C war is not a woman's face. War has no woman's face read online by Svetlana Aleksievich. About life and being

Svetlana ALEKSIEVICH

WAR IS NOT A FEMALE FACE…

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained 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 an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? A woman gives life, a woman protects life, a woman and life are synonyms.

In the most terrible war of the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She not only rescued and bandaged the wounded, but also fired from a "sniper", bombed, undermined bridges, went on reconnaissance, took language. The woman killed. She killed the enemy, who fell with unprecedented cruelty on her land, on her house, on her children. “It’s not a woman’s lot to kill,” one of the heroines of this book will say, accommodating 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." That 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 the letters of Nicholas Roerich, 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 such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary has legalized some Russian words now accepted in the world: for example, add one more the word is an untranslatable, meaningful Russian word "feat". Strange as it may seem, but not a single European language has a word of at least an approximate meaning ... "If the Russian word" feat "is ever included in the languages ​​of the world, it will be the share of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders who saved the kids and defended the country along with the men.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, paratroopers, sailors, traffic controllers, drivers, ordinary field bath and laundry detachments, cooks, bakers, testimonies of partisans and underground workers. “There is hardly at least one military specialty that our brave women would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls were Komsomol members of the tank battalion, and heavy tank drivers, and in the infantry - machine-gun company commanders, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

Only on 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 the girls sent by the Komsomol were in the active army. In total, over 800 thousand women served in various branches of the military during the war years ...

The partisan movement became popular. Only in Belarus in partisan detachments there were about 60 thousand courageous Soviet patriots. Every fourth person on Belarusian soil was burned or killed by the Nazis.

Those are the numbers. We know them. And behind them are destinies, whole lives turned upside down, twisted by war: the loss of loved ones, lost health, female 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 heart 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 am so glad that I can tell 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 will 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 all this must be forgotten, or I will 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 bear it. He's still a man. But how a woman could, I myself do not know. Now, as soon as I remember, I am terrified, but then I could do anything: I could sleep next to the dead, and I myself shot, and I saw blood, I remember very well that in the snow the smell of blood is somehow especially strong ... So I say, and I already feel bad ... And then nothing, then everything could. She began to tell her granddaughter, and my daughter-in-law pulled me up: why would a girl know this? This, they say, woman is growing ... 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 with her for forty years now, we were underground together during the war. We wanted to get tickets, but the queue was long. She just had a certificate of a participant in the Great Patriotic War with her, and she went to the cash register and showed it. And some girl, about fourteen years old, probably says: “Did you women fight? It would be interesting to know for what such feats you were given these certificates?

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking like in a fever…” (Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers' trenches swam, the dugouts "in three runs" collapsed, 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 for the war. Eleven people were missing from my family: the Ukrainian grandfather Petro, my mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, the Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, my father’s mother, died of starvation and typhus during the partisan blockade, the Nazis burned two families of distant relatives with their children in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, his father's brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years and "my" war. Many times I was scared. I have been hurt many times. No, I will not tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to and couldn't. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decide to include in the story. It contains what I felt, experienced, it also contains 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 have the right to write in this book “I feel”, “I suffer”, “I doubt”. What are my feelings, my torments next to their feelings and torments? Will 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 explicit or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion after many years is also a document.

Svetlana ALEKSIEVICH

WAR IS NOT A FEMALE FACE…

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained 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 an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? A woman gives life, a woman protects life, a woman and life are synonyms.

