Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich
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Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II
By Svetlana Alexievich
Translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky
Random House, 2019
Originally published in Russian in 1985, Last Witnesses is the newest English-language addition to Svetlana Alexievich’s work, continuing a translation trend that has accelerated since she won the Nobel Prize in 2015. Sometimes described as “documentary literature,” Alexievich’s nonfiction collects interviews from citizens of the former Soviet Union, focusing on their personal experiences of major events. One of her trademarks is omitting her own questions so that each voice appears in isolation, both fragmented and uninterrupted.
At first glance, Last Witnesses appears to be one of her more straightforward projects. Alexievich interviews around 100 people who were children during World War II, mostly those who lived in and around Minsk at the time. But anticipating the contents of Last Witnesses can’t prepare for the experience. It is the fall of Troy, 100 times over, from the perspective of a child: the chaos of burning, dismembering, wailing, fleeing. The invasion of the Soviet Union, while always a very real possibility, was still a surprise when it came. Where were the Soviet soldiers, the great defenders of the fatherland? How had German tanks rolled into their cities and villages with so little challenge?
Many of those interviewed share images of their lives before the war: going to the movies, watching a grandfather resole shoes, a mother who “baked the best bread in the village,” “sweet rolls and tea with sugar,” primers and cats and gardens. There’s a sort of idealization, sometimes conscious on the part of the speaker, that comes from the awareness of what followed. Almost all recall the precise moment they understood that the fighting had come to their homes. Natasha Golik remembers, “They said: it’s war. I—understandably—being five years old, didn’t picture anything specific. Anything frightening. But I fell asleep from fear, precisely from fear. I slept for two days.” Older children dreamed that the war would be a time for heroics, for unbeatable Soviet fighters to prove their worth against the Germans. But that optimism quickly disintegrated as families attempted to evacuate east amid bombings, executions, and retaliatory partisan attacks.
The stories soon bleed together, a mishmash of specifics and similarities. There are large memory gaps, emphasizing the confusion of things children couldn’t articulate at the time, and the way so many looked to the adults around them to process their unspoken realities. The silent parental pact of “I will protect and comfort you,” and the corresponding message from the eyes of a child, “I know you can protect and comfort me,” were corrupted, exposed as wishful thinking. Some narrators distanced themselves from their parents as a consequence, but for others, this only intensified their need. Zina Kosiak was eight years old at the start of the war, and waited through years of near starvation in the hope that she and her parents would be reunited, only to learn after victory that they had died while looking for her in a bombing. “I’m already fifty-one years old,” she confesses, “But I still want my mamma.” Nina Shunto, six years old at the time, describes how she and her brother were taken in by a kind stranger, only for her to be burned with their new village. “We didn’t know where to go. How would we find another auntie? We had just come to love this one.”
All of Alexievich’s work engages with the burdens of trauma and memory, but there’s a refuge in variety that readers won’t find in this book. Her other titles feature people from all different stages and stations of life, with distinct angles on topics like the Soviet-Afghan War and the Chernobyl nuclear disaster. But the imposed uniformity of childhood makes Last Witnesses uniquely battering. Its narrators gradually meld into a collective persona of The Suffering Child, until we’re left with an almost metronomic display of horrors.
The end result is a disquieting inability to find many of the messages readers might expect from a war book. Other historical accounts trace the why and how of World War II; here, cause surrenders to the lived reality of effect. Few generalizations can be made about storytelling; some of the speakers feel catharsis in sharing their memories, while for others the process is torturous. Readers may want to marvel at the resilience of humanity, that anyone could survive to tell these stories. But that framing obscures the real marvel, which is how effective and indiscriminate Nazi Germany was at obliterating Soviet life. And what type of “resilience” would we really be celebrating in a book like Last Witnesses, beyond the sheer improbability of survival, and the imperative to endure far past the point of endurance?
As with Alexievich’s first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, Last Witnesses gives a voice to those whose stories are overlooked in typical war narratives. But the title has dual significance, as noted by Valya Brinskaya in the book’s final interview. After the postwar deaths of her parents, she explains, “[My sister and I] sensed, we felt at once that we were the last ones. At that limit…that brink…We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak…”
One of the book’s epigraphs paraphrases a quote from Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov, claiming “one little tear” of a child will outweigh any good that comes from social and political upheaval. By definition, the last available primary sources of a war will come from its youngest survivors. In the final reckoning, it will always be the tears and terror of children that have the last word.
—Jennifer Helinek is a book reviewer and EFL teacher working in New York.