War does not have a woman's face... War does not have a woman's face War does not have a woman's face author

DatsoPic 2.0 2009 by Andrey Datso

“We drove for many days... We got out with the girls at some station with a bucket to get water. We looked around and gasped: one after another the trains were coming, and there were only girls there. They were singing. They were waving at us - some with kerchiefs, some with caps. It became clear : there are not enough men, they died in the ground. Or in captivity. Now we are in their place... Mom wrote me a prayer. I put it in the medallion. Maybe it helped - I returned home. I kissed the medallion before the battle... "

“Once at night, a whole company was conducting reconnaissance in force in our regiment’s sector. By dawn it withdrew, and a groan was heard from the no-man’s land. A wounded man was left behind. “Don’t go, they’ll kill you,” the soldiers didn’t let me in, “you see, it’s already dawn.” She didn’t listen. , crawled. She found a wounded man, dragged him for eight hours, tying his arm with a belt. She dragged him alive. The commander found out and rashly announced five days of arrest for unauthorized absence. And the deputy regiment commander reacted differently: “Deserves a reward.” At the age of nineteen, I I had a medal "For Courage". At the age of nineteen I turned gray. At the age of nineteen, in the last battle, both lungs were shot through, the second bullet passed between two vertebrae. My legs were paralyzed... And I was considered killed... At the age of nineteen... I have "My granddaughter is like this now. I look at her and I don’t believe it. Child!"

“I was on night duty... I went into the ward of the seriously wounded. The captain was lying... 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, what am I - she answered him there. She left and returned an hour later. He lies dead. And that smile on his face..."

“And when he appeared for the third time, it’s just one moment - he will appear, then he will disappear - I decided to shoot. I made up my mind, and suddenly this thought flashed: this is a man, even though he is an enemy, but a man, and somehow I started trembling hands, trembling and chills all over my body. Some kind of fear... Sometimes in my dreams this feeling comes back to me now... After plywood targets, it was difficult to shoot at a living person. I can see him through an optical sight, okay I see. It’s as if he’s close... And something inside me resists... Something doesn’t give, I can’t make up my mind. But I pulled myself together, pulled the trigger... We didn’t succeed right away. Not It's a woman's business to hate and kill. Not ours... We had to convince ourselves. Persuade..."

“And the girls were eager to go to the front voluntarily, but a coward would not fight on his own. These were brave, extraordinary girls. There are statistics: losses among frontline physicians took second place after losses in rifle battalions. In the infantry. What is it like, for example, to pull a wounded man out of battlefield? I'll tell you now... We went on the attack, and they started mowing us down with a machine gun. And the battalion was gone. Everyone was lying down. They weren't all killed, there were many wounded. The Germans were hitting, they didn't stop firing. Completely unexpected for everyone First one girl jumps out of the trench, then a second, a third... They began to bandage and drag away the wounded, even the Germans were speechless with amazement for a while. By ten o'clock in the evening, all the girls were seriously wounded, and each one saved a maximum of two or three people . They were awarded sparingly, at the beginning of the war they did not scatter awards. The wounded man had to be pulled out along with his personal weapon. The first question in the medical battalion: where are the weapons? At the beginning of the war there was not enough of it. A rifle, a machine gun, a machine gun - these also had to be carried. In forty-one, order number two hundred and eighty-one was issued on the presentation of awards for saving the lives of soldiers: for fifteen seriously wounded people carried out from the battlefield along with personal weapons - the medal "For Military Merit", for saving twenty-five people - the Order of the Red Star, for saving forty - the Order of the Red Banner, for saving eighty - the Order of Lenin. And I described to you what it meant to save at least one person in battle... From under bullets..."

