A profound masterpiece!

Last Witness is the author's collection of the memories of those children during World War II. Traumatic and heartwrenching accounts that is a MUST-READ. It contains not just everyday details of life in combat but also reveals the actual view of the war during that time.

Some years ago, American writer Alice Walker wrote a picture book entitled “Why War Is Never a Good Idea”. More than anything else I have read, Svetlana Alexievich’s book shows why. It contains testimonies of those who were traumatically impacted as children by the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 and the war that continued there until 1944. Yale historian Timothy Snyder calls the stretch of earth where Alexievich’s “last witnesses” were born—an area which extends from central Poland to western Russia, through Ukraine, Belarus, and the Baltic states—“the bloodlands” and for good reason. He writes that “mass violence of a sort never before seen in history was visited on this region.” People tend to think the horror of the twentieth century is located in the concentration camps, Snyder observes, but the camps are not where most of the victims died; the bloodlands are. Alexievich’s interviewees are for the most part Belarusians. Their childhood memories, which the author apparently collected, recorded, and shaped between 1978 and 2004, bear witness to the intense human and animal suffering in this part of eastern Europe as a direct result of Hitler’s aspirations and depravity. For Stalin’s genocidal acts and crimes against humanity, you will need to read another book.

I concurrently read ARCs of the adult and the more recent young adult editions of <i><b>Last Witnesses</i></b> (translated from the Russian) but my remarks will focus mostly on the latter. I was interested to see how a book, which provides first-hand accounts of wartime experiences and atrocities, would be altered for younger people. Not as much as you might think, it turns out. True, the young people’s version is shorter by about a third, containing only 65 of the original 100 accounts, a few of them with significant edits. Since the book is a collection of memories from some who were as young as two years of age in 1941 (when the Soviet-German War began), many of the recollections are understandably fragmentary. Editors of the young people’s version seem to have rejected a few of the original pieces because they are fractured and confusing, but it’s evident that more of them were excluded because of graphic content. <spoiler>One story that was cut concerns a young girl whose family survived famine during the 900-day Siege of Leningrad by eating beloved family pets. A couple of stories focus on the Germans’ fattening up of captive, pretty, blond children under the age of five in order to use them to transfuse wounded German soldiers. Nazi doctors apparently believed the blood of the very young promoted healing. The children whose blood was repeatedly taken almost always died. Other excluded stories tell of the Nazis’ sexual assault of girls and women, physical abuse and torture of children, and cruelty towards animals. Eyewitness accounts of the punitive/death-squad murders of Jews, local communists, POWs, and relatives of partisan fighters have also been omitted. Germans regularly compelled victims to dig the pits they would fall into when executed. They forced villagers and family members to watch. Any crying by witnesses meant that they too would be shot. Carried out by the notorious Einsatzgruppen, this was “the Holocaust by bullets” that preceded the construction of the Nazi death camps in Poland.</spoiler>

While the young adult edition of <i><b>Last Witnesses</i></b> has fewer survivor accounts than the original, it does have additional special features to make the material accessible. First of all, there’s an introduction, which provides basic information about the founding of the Soviet Union and the terror Stalin inflicted on his own people prior to World War II: the mass killings, including political and military purges that weakened the Red Army; the policies that led to deliberate, genocidal famine; and the creation of the gulag network. An overview of Hitler’s goals is also presented. Early in World War II, the Führer had agreed to leave the Soviet Union alone in exchange for the western half of Poland, but, buoyed by victories in western Europe, he changed his mind and invaded the USSR after all. The land was rich in natural resources—oil and minerals; the soil was suitable for agriculture; and, besides, only communists and racially inferior humans—Slavs and most of Europe’s Jews—lived there. A brief summary of the war itself—a war in which German “criminality against civilians . . . was pushed to an extreme”—follows. The introduction refers the reader to a map of eastern Europe, which includes the major cities mentioned in the witnesses’ recorded oral histories. Unfortunately, this essential component was lacking in both advanced reader copies. It’s not clear if the adult version was to include one at all, but I can’t imagine reading either edition without a map to show the vast distances child evacuees travelled (with other, unrelated children or with family members), usually in squalid cattle cars. Footnotes and a useful fifty-word glossary are also provided. The latter explains many words, terms, and events a younger audience might be unfamiliar with, as well as a few that adults might appreciate, too: “Boletus”, “katiushas”, and “quitrent”, for example, were words unknown to me.