In the most terrible war of the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She not only rescued and bandaged the wounded, but also fired from a "sniper", bombed, undermined bridges, went on reconnaissance, took language. The woman killed. She killed the enemy, who fell with unprecedented cruelty on her land, on her house, on her children. “It’s not a woman’s lot to kill,” one of the heroines of this book will say, accommodating 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." That 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 the letters of Nicholas Roerich, 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 such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary legalized some Russian words that are now accepted in the world: for example, the word add more one word - an untranslatable, meaningful Russian word "feat". Strange as it may seem, but not a single European language has a word of at least an approximate meaning ... "If the Russian word" feat "is ever included in the languages ​​of the world, it will be the share of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders who saved the kids and defended the country along with the men.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, paratroopers, sailors, traffic controllers, drivers, ordinary field bath and laundry detachments, cooks, bakers, testimonies of partisans and underground workers. “There is hardly at least one military specialty that our brave women would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls were Komsomol members of the tank battalion, and heavy tank drivers, and in the infantry - machine-gun company commanders, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

Only on 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 the 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. "Only in Belarus, there were about 60,000 courageous Soviet patriots in partisan detachments. " Every fourth on Belarusian soil was burned or killed by the Nazis.

Those are the numbers. We know them. And behind them are destinies, whole lives turned upside down, twisted by war: the loss of loved ones, lost health, female 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 heart 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 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 will 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 all this must be forgotten, or I will 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).

“A man, he could bear it. He is still a man. But how a woman could, I don’t know myself. Now, as soon as I remember, horror seizes me, but then I could do everything: sleep next to the dead, and shoot myself , and I saw blood, I remember very well that the smell of blood is somehow especially strong in the snow ... So I say, and I already feel bad ... And then nothing, then I could do everything. This, they say, woman is growing ... 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 with her for forty years now, we were underground together during the war. We wanted to get tickets, but there was a long queue. She just had a certificate of a participant in the Great Patriotic War with her, and she went up to I showed it to the box office, and some girl, about fourteen years old, probably said: "Did you women fight? It would be interesting to know for what such feats you were given these certificates?"

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking as if in a fever ... "(Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers' trenches swam, the dugouts "in three runs" collapsed, 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 for the war. Eleven people were missing from my clan: the Ukrainian grandfather Petro, mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, the Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, father’s mother, died of starvation and typhus during the partisan blockade, the Nazis burned two families of distant relatives with their children in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, his father's brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years and "my" war. Many times I was scared. I have been hurt many times. No, I will not tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to and couldn't. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decide to include in the story. In it is what I felt, experienced. it also includes 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 have the right to write in this book “I feel”, “I suffer”, “I doubt”. What are my feelings, my torments next to their feelings and torments? Will 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 explicit or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion after many years is also a document.

It just so happens that our memory of the war and all our ideas about the war are masculine. This is understandable: it was mostly men who fought, but this is also an acknowledgment of our incomplete knowledge of the war. Although hundreds of books have been written about women who participated in the Great Patriotic War, there is considerable memoir literature, and it convinces us that we are dealing with a historical phenomenon. Never before in the history of mankind have so many women participated in war. In the past, there were legendary units, like the cavalry girl Nadezhda Durova, the partisan Vasilisa Kozhana, during the years of the civil war there were women in the Red Army, but mostly sisters of mercy and doctors. The Great Patriotic War gave the world an example of the mass participation of Soviet women in the defense of their Fatherland.

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained 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 an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? Woman gives life, woman protects life, woman and life are synonyms.

In the most terrible war of the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She not only rescued and bandaged the wounded, but also fired from a "sniper", bombed, undermined bridges, went on reconnaissance, took language. The woman killed. She killed the enemy, who fell with unprecedented cruelty on her land, on her house, on her children. “It’s not a woman’s lot to kill,” one of the heroines of this book will say, accommodating 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." That 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 the letters of Nicholas Roerich, 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 such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary has legalized some Russian words now accepted in the world: for example, add one more the word is an untranslatable, meaningful Russian word "feat". Strange as it may seem, but not a single European language has a word of at least an approximate meaning ... "If the Russian word" feat "is ever included in the languages ​​of the world, it will be the share of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders who saved the kids and defended the country along with the men.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, 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 would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls were Komsomol organizers of a tank battalion, and mechanics-drivers of heavy tanks, and in the infantry - commanders of a machine-gun company, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

Only on 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 the girls sent by the Komsomol were in the active army. In total, over 800 thousand women served in various branches of the military during the war years ...