“What was going on in our souls, the kind of people we were then will probably never exist again. Never! So naive and so sincere. With such faith! When our regiment commander received the banner and gave the command: “Regiment, under the banner!” On your knees!", we all felt happy. We are standing and crying, everyone has tears in their eyes. You won’t believe it now, from this shock my whole body tensed up, my illness, and I got “night blindness”, it’s me it happened from malnutrition, from nervous fatigue, and so, my night blindness went away. You see, the next day I was healthy, I recovered, through such a shock to my whole soul..."

“A hurricane wave threw me against a brick wall. I lost consciousness... When I came to my senses, it was already evening. I raised my head, tried to squeeze my fingers - they seemed to be moving, barely opened my left eye and went to the department, covered in blood. In the corridor I meet our older sister, she didn’t recognize me, she asked: “Who are you? Where from?" She came closer, gasped and said: "Where have you been for so long, Ksenya? The wounded are hungry, but you are not there." They quickly bandaged my head and my left arm above the elbow, and I went to get dinner. My vision was getting dark, sweat was pouring out like hail. I started handing out dinner, fell. They brought me back to consciousness, and all I could hear was: "Hurry! Hurry!" And again - "Hurry! Hurry!" A few days later they were still taking blood from me for the seriously wounded."

“We went to the front quite young. Girls. I even grew up during the war. Mom tried it on at home... I grew ten centimeters...”

We are advancing... The first German villages... We are young. Strong. Four years without women. There is wine in the cellars. Snack. They caught German girls and...
Ten people raped one... There were not enough women, the population fled from the Soviet army, they took young people. Girls... Twelve to thirteen years old... If she cried, they beat her, they forced something into her mouth. It hurts her, but it makes us laugh. Now I don’t understand how I could... A boy from an intelligent family... But it was me...
The only thing we were afraid of was that our girls wouldn’t find out about it. Our nurses. It was a shame in front of them..."
“Someone gave us away... The Germans found out where the partisan detachment was camping. They cordoned off the forest and the approaches to it 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 affected both equipment and people tightened tightly. There was a radio operator with us, she recently gave birth. The child is hungry... Asking for the breast... But the mother herself is hungry, there is no milk, and the child is crying. The punitive forces 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..."
“We were surrounded... Political instructor Lunin is with us... He read out the order that Soviet soldiers do not surrender to the enemy. As Comrade Stalin said, we have no prisoners, but traitors. The guys took out pistols... The political instructor ordered: “Don’t necessary. Live, boys, you are young." And he shot himself...
“After the war... After the war, human life was worth nothing. I’ll give you one example... I was riding on the bus after work, suddenly shouts began: “Stop the thief!” Stop the thief! My purse..." The bus stopped... Immediately there was a crush. The young officer takes the boy out onto the street, puts his hand on his knee and - bang! breaks it in half. He jumps back... And we are going... No one interceded for the boy, he didn’t call a policeman. They didn’t call a doctor. And the officer had military decorations all over his chest... I started to get out at my stop, he jumped off and gave me his hand: “Come in, girl...” So gallant...”
“Many of us believed... We thought that after the war everything would change... Stalin would believe his people. But the war was not over yet, and the trains had already gone to Magadan. The trains with the victors... They arrested those who were in captivity , survived in German camps, who was taken by the Germans to work - everyone who saw Europe. He could tell how the people lived there. Without communists. What kind of houses and what kind of roads are there. About the fact that there are no collective farms anywhere...
After the Victory, everyone fell silent. They were silent and afraid, just like before the war...

Svetlana ALEXIEVICH

WAR HAS NOT A WOMAN'S FACE...

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.

In the most terrible war of 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 of the October Revolution, there is the following passage: “The Oxford Dictionary has legitimized some Russian words that are now accepted in the world: for example, add one more the word is the 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 cope with as well as their brothers, husbands, and fathers,” wrote Marshal of the 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...

The partisan movement became popular. 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, such as the cavalry maiden Nadezhda Durova, the partisan Vasilisa Kozhana, during the Civil War there were women in the ranks of the Red Army, but most of them were nurses and doctors. The Great Patriotic War showed the world an example of the massive participation of Soviet women in the 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.

