I have family members who were forced out of their homes and sent to Siberia by Stalin, later to be released and left homeless and stateless once the tides turned on the USSR In 1941, which has caused me to neglect to think or really learn about the actual toll that WW2 took on the USSR in general. My WW2 interests have most often been focused on Nazi crimes against Jewish populations in the USSR, but I never really stopped to also think about how the non-Jewish and non-collaborating population was really treated. Reading Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich gave me a whole new perspective on how horrific the invading Nazi army was to the Soviet population in general, with absolutely no regards as to whether they were killing and torturing children, women, men, or animals. They bombed, strafed, tortured, and murdered their way through the land, leaving countless victims along the way. And once they were done with murder, they killed via famine and disease, another form of torture.

Last Witnesses is a very, very hard book to read and I would advise readers to take it slowly. I had to put it down a few times, for several days at a time, not just because of the difficulty of the subject matter, or because of the sheer volume of stories within the pages, but also because I wanted each one to stand out, and not fall within the masses of numbers. When you see the words “26 million dead”, while huge, these words don’t convey the real enormity of life lost during WW2 in the USSR. A third of the 26 million were soldiers, a third civilians murdered directly by the Nazis, and a last third also civilians, murdered indirectly via war-related famine and disease. Last Witnesses provides the stories of many children who survived the war and lived on with memories that no child should ever have to remember. The Nazi army literally killed at random on their push inland, and portrayed a brutality that went beyond what they portrayed in other countries (and that says a huge amount, as we know).

This book was originally published in 1985 in the USSR, and this new edition has been beautifully translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The emotion, the pain, the suffering, and the incomprehension of these childhood memories comes across fully, you can hear the adults voices struggling to remember, to evoke the images that haunt them, and you can still feel the trauma that war caused decades before. Many or most of these voices must have now passed on, making it even more important for us to remember them, and to remember what they endured in the name of war.

These voices should be heard, and imprinted in our minds. Thanks to Svetlana Alexievich for this incredible work (I’m not surprised that she has been awarded a Nobel Prize for her incredible talents), and to Netgalley and the publisher for the advance copy of this book.

Last Witnesses is a compelling read of Russian and Ukrainian children's experiences during WWII. The author compiled their stories with no embellishments. Many are just one or two pages, but the impact is immeasurable. The stories are dark, horrific, and absolutely appalling. This book is such an important contribution to WWII history as most have never heard of the atrocities committed against women and children by the Germans.

Last Witnesses
By Svetlana Alexievich
Last Witnesses is an emotion-filled collection of Russian children during World War ll. History comes to life through the words of these pages and makes one reflect on the ugliness war brings. I think that the only thing to better this experience would be to have an introduction to the memoirs. I think this was a great collection to read.
I was provided a copy of this title through NetGalley in exchange for my opinion.

Last Witnesses is a important,emotional,and powerful book. As people can read history does repeat itself,because people never seen to learn from the past. This book is well written and these stories should never be forgotten.

I think it would be beneficial if this book had an introduction. That being said, I liked reading the many voices of the memories that people had of being children during WWII. I found it interesting and liked that it was an oral history, exactly how the people spoke.

I would like to thank netgalley and the publisher for providing me with a copy free of charge. This is my honest and unbiased opinion of it.

Millions of people in the Soviet Union were killed or suffered mightily during World War II. This book tells the stories of children who lived during this time, in their own voices. This is a wonderful record of history for Americans and other English-speaking readers. For those of us in the West, these stories are still trickling out and may be new to many readers.

These stories are gripping and powerful. A little more overall narrative and structure might have been helpful for those readers not familiar with Russian/Soviet history.

Imagine that you are a toddler, or maybe as old as 10 or so. You and your brothers and sisters and your family and friends are living an ordinary life, except that your father is away on military service. One day, foreign soldiers rumble in on trucks and tanks and begin shooting everyone, mostly women and children. You get away, but your mother is dead, along with most people you know. Or maybe you got lucky and you, maybe with some of your family, fled to the woods and were able to escape to a place where the soldiers didn’t attack. For long years, you work and scavenge for food, barely keeping alive, until the war ends.