The partisan movement became popular. Only in Belarus in partisan detachments there were about 60 thousand courageous Soviet patriots. Every fourth person on Belarusian soil was burned or killed by the Nazis.

Those are the numbers. We know them. And behind them are destinies, whole lives turned upside down, twisted by war: the loss of loved ones, lost health, female 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 heart 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 am so glad that I can tell 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 will 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 all this must be forgotten, or I will 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 bear it. He's still a man. But how a woman could, I myself do not know. Now, as soon as I remember, I am terrified, but then I could do anything: I could sleep next to the dead, and I myself shot, and I saw blood, I remember very well that in the snow the smell of blood is somehow especially strong ... So I say, and I already feel bad ... And then nothing, then everything could. She began to tell her granddaughter, and my daughter-in-law pulled me up: why would a girl know this? This, they say, woman is growing ... 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 with her for forty years now, we were underground together during the war. We wanted to get tickets, but the queue was long. She just had a certificate of a participant in the Great Patriotic War with her, and she went to the cash register and showed it. And some girl, about fourteen years old, probably says: “Did you women fight? It would be interesting to know for what such feats you were given these certificates?

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking like in a fever…” (Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers' trenches swam, the dugouts "in three runs" collapsed, 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 for the war. Eleven people were missing from my family: the Ukrainian grandfather Petro, my mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, the Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, my father’s mother, died of starvation and typhus during the partisan blockade, the Nazis burned two families of distant relatives with their children in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, his father's brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years and "my" war. Many times I was scared. I have been hurt many times. No, I will not tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to and couldn't. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decide to include in the story. It contains what I felt, experienced, it also contains 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 have the right to write in this book “I feel”, “I suffer”, “I doubt”. What are my feelings, my torments next to their feelings and torments? 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 explicit or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion after many years is also a document.

It just so happens that our memory of the war and all our ideas about the war are masculine. This is understandable: it was mostly men who fought, but this is also an acknowledgment of our incomplete knowledge of the war. Although hundreds of books have been written about women who participated in the Great Patriotic War, there is considerable memoir literature, and it convinces us that we are dealing with a historical phenomenon. Never before in the history of mankind have so many women participated in war. In the past, there were legendary units, like the cavalry girl Nadezhda Durova, the partisan Vasilisa Kozhana, during the years of the civil war there were women in the Red Army, but mostly sisters of mercy and doctors. The Great Patriotic War gave the world an example of the mass participation of Soviet women in the defense of their Fatherland.

Pushkin, publishing an excerpt from the notes of Nadezhda Durova in Sovremennik, wrote in the preface: “What reasons made a young girl, of a good noble family, leave her father’s house, renounce her sex, take on labors and duties that frighten both men and appear on the battlefield - and what else? Napoleonic! What prompted her? Secret, family afflictions? Inflamed imagination? An innate indomitable tendency? Love?.. ”It was only about one incredible fate, and there could be many guesses. It is quite another when eight hundred thousand women served in the army, and even more were asked to go to the front.

They went because "we and the motherland - for us it was one and the same" (Tikhonovich K.S ... anti-aircraft gunner). They were allowed to go to the front, because it was thrown on the scales of history: to be or not to be a people, a country? That was the question.

What is collected in this book, according to what principle? It will not be famous snipers and not famous pilots or partisans who will tell, a lot has already been written about them, and I deliberately avoided their names. “We are ordinary military girls, of which there are many,” I had to hear more than once. But it was to them that she went, she was looking for them. It is in their minds that what we highly call the people's memory is stored. “When you look at the war with our, woman’s, eyes, it’s more terrible than terrible,” said Alexandra Iosifovna Mishutina, sergeant, medical instructor. In these words of a simple woman who went through the whole war, then got married, gave birth to three children, now she is nursing her grandchildren, and the main idea of ​​the book is concluded.