09.10.2015

“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..."

“...On the thirtieth of May, 1943, at exactly one o’clock in the afternoon there was a massive raid on Krasnodar. I jumped out of the building to see how they managed to send the wounded from the railway station. Two bombs hit the barn where ammunition was stored. Before my eyes, boxes flew higher than a six-story building and burst. I was thrown against a brick wall by a hurricane wave. Lost consciousness...
When I came to my senses, it was six o’clock in the evening. She moved her head and hands - they seemed to be moving, barely opened her left eye and went to the department, covered in blood. My older sister met me in the corridor; she didn’t recognize me and asked: “Who are you? Where?". She came closer, recognized her and said: “Where have you been for so long, Ksenya? The wounded are hungry, but you are not there.” They quickly bandaged my head and my left arm above the elbow, and I went to get dinner. It was getting dark before my eyes and sweat was pouring out. I started handing out dinner and fell. They brought me back to consciousness, and all I could hear was: “Hurry!.. Faster!..” I also gave blood to the seriously wounded.
For twenty months no one replaced me, no one replaced me. The left leg, swollen to the knee, is bandaged, the arm was operated on, it is also bandaged, the head is bandaged. During my school years, I passed the standards for the BGTO and GTO, but there is no athlete in the world who could ride in such a state for twenty months around the clock. I rode and endured everything.
...Everything has now been restored, everything is buried in flowers, but I am languishing in pain, and even now I do not have a woman’s face. I can't smile, I groan every day. I changed so much during the war that when I came home, my mother didn’t recognize me. They showed me where she lived, I went to the door and knocked. Answered:
- Yes Yes...
I walked in, said hello and said:
- Let me spend the night.
Mom was lighting the stove, and my two younger brothers were sitting on the floor on a pile of straw, naked, with nothing to wear. Mom didn’t recognize me and answered:
- Go further.
I still ask: yes, somehow. Mom says:
- Do you see, citizen, how we live? Our soldiers slept for as long as they did. Before it gets dark, move on.
I come closer to my mother, she again:
- Citizen, move on before it gets dark.
I lean over, hug her and say:
- Mom-mommy!
Then they will all attack me and roar...
I went through a very difficult path. To date, there are no books or films to compare with what I experienced.”

“They were sorry, they didn’t let me go to the front line. But I still became a medical instructor for a machine gun company. I wasn't afraid to die. Because of my youth, probably. Once at night, a whole company conducted reconnaissance in force in our regiment’s sector. By dawn she had moved away, and a groan was heard from the no-man's land. “Don’t go, they’ll kill you,” the soldiers told me, “you see, it’s already dawn.”
She didn’t listen and crawled. She found a wounded man and dragged him for eight hours, tying his arm with a belt. She dragged a living one. The commander found out and rashly announced five days of arrest for unauthorized absence. But the deputy regiment commander reacted differently: “Deserves a reward.” I understood both of them...
At the age of nineteen I had a medal “For Courage”. At nineteen she turned gray. At the age of nineteen, in the last battle, both lungs were shot, the second bullet passed between two vertebrae. My legs were paralyzed, and they considered me dead... When I arrived home, my sister showed me the funeral!..”

“The soldiers lay down. Command: “Forward! For the Motherland!” and they lie there. Again the command, again they lie down. I took off my hat so they could see that I was a girl, I stood up... And they all stood up, and we went into battle.”

“When I saw the first fascist soldier, I could not utter a word, I lost my speech. And they come young, cheerful and smiling. And wherever they stopped, wherever they saw a pump or a well, they began to wash themselves. Their sleeves are always rolled up. And they wash, they wash... There is blood all around, screams, and they wash, they wash... And such hatred rose from within that you could barely restrain yourself. I came home, I changed two shirts. That’s how I wanted it, that’s how everything inside protested against the fact that they were here. I couldn't sleep at night."

