moment a rocket flashed in the sky, and I saw that I had pulled down a large wounded fish. The fish is large, as tall as a man. Beluga... She's dying... I fell next to her and broke this three-story mat. I cried from resentment... And from the fact that everyone was suffering...”

…………………………………….

“We were leaving the encirclement... Wherever we rush, there are Germans everywhere. We decide: in the morning we will break through in battle. We’ll die anyway, but we’d better 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 understand. Such a thing... Everyone was preparing to die...

Only a few escaped in the morning... Not many... Well, about seven people, but there were fifty. The Germans cut me down with machine guns... I remember those girls with gratitude. I didn’t find a single one among the living this morning... I have never met...”

From a conversation with the censor:

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

- Our heroism is sterile; it does not want to take into account either physiology or biology. You don't believe him. And not only the spirit was tested, but also the body. Material shell.

- Where do you get these thoughts from? Other people's thoughts. Not Soviet. You laugh at those in mass graves. We've read enough remark... Remarqueism won't work for us. Soviet woman- not an animal...

…………………………………….

“Someone gave us away... The Germans found out where the partisan detachment was stationed. The forest and approaches to it were cordoned off from all sides. We hid in the wild thickets, we were saved by the swamps, where the punitive forces did not enter. A quagmire. It captivated both the equipment and the people. For several days, for weeks, we stood up to our necks in water. There was a radio operator with us; she had recently given birth. The baby is hungry... He asks for the breast... But the mother herself is hungry, there is no milk, and the baby is crying. The punishers are nearby... With the dogs... The dogs will hear, we will all die. The whole group is about thirty people... Do you understand?

We make a decision...

No one dares to convey the commander’s order, but the mother herself guesses. He lowers the bundle with the child into the water and holds it there for a long time... The child no longer screams... Not a sound... And we cannot raise our eyes. Neither at mother, nor at each other... »

…………………………………….

“When we took prisoners, they brought them into the detachment... They were not shot, too easy death for them, we slaughtered them like pigs with ramrods and cut them into pieces . I went to see it... I was waiting! I've been waiting for a long time for the moment when their eyes begin to burst from pain... Pupils...

What do you know about this?! They burned my mother and sisters at the stake in the middle of the village...»

…………………………………….

“I don’t remember cats or dogs during the war, I remember rats. Big... With yellow-blue eyes... They were visible and invisible. When I recovered from my injury, the hospital sent me back to my unit. Some were in the trenches near Stalingrad. The commander ordered: “Take her to the girls’ dugout.” I entered the dugout and the first thing I was surprised was that there were no things there. Empty beds of pine 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 couldn’t find my backpack. No traces of things, no comb, no pencil. It turned out that everyone was instantly eaten by rats...

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

In no scariest movie have I ever seen rats leaving a city before shelling. This is not in Stalingrad... It was already near Vyazma... In the morning, herds of rats walked through the city, they went into the fields. They smelled death. There were thousands of them... Black, gray... People looked in horror at this ominous sight and huddled close to their houses. And exactly at the time when they disappeared from our eyes, the shelling began. Planes flew in. Instead of houses and basements, there was stone sand...»

…………………………………….

“There were so many killed at Stalingrad that the horses were no longer afraid of them. Usually they are afraid. A horse will never step on a dead person. We collected our dead, but the Germans were lying everywhere. Frozen...Icy...I- driver, carried boxes with artillery shells, I heard their skulls cracking under the wheels... Bones... And I was happy...»

From a conversation with the censor:

- Yes, the Victory was difficult for us, but you must look for heroic examples. There are hundreds of them. And you show the dirt of war. Underwear. Our Victory is terrible... What are you trying to achieve?

Truth.

- And you think that the truth is what is in life. What's on the street. Underfoot. It's so low for you. Earthly. No, the truth is what we dream about. What we want to be!

(To be continued...)

Everything we know about a woman is best summed up 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 the essence, as the purpose, as the ultimate meaning? A woman gives life, a woman protects life, a woman and life are synonymous.