In optics, there is the concept of "aperture" - the ability of the lens to fix the captured image worse or better. So, the female memory of the war is the most “aperture-fast” in terms of tension of feelings, in terms of pain. It is emotional, it is passionate, full of details, and it is in the details that the document acquires its incorruptible power.

The signalman Antonina Fedorovna Valegzhaninova fought near Stalingrad. Talking about the difficulties of the Stalingrad battles, for a long time she could not find a definition for the feelings that she experienced there, and then suddenly combined them into a single image: “I remember one battle. A lot of people were killed ... Scattered like potatoes when they are turned out of the ground with a plow. A huge, large field ... They just kept moving and lying ... They are like potatoes ... Even a horse, such a delicate animal, she walks and is afraid to put her foot so as not to step on a person, but they have ceased to be afraid of the dead ... "And the partisan Valentina Pavlovna Kozhemyakina kept in mind such a detail: the first days of the war, our units are retreating with heavy fighting, the whole village came out to see them off, they are standing with their mother. “An elderly soldier passes by, stopped near our hut and bows low, low, right at the feet of his mother:“ Forgive me, mother ... But save the girl! Oh, save the girl!“ And I was sixteen years old then, I have a long, long braid ... ”She will also recall another case, how she will cry over the first wounded man, and he, dying, will tell her:“ Take care of yourself, girl. You still have to give birth ... Look how many men died ... ”.

Women's memory covers that continent of human feelings in war, which usually eludes men's attention. If a man was captured by war as an action, then a woman felt and endured it differently due to her female psychology: bombing, death, suffering - for her, the whole war is not yet. The woman felt more strongly, again due to her psychological and physiological characteristics, the overload of war - physical and moral, she endured the "male" being war more difficult. And what she remembered, brought out of mortal hell, today has become a unique spiritual experience, an experience of limitless human possibilities, which we have no right to forget.

Perhaps in these stories there will be little actual military and special material (the author did not set herself such a task), but they contain an excess of human material, the material that ensured the victory of the Soviet people over fascism. After all, in order to win for everyone, for the whole people to win, it was necessary to strive to win for everyone, each individually.

They are still alive - participants in the battles. But human life is not infinite; only memory, which alone conquers time, can prolong it. People who endured the great war, who won it, realize today the significance of what they have done and experienced. They are ready to help us. I have often come across in families thin student and thick common notebooks, written and left for children and grandchildren. This grandfather's or grandmother's inheritance was reluctantly passed into the wrong hands. They were usually justified in the same way: “We want the children to have a memory ...”, “I will make a copy for you, and I will keep the originals for my son ...”

But not everyone is recording. Much disappears, dissolves without a trace. Forgotten. If you do not forget the war, there is a lot of hatred. And if the war is forgotten, a new one begins. That's what the ancients said.

Collected together, the stories of women paint the face of a war that is not at all a woman's face. They sound like evidence - accusations against fascism of yesterday, fascism of today and fascism of the future. Fascism is blamed on mothers, sisters, wives. Fascism is blamed by a woman.

Here is one of them sitting in front of me, telling how, just before the war, her mother would not let her go to her grandmother without an escort, they say, she was still small, and two months later this “little one” went to the front. She became a medical instructor, fought from Smolensk to Prague. She returned home at the age of twenty-two, her peers were still girls, and she was already an old man, who had seen a lot and felt a lot: she was wounded three times, one severe wound in the chest area, she was shell-shocked twice, after the second concussion, when she was dug out of filled trench, turned gray. But it was necessary to start a woman's life: again learn to wear a light dress, shoes, get married, give birth to a child. A man, even if he was a cripple, he returned from the war, but he still created a family. And women's post-war fate was more dramatic. The war took away their youth, took away their husbands: few of their peers returned from the front. They knew this even without statistics, because they remembered how the men lay on the trampled fields in heavy sheaves and how it was impossible to believe, come to terms with the idea that you could no longer lift these tall guys in sailor jackets, that they would remain forever lying in mass graves - fathers , husbands, brothers, grooms. “There were so many wounded that it seemed that the whole world was already wounded ...” (Anastasia Sergeevna Demchenko, senior sergeant, nurse).
Part 46 -

When was the first time in history that women appeared in the army?