Alexievich’s witnesses, even the youngest, recall the arrival of the Germans in June 1941. As children, they saw and heard the planes strafing the trains that were carrying them away from the fighting: to orphanages or settlements in Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, or Siberia—and elsewhere. Others describe the bombing of their villages, the arrival of black trucks, black motorcycles, and black-uniformed interrogation squads, carrying lists and going door to door to flush out the families of partisan fighters. Up close, the Germans looked surprisingly “ordinary”: handsome, strong, and healthy. Many witnesses comment they had difficulty reconciling these laughing, joking, harmonica-playing youths with the heinous acts they committed.

Submachine gun fire from low-flying aircraft often killed parents as they fled cottages with their young. These were often the children’s first encounters with death, something most would grow used to. Families often ran into forests, sometimes to live among the partisans; other family groups travelled along roads, pushing or pulling carts with food and a few possessions. They made easy targets for the enemy overhead. Grandparents figure prominently in many accounts—rescuing children and small animals the children were attached to, chicks and kittens—but strangers played significant roles as well. Belarusian peasants commonly took in wandering or orphaned children, housed as many as six refugee families in a single dwelling, and despaired when they lacked food for those who were starving. In eastern European peasant communities, unrelated elders were often addressed as grandfather, grandmother, uncle, or aunt. During these dark times, they stepped in as though they really were blood relatives, putting their own lives at risk in order to shelter Jewish and partisan children.

The Germans regularly burned the Belarusian villages they entered. According to the Smithsonian Magazine online, “By one historian’s count, occupying forces murdered all the inhabitants of 629 razed Belarusian villages, in addition to burning down another 5,454 villages and killing at least a portion of their residents.”

<a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/collections/item/object/205260145" target="_blank"> <img src="https://media.iwm.org.uk/ciim5/295/612/mid_000000.jpg?action=e&cat=Photographs" alt="THE OPERATION BARBAROSSA, JUNE-DECEMBER 1941"> </a> <span> THE OPERATION BARBAROSSA, JUNE-DECEMBER 1941 <a href="https://www.iwm.org.uk/corporate/privacy-copyright">© IWM (HU 111384)</a> </span>

Children who travelled east often ended up in orphanages. One woman Alexievich interviewed spoke of feeling protected and loved by the teachers, nannies, and matrons of her orphanage, but far more survivors testify to the lack of tenderness in these institutions. Some orphans observe that the effects of living in such harsh, uncaring places have been long-lasting. As adults, they admit to being emotionally stunted, disconnected, even alienated from others. Maria Puzan comments: “Everyone in the orphanage had trouble growing up. I think it’s probably from pining. We didn’t grow up because we heard so few tender words. We couldn’t grow up without mamas . . .” Affection was not the only thing orphans were starved of in these institutions. Food was extremely scarce. Animals used for labour were often sacrificed, but even this did not meet needs for long. Children ate grass, bark and the buds on trees. There is one striking account of an incident that occurred near the end of the war when conditions were still very harsh: children saved their own limited rations to give to German prisoners. There are other powerful stories of humanity while in hell. When they were incarcerated in a Lithuanian concentration camp, one mother repeatedly reminded her daughter: “We must remain human.” Another survivor, who was recruited to bring wounded Germans water, observes: “Hatred is a feeling that gets formed in a man, it’s not an innate thing.”

Alexievich’s book is full of rich and varied stories. There is a surprisingly humorous narrative of very young orphaned boys taken in by the Red Army. Compelled by officers to attend a school in one locale where the soldiers were stationed, the boys refused to cooperate with mere civilian teachers. We follow only the commands of our military leaders, they told their instructors. The commanding officer subsequently demoted them after issuing strict reminders that their job was to learn.