On the most terrible war In the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She not only saved and bandaged the wounded, but also shot with a sniper, bombed, blew up bridges, went on reconnaissance missions, and took tongues. The woman killed. She killed the enemy, who attacked her land, her home, and her children with unprecedented cruelty. “It’s not a woman’s lot to kill,” one of the heroines of this book will say, containing 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.” It 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 Nicholas Roerich’s letters, written in May-June 1945 and stored in the fund of the Slavic Anti-Fascist Committee in the Central state archive October revolution, there is such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary has legitimized some Russian words that are now accepted in the world: for example, add one more word - untranslatable, meaningful Russian word"feat". Strange as it may seem, not a single European language has a word with even an approximate meaning...” If the Russian word “feat” ever enters the languages ​​of the world, that will be part of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders , who saved the children and defended the country together with the men.

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

Only after 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 girls sent by the Komsomol were in the active army. In total, during the war years, over 800 thousand women served in various branches of the military at the front...

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

These are the numbers. We know them. And behind them are destinies, entire lives, upside down, twisted by the war: the loss of loved ones, lost health, women’s 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 soul 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’m so glad that I can tell this to 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'll 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 I had to forget all this, or I would 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 take it. He is still a man. But I myself don’t know how a woman could. Now, as soon as I remember, horror seizes me, but then I could do anything: I could sleep next to the dead man, I shot myself, I saw blood, I really remember that the smell of blood in the snow was somehow especially strong... So I say, and I already feel bad... And then nothing, then I could do anything. I started telling my granddaughter, but my daughter-in-law reprimanded me: why would a girl know this? This, they say, the woman is growing... The 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 for almost forty years, we were underground together during the war. We wanted to get tickets, but there was a long line. She just had with her a certificate of participation in the Great Patriotic War, and she went to the cash register and showed it. And some girl, probably about fourteen years old, said: “Did you women fight?” It would be interesting to know for what kind of feats you were given these certificates?”

Of course, other people in line let us through, but we didn’t go to the cinema. We were shaking as if in a fever...” (Vera Grigorievna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers’ trenches were swollen, the “three roll” dugouts were destroyed, 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 of the war. My family was missing eleven people: Ukrainian grandfather Petro, my mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, my father’s mother, died during the partisan blockade from hunger and typhus, two families of distant relatives along with their children were burned by the Nazis in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, my father’s brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years of “my” war. More than once I was scared. More than once I was hurt. No, I won’t tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times have I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to, but I couldn’t anymore. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decided to include in the story. It contains what I felt, experienced, and 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 had the right to write in this book “I feel,” “I suffer,” “I doubt.” What are my feelings, my torment next to their feelings and torment? 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 obvious or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion, many years later, is also a document.

It just so happens that our memory of the war and all our ideas about the war are male. This is understandable: it was mostly men who fought, but it is also a recognition of our incomplete knowledge about the war. Although hundreds of books have been written about women who participated in the Great Patriotic War, there is a considerable literature of memoirs, and it convinces that we are dealing with a historical phenomenon. Never before in the history of mankind have so many women participated in war. In past times there were legendary individuals, like the cavalry maiden Nadezhda Durova, the partisan Vasilisa Kozhana, in the years civil war There were women in the ranks of the Red Army, but most of them were nurses and doctors. Great Patriotic War showed the world an example of mass participation Soviet women in defense of their Fatherland.

Pushkin, publishing an excerpt from Nadezhda Durova’s notes in Sovremennik, wrote in the preface: “What reasons forced a young girl of a good noble family to leave her father’s house, renounce her sex, take on labors and responsibilities that frighten both men and appear on the battlefield - and what others? Napoleonic! What prompted her? Secret, family grief? A fevered imagination? An innate indomitable tendency? Love?..” We were talking about only one incredible fate, and there could be many guesses. It was completely different when eight hundred thousand women served in the army, and even more of them asked to go to the front.

They went because “we and our homeland were one and the same for us” (Tikhonovich K.S... anti-aircraft gunner). They were allowed to go to the front because the scales of history were thrown: to be or not to be for the people, for the country? That was the question.

What is collected in this book, according to what principle? The stories will not be told by famous snipers or famous female pilots or partisans; a lot has already been written about them, and I deliberately avoided their names. “We are ordinary military girls, of which there are many,” I heard more than once. But it was to them that I went, I looked for them. It is in their minds that what we highly call folk memory is stored. “When you look at the war with our women’s eyes, it’s worse than the worst,” said Alexandra Iosifovna Mishutina, sergeant, medical instructor. These words of a simple woman who went through the entire war, then got married, gave birth to three children, and now nurses her grandchildren, contain the main idea of ​​the book.