“The Germans entered the village on motorcycles. I looked at them with all my eyes: they were young, cheerful, laughing all the time. They laughed! It stopped my heart that they were here, on your land, and still laughing.
I only dreamed that I would take revenge, that I would die and that they would write a book about me. She was ready to do everything for her homeland.
- But you had a small child?
- I gave birth to my daughter in forty-three. In the swamp she gave birth in a haystack. I dried the diapers on myself, put them in my bosom, warm them up and swaddle them again. Everything around was burning, villages were burned along with people... Nine villages were burned in our Gressky district (there was one before the war, now its entire territory is included in the Slutsky district).
I collected cinders myself and gathered my friend’s family. They found the bones, and where there was a piece of clothing left, even just a small edge, they found out who it was. I picked up one piece, she said: “Mom’s jacket...”. And she fell. Some collected bones in a sheet, others in a pillowcase. What was clean? And they put it in a common grave. Only the bones are white...
After that, no matter what task I was sent on, I went. I wanted to provide as much help as possible. I didn't regret anything.
My child was small, three months old, and I went with him on missions. The commissioner sent me away, and he cried: “My soul hurts.” I brought medicine from the city, bandages, serum... I’ll put it between my arms and legs, I’ll bandage it with diapers and carry it. The wounded are dying in the forest. Need to go. No one will get through, there are German and police posts everywhere, I passed through alone.
Now it’s hard to tell like that... To have a temperature, the baby cried, I rubbed salt on him. Then he is all red, there is a rash on him, he crawls out of his skin. I approach the post: “Typhoid, sir... Typhus...” They shout for her to leave quickly: “A century!.. A century...” And she rubbed it with salt and put in garlic. And the baby is small... From the age of three months I went with him on missions... I also breastfed...
As soon as we pass the checkpoints, I enter the forest, crying and crying. I'm screaming! So sorry for the child. And in a day or two I go again. Necessary..."

“In the company, in terms of my height and build, I turned out to be the smallest, height one hundred and fifty-three centimeters, shoes of size thirty-four and, naturally, the military industry did not make such tiny sizes, and even more so America did not supply them to us. I got boots of size forty-two, I put them on and took them off without unlacing, through the tops, heavy, and I walked in them, dragging my feet on the ground. My march on the stone pavement sparked sparks, and the walk looked like anything other than a march. It’s scary to remember how painful the first march was.
The commander saw me coming and called me:
- Smirnova, how do you march in combat? What, they didn’t teach you why you don’t raise your legs? I announce three outfits out of turn...
I answered:
- Yes, Comrade Senior Lieutenant, three squads are out of turn! she turned to walk, and her shoes remained on the floor, her feet were rubbed bloody by the tops. Then it turned out that I could no longer walk differently. The company shoemaker Parshin was given the order to sew me boots from an old raincoat, size thirty-six...”

“We were girls just like you, don’t think that we were different. Discipline, regulations, insignia - all this military wisdom was not given to us right away. We stand guarding the planes. And the charter says that if someone is walking, they must be stopped: “Stop, who’s walking?” My friend saw the regiment commander and shouted: “Wait, who’s coming? Excuse me, but I will shoot! Can you imagine? She shouts: “Excuse me, but I will shoot!”

“When we arrived at the front line, we turned out to be more resilient than the older ones. I don't know how to explain this. They carried men two to three times heavier than us. You are dragging him and his weapon, and he is also wearing an overcoat and boots. You put eighty kilograms on yourself and drag it. You lose... You go after the next one, and again seventy-eighty kilograms... And so five or six times in one attack. And you yourself have forty-eight kilograms - ballet weight. I just can’t believe how we could..."