Orphans were sometimes taken in by partisan fighters as well. Occasionally they went on scouting or other missions. One ten-year-old child, Vasya Saulchenko, who was sent to get a wounded German’s gun, ended up shooting the soldier because the man pointed the weapon at Vasya’s face. This was the first time the boy killed, and it troubled him little during the war; there wasn’t time—“we lived among the dead,” he said, “we even got used to it,”—but, as an adult, he admits to being tormented by recurrent nightmares in which he is trying to fly away, but the soldier keeps pulling him down into a pit. The young adult edition does not retain the paragraphs in which Vasya admits he cannot speak to his son about his experiences. Telling him “would destroy his world. A world without war . . . People who haven’t seen a man kill another man are completely different people . . .” I don’t understand why this important passage was left out.

For me, some of the most poignant stories concern the fragile friendships that formed between children in the direst circumstances: orphanages, concentration camps, or on the streets of cities. One story tells of the close relationship between two boys—one Belarusian; the other, Jewish—who met on the streets of Minsk, lived together in an abandoned apartment, and started shoeshine and luggage-carrying businesses. They acted as porters for Nazi officers arriving by train. Fearing that his friend’s Jewish identity would be discovered, Eduard Voroshilov clipped back his pal Kim’s curly black hair and made sure the boy always wore a cap. One day when the two were anxiously awaiting payment, a German officer pushed Kim, knocking off his hat. His Jewish identity exposed, Kim was taken to the ghetto. Eduard saw him several times afterwards. He regularly went to the ghetto’s barbed-wire fence to toss potatoes to the boy . . . until, after a night of shouting that could be heard across the city, his Jewish friend disappeared.

Again and again while reading this book I thought of the opening line of Frank McCourt’s memoir “When I look back on my childhood I wonder how I managed to survive at all,” so well does it apply to the experiences of the eastern Europeans who tell their stories here. The majority of the last witnesses to whom Alexievich listened have themselves likely died by now. When they spoke to her, though middle-aged and older, they were still grieving their lost childhoods and they continued to long for their dead parents. The psychological effects of their wartime experiences were profound. Immediately after their traumas, many were unable to speak; a few were unconscious for days. Later, some were terrified by the noise or appearance of airplanes or trucks. Sleep disorders—nightmares, shouting, and sleepwalking—were common. Later, memory impairment made it challenging for them to learn in school, and emotional disturbances, including an inability to feel, to cry, to show affection, or forgive made close relationships difficult. “People were a burden to me, I had trouble being with them,” confesses one woman. “I kept something inside that I couldn’t share with anyone.” Another woman had learned from her mother’s experience that physical beauty was dangerous. She became alarmed when her own appearance was praised. Yet another told Alexievich she feared men, not dead ones but the living, and she had never married as a result. The loss of beloved pets and farm animals had caused extreme grief in childhood for some. One woman recalled crying for days as a child over the death by shrapnel of her beloved cat. So marked was she by that experience that when her own daughter begged her for a kitten she could not fulfill that wish. Some of these discussions of the traumatic aftereffects of war have been excluded from the young people’s edition of the book.

This is the third of Svetlana Alexievich’s oral histories I’ve read. I’ve been engaged and moved by all of them, but this one made me weep.

As an adult, of course I understand that Hitler had to be stopped, but that doesn’t mean I will ever believe war is a good idea.

Thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for providing me with a digital advanced reader copy.

I am so glad that someone has been collecting the tales from these former children. my mother and her older sister and their cousins often told their tales from WW2 Some were just heartbreaking. Boy soldiers! Too cruel. Sadly, they are still around, and often much younger in many parts of the world. All their stories should be told. maybe someday the madness will stop. The children of WW2 in Europe, are very old now and many have already passed on. I hope someone is collecting their tales. Great book. Very hard to put down once started.