Now consider the fact that this did happen to millions of children in the USSR during World War II, and that today these children are in their late 80s and 90s. You probably know people here in the US that age. Can you imagine if the shared experience of all the people you know that age was one of childhood horror?

If your imagination can’t quite conjure up such a nightmare, Svetlana Alexievich takes you there with this searing collection of oral histories. She conducted her interviews in the 1970s, when these children had grown into their 30s and 40s. They had so many different experiences, including joining the partisans while not yet a teenager, going into hiding, moving far from home, being taken in by relatives or acquaintances, or being put into orphanages.

What is common to nearly all these stories is the absence of a father from the start, often the loss of a mother, and in all cases the loss of a childhood. So many of them talk about wanting to have some kind of childhood after the war ended, even if they were nearly grown up by then. Often they coveted dolls and toys, and would even buy them, just to get that feeling of being a child that had been taken from them.

This is a difficult book to get through, but worth it. If only we had learned from WW2 and didn’t keep putting children through the trauma of war, upheaval and loss of their families.

I wasn't but a few stories in and had to take a break. My husband asked why I do this to myself by reading books on the Holocaust. The only answer I have is that these survivor stories need to not only be told, but read. These people have went through the unimaginable.

I appreciate the author taking the time to tell the stories of those who were just children at the time. I've read in other publications where someones hair would turn white on the spot or overnight. There are several mentions of this in the book. My heart broke so many times reading this book.

I would recommend this book, but make sure you have tissues handy.

This is a 2019 translation of a book published in the former Soviet Union in 1985, long before the author won the Nobel Prize.

This is a good book, and worth reading, but not enjoyable.

I did not find this book as terrifying as the online excerpts (in The New York Times here and The Paris Review here) of the author's book of interviews with Chernobyl survivors, it's still pretty damn scary, even if I believe that the interviews were edited for political orthodoxy by Soviet authorities. Which is to say, although the book is almost completely bereft of the Russian-on-Russian cruelty which I am sure took place, there was more than enough horrific German-on-Russian cruelty to supply the nightmares of ordinary folks for months on end. In fact, the only problem with this book is that I could not read it in the evening, as whatever I read after dark usually bleeds (literally, in this case) into my dreams.

I only have a limited number of things to say, so I say them over and over. One of them is the admittedly sentimental notion that you can, in some small way, honor the almost-nameless and -forgotten millions who died needlessly due to the political lunacy of our so-called leaders by reading about them. Another one is that the great volume of knuckleheads abroad in our world today who are clamoring for dramatic change in liberal democracy are actually clamoring to recreate the world portrayed in books like this one, which would be OK with me if only the rest of us could be excluded from the results of their idiocy.

Thanks to Penguin Random House and Netgalley for a free electronic advance review copy of this book.

Svetlana Alexievich brings to live the memories of World War II's children as a child perspective. This is a very good reference book for social studies. The memories are vivid and painful, but Svetlana's preserve these memories to keep in mind to never forget the impact of the war on people lives.

#LastWitnesses #NetGalley

There were things I liked about this book and things I disliked. I enjoyed reading the children’s perspectives and seeing the War through their eyes. I liked that it was so raw and emotional. What I didn’t like was that the stories are extremely short. There are so many which made it hard for me to connect with every story; it felt impossible. I probably would have liked this book better if it went in to each person’s testimonies in more detail.

A difficult read, not only because of the dark subject matter, but also because of the format. This book was a series of many, many (MANY) vignettes, as told by children who survived horrific events of World War II. Each shared memory is fairly brief, some only a page or two long. Switching so quickly between stories, each with new characters and plots, made this book unique in its style. While tough to get through, the book will definitely affect the reader.

"The collected interviews in "Last Witnesses" will simultaneously make one marvel at the power of human endurance, provide an even fuller picture of the nightmarish and destructive disruption of war, and may possibly make one a pacifist by the time they're finished reading - for no one must undergo the horrors recorded here, much less children. Alexievich has crafted a powerful work by shining light on a perspective of war that often goes ignored, and we are all the richer in potential awareness now that we finally have a long, long overdue English translation. of "Last Witnesses." This is definitely not a book to be passed by.