“...Medical instructors in tank units died quickly. There is no room for us in the tank; you cling on top of the armor, and the only thing you can think about is not to get your legs pulled into the tracks. And we have to watch where the tank catches fire... Run there, crawl... There were five of us at the front: Lyuba Yasinskaya, Shura Kiseleva, Tonya Bobkova, Zina Latysh and me. Konakovo girls - the tank crews called us. And all the girls died...
Before the battle in which Lyuba Yasinskaya was killed, she and I sat in the evening, hugging each other, talking. It was forty-three. Our division approached the Dnieper. She suddenly says to me: “You know, I will die in this battle... I have some kind of premonition. I went to the foreman and asked for new underwear, but he regretted: “You only recently received it.” Let’s go together in the morning and ask.” I reassure her: “We’ve been fighting with you for two years now, now bullets are afraid of us.”
But in the morning she finally persuaded me to go to the foreman, and we begged him for a pair of new underwear. And now she has this new undershirt. Snow-white, with strings like this... She was all covered in blood... This combination of white and red, with scarlet blood, is still in my memory. This is how she imagined it...
The four of us carried it on a raincoat, it became so heavy. They put all the guys down, a lot of people died in that battle, and Lyuba was on top. It never dawned on me that she was no longer there, that she was dead. I think: I’ll at least take something from her as a souvenir. And she had a ring on her hand; I don’t know what it was, gold or simple. I took it. Although the guys told me: don’t you dare take it, it’s a bad omen. And when it’s time to say goodbye, everyone, according to custom, throws a handful of earth, I threw it too, and this ring flew to the same place, into the grave... To Lyuba... And then I remembered that she loved this ring very much... In their family, the father went through the entire war and returned alive. And my brother came back from the war. The men returned... And Lyuba died...
Shura Kiseleva, she was our most beautiful, burned down. She was hiding the seriously wounded in stacks of straw; shelling began and the straw caught fire. Shura could have saved herself, but to do this it was necessary to abandon the wounded - none of them could move... The wounded burned... And Shura along with them...
Only recently did I learn the details of Toni Bobkova’s death. She shielded her loved one from the mine fragment. The fragments fly - it's just a fraction of a second... How did she make it? She saved Lieutenant Petya Boychevsky, she loved him. And he stayed to live.
Thirty years later, Petya Boychevsky came from Krasnodar and found me at our front-line meeting, and told me all this. We went with him to Borisov and found the clearing where Tonya died. He took the soil from her grave, and then wrote to me that he buried her on his mother’s grave. “I have two mothers,” he wrote, “the one who gave birth to me, and Tonya, who saved my life...”

“And the girls were eager to go to the front voluntarily, but a coward himself would not go to war. These were brave, extraordinary girls. There are statistics: losses among frontline medics ranked second after losses in rifle battalions. In the infantry. What does it mean, for example, to pull a wounded man out of the battlefield? I'll tell you now... We went on the attack, and let's mow us down with a machine gun. And the battalion was gone. Everyone was lying down. They were not all killed, many were wounded. The Germans are hitting and they don’t stop firing. Quite unexpectedly for everyone, first one girl jumps out of the trench, then a second, a third... They began to bandage and drag away the wounded, even the Germans were speechless with amazement for a while. By ten o'clock in the evening, all the girls were seriously wounded, and each saved a maximum of two or three people. They were awarded sparingly; at the beginning of the war, awards were not scattered. The wounded man had to be pulled out along with his personal weapon. The first question in the medical battalion: where are the weapons? At the beginning of the war there was not enough of him. A rifle, a machine gun, a machine gun - these also had to be carried. In forty-one, order number two hundred and eighty-one was issued on the presentation of awards for saving the lives of soldiers: for fifteen seriously wounded people carried out from the battlefield along with personal weapons - the medal “For Military Merit”, for saving twenty-five people - the Order of the Red Star, for saving forty - the Order of the Red Banner, for saving eighty - the Order of Lenin. And I described to you what it meant to save at least one person in battle... From under bullets...”