Alexievich's journalism remains some of the final oral history I've ever read. Chronicling the recollections of survivors who were children during WWII, Last Witnesses allows one to experience the sense of loss and confusion--and the fleeting joys and terrors--that shaped an entire generation. It's not a military history at all, but a human one, and those kinds of stories have so much resonance.

Originally published in 1985, the English translation feels more timely than ever. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky have done amazing work with this edition, and certain lines--"I no longer believed in my mother's hobgoblins crouching behind the stove, and she stopped mentioning them" and "I believed I was brave"--are heartbreaking, because they are such clear depictions of a child leaving childhood behind.

(See all of my Book Reviews) - “Last Witnesses” eBook was published in 2019 (originally published in 1985) and was written by Svetlana Alexievich (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Svetlana_Alexievich). Ms. Alexievich has written at least 6 books and is a Nobel Laureate in Literature.

I categorize this novel as ‘PG’ because it contains scenes of Violence. The book is a collection of memories from children (primarily from the Ukraine) who lived through the Eastern Front of WWII.

I found the 5+ hours I spent reading this 298-page oral history of WWII interesting. Unfortunately, after the first few dozen memories, I found them very repetitive. I like the chosen cover art. I give this book a 3.5 (rounded up to a 4) out of 5.

Further book reviews I have written can be accessed at https://johnpurvis.wordpress.com/blog/.

My book reviews are also published on Goodreads (https://www.goodreads.com/user/show/31181778-john-purvis).

Svetlana continues to awe with stories that would otherwise die unheard. Her journalism is beyond categorization.

The stories are extremely short and not fleshed out well. More a collection of small events told from the child's perspective. This is the first book I chose not to finish. The writing style from the Child's viewpoint did not appeal to me and the stories lacked substance.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for providing an ARC copy of the book. The opinions expressed above are my own.

This is powerful, heartbreaking, very sad, and strangely enough, uplifting. Both of my parents were children of war. Mom was born in July 1941 and she doesn't remember much, but she remembers hunger, constant hunger. Dad was born in 1938 and he lived on a border of USSR (his father was in the military and stationed on a border). My dad remembers running with his older brothers and their mom (my grandma) from the airplanes and their machine guns. My grandma actually kept a skirt she wore that day (it was a blue flowing maxi skirt that she made earlier that year) and it had multiple bullet holes in it. I decided to read this book because of them, to understand what their experience might have been like. Now, all I want to do is to hug and hold them...

Such a moving emotional book. I have not read a book by Svetlana Alexievich before but this will not be my last one. I have read hundreds of books from this era and several of them written by children. This book has hundreds of memories from hundreds of children. Whether about family, weather, soldiers, food, animals, they all have some memory from that time. Most don’t want to remember, but all memories are different. I’m so fascinated with this book, I could read these short memories forever. I also posted a review on Amazon

"Last Witnesses" is Svetlana Alexievich’s collection of the memories of Russian children during World War II. These precious children had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with deeply embedded trauma from the war. Alexievich gives voice to powerful and personal experiences of these young individuals.
My heart broke as I read this book. I had to take frequent breaks because the content is very dark, violent and depressing. Yet it's also enlightening and reveals a side of the war I had not known before. I recommend "Last Witnesses" to readers interested in WW2, youth, trauma, and resilience.

I don’t think I’ve wanted to cry so much reading a war book since reading Black Book in Russian about the Russian Holocaust, What a unique perspective to learn about horrors of war: but from the mouths of babes. Svetlana Alexievich’s work is poignant, heartbreaking and so very necessary as a testimony of a group that probably most often gets ignored by historians and God knows, there are fewer of them each day,

Alexievich again brings the stories of those who experienced the horrors of war to the reader in a compilation that speaks to the resilience of the human spirit. There are many memoirs, novels, and histories detailing the holocaust and the suffering of the Jewish people under Nazi occupation. Alexievich has focused her works on life in the Soviet Union, Ukraine, and other eastern European countries during the war and its aftermath.