- Already in the IV century BC, women fought in the Greek troops in Athens and Sparta. Later they participated in the campaigns of Alexander the Great.

The Russian historian Nikolai Karamzin wrote about our ancestors: “Slav women sometimes went to war with their fathers and spouses without fear of death: thus, during the siege of Constantinople in 626, the Greeks found many female corpses among the killed Slavs. Mother, raising children, prepared them to be warriors.

- And in the new time?

- For the first time - in England in the 1560-1650s they began to form hospitals in which female soldiers served.

What happened in the 20th century?

- The beginning of the century ... In the First World War in England, women were already taken to 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, France, many women also began to serve in military hospitals and hospital trains.

And during World War II, the world witnessed a female phenomenon. Women served in all branches of the armed forces already in many countries of the world: in the British army - 225 thousand, in the American - 450-500 thousand, in the German - 500 thousand ...

About a million women fought in the Soviet army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most "male" ones. Even a language problem arose: the words “tanker”, “infantryman”, “submachine 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, in the war ...

From a conversation with a historian

Man is more than war
(from the book's diary)

Millions killed cheaply

Trampled a 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 it was everyone's favorite reading. All my peers. And this is not surprising - we were children of the Victory. Children of the winners. The first thing I remember about the war? His childhood longing among incomprehensible and frightening words. The war was always remembered: at school and at home, at weddings and christenings, on holidays and at wakes. Even in children's conversations. A neighbor boy once asked me: “What are these people doing underground? After the war, there are more of them than on earth.” We also wanted to unravel the mystery of the war.

Then I thought about death ... And I never stopped thinking about it, for me it became the main secret of life.

Everything for us led from that terrible and mysterious world. In our family, the Ukrainian grandfather, my mother's father, died at the front, was buried somewhere in the Hungarian land, 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 one. My father. It was like that in every house. Everyone has. It was impossible not to think about death. There were shadows everywhere...

The village boys played "Germans" and "Russians" for a long time. German words were shouting: “Hyundai 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 do not know another world and other people. Have they ever been?

* * *

The village of my childhood after the war was female. Babia. I don't remember male voices. This is how it remained with me: women talk about the war. They cry. They sing like they cry.

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 for books. Now I have an answer - why. Is it by chance? We were always at war or preparing for war. They remembered how they fought. We have never lived differently, probably, and we do not know how. We can’t imagine how to live differently, we will have to learn this for a long time someday.

In 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 appeared fearlessness. Now I think: if I were a more real person, could I rush into such an abyss? From what all this was - from ignorance? Or from a sense of the way? After all, there is a sense of the way ...

I have been looking for a long time ... What words can convey what I hear? I was looking for a genre that would correspond to the way I see the world, how my eye, my ear works.

Once the book “I am from a fiery village” by A. Adamovich, Ya. Bryl, V. Kolesnik fell into the hands. I experienced such a shock only once, while reading Dostoevsky. And here - 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, in a trolley bus. 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 so much meet and record as I thought. Read. 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 more has been written about them. But... Men also wrote about men - it became clear right away. Everything we know about the war is known from the "male voice". We are all captive to "male" ideas and "male" feelings of war. "Male" words. And the women are silent. Nobody but me asked my grandmother. My mother. Even those who were at the front are silent. If they suddenly start talking, then they tell not their own war, but someone else's. Another. Adapt to the male canon. And only at home or when they cry in the circle of front-line girlfriends, they remember the war (I heard it more than once in my journalistic trips), which is completely unfamiliar to me. As in childhood, I am shocked. In their stories, a monstrous grin of the mysterious is visible ... When women speak, they have little or no what we are used to reading and hearing about: how some people heroically killed others and won. Or lost. What was the technique - what generals. Women's stories are different and about something else. The "women's" war has its own colors, its own smells, its own lighting and its own space of feelings. Your words. There are no heroes and incredible feats, there are just people who are engaged in inhuman human deeds. And not only they (people!) suffer there, but also the earth, and birds, and trees. All who live 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, women did 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.