“I was evacuated first to Kharkov, and then to Tataria. I got a job there. And then one day they were looking for me, and my maiden name was Lisovskaya. Everyone’s name is: “Sovskaya!” Sovskaya! And then I shout: “It’s me!” They tell me: “Go to the NKVD, take a pass and go to Moscow.” Why? Nobody told me anything, and I didn’t know. It’s wartime... I’m already thinking, maybe my husband is wounded, maybe they’re calling me to see him. And I haven’t heard anything from him for four months now. And I was already driving with the intention that I would find him, that he was without arms, without legs, a cripple, and I would take him and come with it.
I arrive in Moscow and go to the address. It says: “Central Committee of the Communist Party of Belarus,” and there are a lot of people like me there. We wonder: “What? Why? Why were we gathered? They say: “You’ll find out everything.” We come in: our Central Committee secretary Ponomarenko is there, all our leaders are there. They asked me: “Do you want to go back to where you came from?” Well, where I came from - from Belarus. Of course I want. And I was sent to a special school.
As soon as we finished our studies, the next day they put us on cars and drove us to the front line. Then we went. I didn’t know what a front was, what a neutral zone was. I'm both scared and curious. "Bang!" - the rockets fired. The snow, I see, is white and white, and here a line of people lay down one after another. There were a lot of us coming. The rocket went out, there were no shots, they gave us the command: “Run!”, and we ran. And so they went...
Then, when we completed our task, we were told that a plane would come and take us to Moscow. And I, being in the rear, received a letter from my husband. It was so much joy, so unexpected, I didn’t know anything about him for two years. Then I write a letter to the Central Committee. I wrote that I would do everything just so that my husband and I could be together. And I quietly conveyed this letter from the commander of our detachment to the pilot. When the planes came for us, they said that everyone had to fly, but Fedosenko had to. We are waiting for the plane, and it is night, dark as in a barrel. And some plane is circling above us, and then it hits us with bombs. It was a Messerschmitt, they spotted us. He went for a new turn, and at this time our plane was descending - “U 2”, and just under the Christmas tree, where I was standing next to it. This pilot crouched slightly above the ground and let’s get up right away, because he knows: the German will now make a U-turn and start shooting again. I grabbed the wing and shouted: “I’m going to Moscow, I have permission.” He even cursed: “Sit down!” So we flew together with him. There were no wounded, no one.
In the month of May in Moscow I wore felt boots. I came to the theater wearing felt boots. And it was wonderful. I am writing to my husband: how can we meet? I was in the reserve, wherever they wanted, they would send me there. She began to ask: send me to where my husband is, give me at least two days, I just need to look at him once, and then I will return and send me wherever you want. Everyone shrugs. But I still find out by the post office number where my husband is fighting, and I go to him. First I come to the regional party committee, show my husband’s address, documents that I am his wife, and say that I want to see him. They answer me that this is impossible, he is on the very front line, that you should go back, and I am so beaten up, so hungry, and how can I go back? I went to the military commandant. He looked at me and told me to let me get dressed a little. They gave me a tunic and a belt to wear around my waist. And he began to dissuade me:
- Come on, it’s very dangerous there, where your husband is...
I sat and cried, then he took pity and gave me a pass.
“You go out,” he says, “on the highway, there will be a traffic controller there, and he will show you how to drive.”
I found this highway, found this traffic controller, he put me in the car, and I was driving. I arrive at the unit, everyone there is surprised, everyone around is military. "And who are you?" - they ask. I can't say - wife. Well, how can you say that, bombs are exploding all around... I say - sister. I don’t even know why I said that - sister. “Wait,” they tell me. “We have to go another six kilometers.” How can I wait when I got so far?.. And just from there the cars came for lunch, and there was a foreman there, so reddish and freckled. He says:
- Oh, I know Fedosenko. But this is in the trench itself.
Well, I begged him. They put me on a cart, I was driving, I couldn’t see anything anywhere, this was news to me. Frontline, no one anywhere, shooting occasionally. We've arrived. The foreman asks:
-Where is Fedosenko?
They tell him:
- They went on reconnaissance yesterday, they were caught by dawn, and they are waiting there.
But they have a connection. And they told him over the phone that his sister had arrived. Which sister? They say: "Red". And his sister is black. Well, since she was a redhead, he immediately guessed which sister she was. I don’t know how he crawled out there, but Fedosenko soon appeared, and we made a meeting there. There was joy...
I stayed with him one day, the second and I said:
- Go to headquarters and report. I'll stay here with you.
He went to the authorities, but I can’t breathe: how can they say that she won’t be able to walk for twenty-four hours? This is the front, that’s clear... And suddenly I see the authorities coming into the dugout: major, colonel. Everyone shakes hands. Then, of course, we sat down in the dugout, drank everything, and everyone said their word that the wife found her husband in the trench, this is a real wife, there are documents. This is such a woman, let me look at such a woman. They said such words, they all cried. I remember that evening all my life.
I stayed with them as a nurse. I went with them on reconnaissance. The mortar hits, I see - it fell. I think: killed or wounded? I run there, and the mortar hits, and the commander shouts:
- Where are you going, damn woman!! I crawl up - alive...
Near the Dnieper at night under the moon I was awarded the Order of the Red Banner. Then they told me that I had been nominated for the Order of the Red Star, but I didn’t look for it. The husband was wounded, seriously. We ran together, we walked together through such a swamp, we crawled together. There was, say, a machine gun on the right, and we were crawling on the left through the swamp, and we pressed ourselves so close to the ground that if the machine gun was on the right side, then he was wounded on the left side in the thigh. They were wounded by an explosive bullet, and try to put a bandage on it, it’s the buttock. Everything was torn apart, both dirt and earth - everything went there.
And we were coming from encirclement. There is nowhere to take the wounded, I also have no medicine. Our only hope is that we will break through. When they broke through, my husband was evacuated all the way to the hospital. By the time I got him there, there was already general blood poisoning. It was New Year. He is dying... And he was awarded many times, I collected all his orders and placed them next to him. It was just a round, and he was sleeping. The doctor comes up and tells me:
- And you go. You need to leave here. He's already dead.
I answer:
- Quiet, he's still alive.
The husband just opened his eyes and said:
- For some reason the ceiling has become blue.
I look:
- No, he is not blue, he, Vasya, is white. - And it seemed to him that it was blue.
The neighbor tells him:
- Well, Fedosenko, if you stay alive, you must carry your wife in your arms.
“And I will wear it,” he agrees.
I don't know, he must have felt like he was dying because he picked me up and kissed me. This is how they kiss for the last time:
- Lyubochka, it’s such a pity, everyone is celebrating New Year, and you and I are here... But don’t be sorry, we will still have everything...
And when he had a few hours left to live, he had this misfortune, that it was necessary to change his bed... I changed his bed, bandaged his leg, and he needs to be pulled up onto the pillow, he’s a heavy man, I pull him so low, low, and now I feel that this is all, that in another minute and he will be gone...
And I wanted to die myself... But I carried our child under my heart, and only this held me back... I buried my husband on the first of January, and thirty-eight days later Vasya was born to me, he has been around since forty-four, and already has children. My husband’s name was Vasily, my son was Vasily Vasilyevich, and my grandson was Vasya... Vasilek...”

© 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... During the First World War in England, women were already taken 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

A man greater than war (from the book's diary)

Millions killed for cheap

We trampled the path in the dark...

Osip Mandelstam

1978–1985

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. The Germans burned eleven distant relatives along with 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. They shouted German words: “Hende 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, history “humanizes” and becomes similar to 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! I was convinced that ordinary people behave more sincerely - nurses, cooks, laundresses... They, how can I define this more accurately, pull 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.