In "Last Witnesses" we are reminded that the number of individuals who are able to share their personal recollections is dwindling and it is even more important that we not forget what they endured and how important it is for the world to remember the devastation and suffering that war leaves in its wake. These are the stories of children, now adults, and we see how the exposure to violence and deprivation robbed them of their childhood and changed their lives forever. From the siege of Leningrad, the bombing of villages, assassination of partisans or anyone involved in the resistance, life in the orphanages, and at its worst the death camps - these children experienced and survived both the worst and at the same time the best mankind has to offer. Literature and history has always served to remind of us of the past so we can try to do better in the future. The voices of these survivors as they share their memories are clear, speak out loudly and are a warning of the risks we face as a world community when fascism and extreme nationalism are allowed to flourish and receive recognition.

For more reviews and bookish posts please visit: http://www.ManOfLaBook.com

Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Richard Pevear and Lariss Volokhonsky) is a collection of short memoirs told by people who were children during World War II. Ms. Alexievich is a Noble Prize winning author and journalist.

I always found it fascinating to learn what children remember. Something which you or I won’t give a second thought to, could be a lifetime memory for someone else – hopefully not a traumatic one.
But one never knows.

Keeping that in mind, Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich (translated by Richard Pevear and Lariss Volokhonsky) is an interesting, sometime horrifying, collection of very short stories told by people about their childhood during World War II, or as it’s called in Russia The Great Patriotic War. Some children remember the horrors they witnessed, other remember smells or the day the war started.

The war, in which the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, lasted 4 years and cost approximately 27 million Soviet lives. It was a ruthless time, brutality and hunger were everywhere and one never knew who might survive to the see the next day.

The stories the author collected shattered many lives, not the least the childhood of the person telling. Several of them never recovered after their childhood ended abruptly, no matter what age they were.

The collection consists of many stories from all different parts of the Soviet Union, the front lines, those who were partisans, the ones who were under siege in Leningrad with nothing to eat, and even children sent as slaves to Germany. Many of the stories center around the separation of the children from their parents, whether they were fighting, murdered by the Nazis, or separated due to the realities of war.

For many of the story-tellers these events were difficult to verbalize, even though many decades have passed. This book, even though difficult to read, is an important reminder that we must not forget the past, and that war exacts a heavy toll from everyone in its path – no matter the age, race, or religion.

Svetlana Alexievich won the 2015 Nobel Prize for her polyphonic nonfiction and this book, a collection of accounts from adults looking back on their childhoods during World War II in the Soviet Union, illustrates the power of her oral histories. The stories told by each participant soon become numbingly similar—mothers and fathers murdered, often in front of the child; villages set alight; homelessness and displacement; hunger—so much so that the accounts almost start to blur together and lose their potency. And then someone will recount a detail—how the frozen hanged bodies of partisans tinkled together in the trees like ghoulish wind chimes; how Russian children went sledding using the bodies of dead Germans as the sleds; how desperate and starving people bought and ate dirt that came from bombed and destroyed warehouses at the market because it retained a taste of the sunflower oil or the burned jam that had been spilled on it—and you’re jolted back into the horror of each person’s individual suffering. This book was originally published in 1985, but is depressingly relevant today. As one participant says, “Recently they showed refugees on television … Somewhere, again, there is war. Shooting. Hungry people standing in lines with empty bowls. With empty eyes. I remember those eyes … I ran to the other room, I was in hysterics … ” And another notes that “We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak …  Our words will be the last … ” As difficult as these voices are to hear, Last Witnesses is a powerful and necessary record.

Thank you to NetGalley and Random House for providing me with an ARC of this title in exchange for my honest review.

On August 23, 1939–shortly before World War II (1939-45) broke out in Europe–enemies Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union surprised the world by signing the German-Soviet Nonaggression Pact, in which the two countries agreed to take no military action against each other for the next 10 years. https://www.history.com/topics/world-war-ii/german-soviet-nonaggression-pact.

