Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexievich. Translated by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.

Current events sometimes justify reviewing a book published years ago, especially if the book helps readers better understand their world today. Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Nobel Laureate Svetlana Alexievich is such a book.

In 2016, I reviewed another of Alexievich’s books, Secondhand Time: The Last of the Soviets (published in 2016), an oral history written during the period 1991–2012 when the Soviet Union disintegrated, and the Russian Federation emerged from the wreckage. Before writing this book, Alexievich listened to the stories of thousands of men and women and wrote a book in which they spoke as a chorus to her readers. She used the same approach to write Last Witnesses, which was published in Russian in 1985 and translated to English in 2019.

In Last Witnesses, you read the stories of one hundred Soviet citizens who were between two and fifteen years old during WW II. In each chapter—most are two to three pages long—you hear from one of them; the title of each chapter includes the person’s name, age during the war, and present occupation. In 1985, when the book was first published, these individuals were about 40–55 years old, and likely many were parents or grandparents. They worked throughout the Soviet economy, for example, as accountants, agronomists, artists, engineers, professors, and teachers.

The population of the Soviet Union in 1940, as WW II began, was an estimated 175 million. The number of Soviets who died during WW II is not known because many of the dead were not counted and were buried in mass graves. However, estimates of the number of men, women, and children who died during the war range from 26 million–40 million, or 15–23% of the population. Thus, it is likely that most, if not all, Soviet citizens witnessed war and were powerfully and permanently affected by it. The one hundred people who appear in this book were such witnesses.

Karya remembered the sounds of iron-shod German boots on pavement:

“I saw the first fascists, not even saw but heard—they all had iron-shod boots, they stomped loudly. Stomped over the pavement. I had the feeling that it even hurt the earth when they walked.” – Karya Korotaeva, thirteen years old, became an engineer in hydrotechnology.

Taisa feared separation from her mother:

“Once I experienced fear, after which I wasn’t afraid of any bombing. We hadn’t been warned that it would be a short stop of ten or fifteen minutes. The train started and I was left behind. Alone …  I don’t remember who picked me up … I was literally thrown into the car … Not our car, but the one before the end. For the first time I had a scare that I would be left alone and mama would go off. While mama was near me, I wasn’t afraid. But here I went mute with fright. And until mama came running to me and threw both arms around me, I was mute, and no one could get a word out of me. Mama was my world. My planet. When I had pain somewhere, I would take mama’s hand and the pain would go away. At night I always slept next to her, the closer the less fear there was. If mama was near, it seemed that everything was as it used to be at home. You close your eyes—there isn’t any war.” – Taisa Nasvetnikova, seven years old, became a teacher.

Many were orphaned:

“Small children—there were some forty of us [in an orphanage]—were placed separately. During the night there was howling. We called mama and papa. Our house parents and teachers tried not to say the word mama before us. They told us fairy tales and found books without this word in them. If anyone suddenly said “mama,” howling began. Inconsolable howling.” – Zina Kosiak, eight years old, became a hairdresser.

Vasia lost his childhood:

“The war is my history book. My solitude … I missed the time of childhood, it fell out of my life. I’m a man without a childhood. Instead of a childhood, I have the war.”
“The only other shock like that in my life came from love. When I fell in love … Knew love …” – Vasia Kharevsky, four years old, became an architect.

Nikolai followed his older sister to the front:

“In 1944 my sister Vera came to us for one day on her way from the hospital after being wounded. In the morning she was taken to the train station in a wagon, and I ran after her on foot. At the station a soldier refused to let me on the train: ‘Who are you with, boy?’
“I wasn’t at a loss: ‘I’m with First Sergeant Vera Redkina.’
“That’s how I made it to the war …'” – Nikolai Redkin, eleven years old, became a mechanic.

Lenya did not recognize his father when he returned home at the end of the war:

“I came home from school and found my father, who had returned from the war, asleep on the sofa. He was asleep, and I took papers out of his map case and read them. And I realized—this was my father. I sat and looked at him until he woke up.
“My knees trembled all the time …” – Lenya Khosenevich, five years old, became a designer.

Alexievich’s genius lies not only in hearing the voice of each one of her hundred subjects, but, more importantly, in uniting these voices into a chorus that gives voice to the Soviet people at a time of great suffering.

Such trauma affected not only its direct victims but also became a pervasive trauma that lived on in Soviet society as it rose from the ashes of WWII and life under Josef Stalin. In the aftermath of the war, the USSR raised the standard of living for many of its citizens, developed nuclear weapons, launched Sputnik, and became a world power.

This demographic group, born before 1945—the year I was born—are now at least 80 years old. Some have lived through the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Today they are witnesses to the war in Ukraine, not unlike the one they witnessed a lifetime ago in their own country.

How has it happened that a nation that suffered so deeply during WW II is now inflicting such suffering on one of its neighbors?