In optics there is the concept of “aperture ratio” - the ability of a lens to capture a captured image worse or better. So, women’s memory of the war is the most “luminous” in terms of intensity of feelings and pain. It is emotional, it is passionate, it is full of details, and it is in the details that a document acquires its incorruptible power.

Signal operator Antonina Fedorovna Valegzhaninova fought at Stalingrad. Talking about the difficulties of the Stalingrad battles, for a long time she could not find a definition for the feelings that she experienced there, and then suddenly she combined them into a single image: “I remember one battle. There were a lot of dead... They were scattered like potatoes when they are turned out of the ground with a plow. A huge, large field... As they moved, they still lie... They are like potatoes... Even horses, such a delicate animal, she walks and is afraid to put her foot so as not to step on a person, but they also stopped being afraid of the dead...” And the partisan Valentina Pavlovna Kozhemyakina kept the following detail in her memory: the first days of the war, our units were retreating with heavy fighting, the whole village came out to see them off, and she and her mother were standing there. “An elderly soldier passes by, stops near our hut and bows low, right at his mother’s feet: “Forgive me, mother... But save the girl!” Oh, save the girl! “And I was sixteen years old then, I have a long, long braid...” She will also remember another incident, how she would cry over the first wounded man, and he, dying, would tell her: “Take care of yourself, girl. You will still have to give birth... Look how many men have died...".

Women's memory covers that continent of human feelings in war, which usually eludes men's attention. If a man was captivated by war as an action, then a woman felt and endured it differently due to her feminine psychology: bombing, death, suffering - for her this is not the whole war. The woman felt more strongly, again due to her psychological and physiological characteristics, the overloads of war - physical and moral, she had a harder time enduring the “male” nature of war. And what she remembered, took from mortal hell, today has become a unique spiritual experience, the experience of boundless human capabilities which we have no right to consign to oblivion.

Perhaps in these stories there will be little actual military and special material (the author did not set herself such a task), but in them there is an excess of human material, the material that ensured victory Soviet people over fascism. After all, in order for everyone to win, for the whole people to win, everyone, each individually, had to strive to win.

They are still alive - participants in the battles. But human life is not infinite, it can only be extended by memory, which alone conquers time. People who endured great war Those who won it realize today the significance of what they did and experienced. They are ready to help us. More than once I have come across thin student notebooks and thick general notebooks in families, written and left for children and grandchildren. This grandfather's or grandmother's inheritance was reluctantly transferred into the wrong hands. They usually made the same excuses: “We want the children to have a memory…”, “I’ll make a copy for you, and keep the originals for my son...”

But not everything is written down. Much disappears, dissolves without a trace. Forgotten. If you don't forget the war, a lot of hatred appears. And if a war is forgotten, a new one begins. That's what the ancients said.

Collected together, the stories of women paint a picture of a war that does not have a feminine face at all. They sound like evidence - accusations against the fascism of yesterday, the fascism of today and the fascism of the future. Mothers, sisters, wives blame fascism. A woman accuses fascism.

Here one of them is sitting in front of me, telling how just before the war her mother did not let her go to her grandmother without an escort, supposedly she was still little, and two months later this “little one” went to the front. She became a medical instructor and fought from Smolensk to Prague. She returned home at twenty-two years old, her peers were still girls, and she was already a lived person who had seen and experienced a lot: wounded three times, one serious wound - in the chest area, she was shell-shocked twice, after the second shell-shock, when she was dug out from a filled-up trench, turned gray. But I had to start my life as a woman: learn to wear a light dress and shoes again, get married, give birth to a child. A man, even if he returned crippled from the war, he still started a family. And women's post-war fate was more dramatic. The war took away their youth, took away their husbands: few of their age returned from the front. They knew this even without statistics, because they remembered how the men lay in heavy sheaves on the trampled fields and how it was impossible to believe, to come to terms with the thought that these tall guys in sailor peacoats could no longer be lifted, that they would remain forever lying in mass graves - fathers , husbands, brothers, grooms. “There were so many wounded that it seemed that the whole world was already wounded...” (Anastasia Sergeevna Demchenko, senior sergeant, nurse).
Part 46 -