In June of 1941, Germany began a quick rout through Mother Russia, both in the air and on the ground, killing everything in their path. This book by Svetlana Alexievich is a collection of the thoughts and memories of Russian children, children of various ages from several areas of Russia, of what they remembered of the German invasion of their homeland. I am so glad that Ms. Alexievich had the foresight to collect these memories. Originally published in 1985, this English translation is courtesy of RandomHouseBooks.com, Penguin Classics. Many of these stories would have been lost without this written work, and I am grateful for this translation, courtesy of Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. Every parent should read this book. And every soldier.

We in the USA tend to think of war as soldiers battling soldiers, even with the obvious nightly news that proves that wrong. And we also consider it to be 'Over there'. This book is a reminder that war is Hell. Anywhere. Everywhere.

I received a free electronic copy of this study from Netgalley, Svetlana Alexievich, and current publisher Penguin Classics. Thank you all for sharing your hard work with me. I have read this work of my own volition, and this review reflects my honest opinion of this work.

Originally released in Russia in the eighties, the translated copy is soon to be released here for what I believe is the first time. If you've read others by this author you know she gathers up first hand accounts of various events and catastrophies, then arranged them with little or no change. This book is a heartbreaker as most are when children are concerned. She interviews the now grown people, eliciting from them there memories of war, the Nazi invasion of Russia. There are a range of ages, the youngest was four. She gives their names, what their present occupation is and what age they were in their first remembrances.

"Then all the colors disappeared. All shades, for the first time the word death appeared; everybody began to repeat this incomprehensible word. And mama and papa weren't there."

"I'm a man without a childhood. Instead of a childhood, I have the war."

"During the war I hadn't seen a single child's thing. I forgot they existed. Children's toys......"

The author beArs witness, she gives those who experienced the unimaginable a place to tell and share their stories, their memories. I applaud her for this. So this isn't an easy read, but along with the horror was kindness, someone who cared when no one else was left that belonged to them.

ARC from Netgalley.

I received a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Thank you NetGalley.
Last Witnesses is a collection of stories from the children who experienced WWII. This isn't my normal "genre" of book, but this was a fabulous book. I learned a lot.. I could feel the children's pain and trauma. I will definitely be reading more by this author.

These pictures, these lights. My riches. The treasure of what I lived through…

Last Witnesses is the latest work from incomparable Belarusian journalist and Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich to be translated from Russian to English. In the vein of her other books, this oral history collects stories told from one of Russia’s immense twentieth century tragedies. Although her other works also feature some voices recalling incidents and scenes from childhood, this one is unique in that all of these recollections are from people who survived the Second World War in the Soviet Union as children — sometimes close to combat and sometimes at home, or what remained of it.

These memories are painful, achingly so, but often hopeful. They’re centered around the remembered joy of some act of kindness or mercy, or else around something almost too terrible to comprehend, underscored by the realization that it was experienced by a child.

Each vignette begins with the speaker’s name, their age at the time of their story, and their profession in adulthood. There’s something jarring about this, as it provides the only context we get of their future juxtaposed with a haunting, personal moment from their past. We know they survived, they’ve made a life despite the sometimes emotionally derailing events they experienced, but there’s something purposely clinical about it. Even when they’re reflecting on how their suffering during wartime affected their adult lives and shaped their personalities, there’s distance.

These are best read in small doses, because they are intense. Many are upliftingly hopeful, replete with warmth and kindness, but so many of them are devastating and senseless. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read them; on the contrary, as more than one of the subjects says themselves, they need to tell these stories and be heard. The simplicity of the telling belies the complexity of the message, and often there’s a lot left unsaid. Like the many that include mentions of rescue by returning Red Army soldiers: “They took us in the direction of the sunrise. Home…” but we know that wasn’t a simple happily-ever-after.

A recurrent story told is of those sent to Germany where their blood was taken forcefully, because “German doctors thought that the blood of children under five years old contributed to the speedy recovery of the wounded. That it had a rejuvenating effect.” I never knew this, although since they believed all kinds of weird pseudoscience in Germany then I’m not surprised, just horrified.

The stories are highly impressionistic, thanks to the sensory elements that survived the decades until Alexievich interviewed them (this was originally published in 1985.) Colors often stood out, even when the storyteller acknowledges memory might be failing them in terms of accuracy.

I remember everything in black: black tanks, black motorcycles, German soldiers in black uniforms. I’m not sure that it was really only black, but that’s how I remember it…I’m wrapped in something and we hide in the swamp. All day and all night. The night is cold. Strange birds cry in frightening voices. It seems that the moon shines very, very bright.

Before the war my older sister worked in the regional party committee, and she stayed behind for the underground work. She brought home many books from the committee library, portraits, red banners. We buried them in the garden under the apple trees. Also her party card. We did it during the night, and I had the feeling that the red…the red color…would be seen from under the ground.

It’s this kind of detail that makes these so tangibly felt. Reaching back to childhood, even non-traumatic memories often have a wash of color over scenes. It was one of many elements that made these so affectingly perceptible.

More so than some of Alexievich’s others, the stories told here feel like smaller parts of a whole, without as much context. The recollections are succinct, none more than a few pages long, and background about families and prewar lives quite brief. It’s purposeful, this revealing of only the most powerful memory, but it did sometimes leave me wondering more about specific anecdotes, or the endings of stories. They often lack a defined beginning, middle, and end. They’re structured so well that it mostly works, but occasionally one would leave questions about how it was ever resolved.

Like a young girl who remembers being pushed from a train bound for Germany, given the opportunity to save herself by her fellow deportees. “I landed in some ditch and fell asleep there. It was cold, and I dreamed that mama was wrapping me in something warm and saying gentle words. I’ve had that dream all my life.” Her recollection ends shortly after, but without explaining how she got out of that ditch. These are their stories and their choices of what to tell and what not, but sometimes it was almost unbearable to be left wondering what was going unsaid.

Wherever you are, mama, I’m there, too. Wherever you are…

Heartbreaking but revelatory, as always Alexievich knows how to compile a unique, deeply felt chronicle of tragedy and war, and the shadows they cast long after they’re past. The translation is mostly smooth, but contains a few oddities. Pevear and Volokhonsky always favor some strange word choice that I think could be better expressed, but for the most part it’s meaningfully done. And regardless, the impact of these stories is strong, and the value of such perspectives from children forced to grow up in unimaginable ways witnessing unimaginable things is incomparable.

5*
I received a complimentary ARC copy of this book through NetGalley from Random House Publishing Group. Opinions expressed in this review are completely my own. Thank you to Random House, NetGalley, and of course Svetlana Alexievich for the honor to receive and read an ARC of this book!

This book is absolutely heart-wrenching but the stories are all so raw, real, and puts the reader in each of these Witnesses shoes. It’s really amazing that all these Witnesses were individually interviewed, and how, despite tragic, the author wrote each story beautifully.

This book is a large collection of stories about child witnesses to WWII in the European theater. Most of the stories are based in Belarus and Russia and are just a few pages each. This makes it easy to pick up and start again but for me I couldn’t put it down. Each story sucks you in deeper. It really puts into perspective how good we have it today.

I gave it 5 stars because of how the author was able to cast you into these Witnesses living rooms and lives during the war. The degree of suffering yet will to overcome is amazingly shown through each Witness’s story. Lastly, the emotions, memory blackouts, and responses to traumatic events really show the resiliency of that person described!

On a side note: the story of Zoya Mazharova was just wow! Probably the most intense for me to read.

I couldn't stop reading this book. I have read plenty of books dealing with World War II but this is the first one that was reporting the memories of fairly young children some 40 years after the war through the adults they have become. Often we assume that those children are mostly oblivious to the horrors of war and what happening around them. This book shows how much they were aware and how it effected them at that time and later on in live.
Each story if short. Some are only a couple of pages. But each story brings home the tragedy of what happened.
To bad that history always seems to repeat itself. The human race never seems to learn. Currently we have these situations as a result of genocide, religions, political gain, financial gain or simply power hungry. What will happen to those children!