* * *

From the first entries...

Surprise: these women have military professions - a medical instructor, a sniper, a machine gunner, an anti-aircraft gun commander, a sapper, and now they are accountants, laboratory assistants, guides, teachers ... Mismatch of roles - here and there. They talk as if not about themselves, but about some other girls. Today they surprise themselves. And in front of my eyes, history “humanizes” and becomes like ordinary life. Another light appears.

There are amazing storytellers, they have pages in their lives that can compete with the best pages of the classics. So that a person can see himself so clearly from above - from the sky, and from below - from the earth. Passed the 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, people create, "write" their lives. It happens that they “add” and “rewrite”. Here you have to be alert. On guard. At the same time, any falsehood gradually self-destructs, does not withstand the neighborhood of such naked truth. This virus does not survive here. Temperature too high! Sincere, as I have already noticed, ordinary people behave - nurses, cooks, laundresses ... They, how to define it more precisely, get words out of themselves, and not from newspapers and read books. From someone else. But only from their own suffering and experiences. The feelings and language of educated people, oddly enough, are often more subject to processing by time. His general encryption. Infected with other people's knowledge. Common spirit. Often you have to walk for a long time, in different circles, in order to hear a story about a “female” war, and not about a “male” one: how they retreated, how they advanced, on which sector of the front ... It takes not one meeting, but many sessions. Like a persistent portrait painter.

I sit for a long time in an unfamiliar house or apartment, sometimes all day long. We drink tea, try on recently bought blouses, discuss hairstyles and culinary recipes. We look at photos of grandchildren together. And then... After some time, you will never know when and why, suddenly that long-awaited moment comes when a person departs from the canon - plaster and reinforced concrete - like our monuments, and goes to himself. Into yourself. He begins to remember not the war, but his youth. A piece of my life ... We must catch this moment. Don't miss! But often after a long day filled with words and facts, only one phrase remains in memory (but what a phrase!): “I went to the front so little that I even grew up during the war.” I leave it in my notebook, although dozens of meters are wound on the tape recorder. Four or five cassettes...

What helps me? It helps that we are used to living together. Together. Cathedral people. Everything in our world is both happiness and tears. We know how to suffer and talk about suffering. Suffering justifies our hard and awkward life. For us, pain is art. I must admit, women boldly embark on this journey ...

* * *

How do they greet me?

My name is: “girl”, “daughter”, “baby”, probably, if I were from their generation, they would behave differently with me. Calm and equal. Without the joy and amazement that the meeting of youth and old age gives. This is a very important point, that then they were young, and now they remember the old ones. Through life they remember - through forty years. They carefully open their world to me, they spare me: “I’m sorry that I was there ... That I saw it ... I got married after the war. She hid behind her husband. She hid herself. And my mother asked: “Shut up! Shut up!! Don't confess." I fulfilled my duty to the Motherland, but I am sad that I was there. What do I know... And you are just a girl. I feel sorry for you…” I often see how they sit and listen to themselves. To the sound of your soul. Compare it with words. With long years, a person understands that there was a life, and now we must come to terms and prepare for departure. I don’t want to and it’s a shame to disappear just like that. Carelessly. On the run. And when he looks back, there is a desire in him not only to tell about his own, but also to reach the secret of life. Answer the question for yourself: why did this happen to him? He looks at everything with a slightly parting and sad look... Almost from there... There is no need to deceive and be deceived. It is already clear to him that without the thought of death, nothing can be seen in a person. Its secret exists above everything.

War is too intimate an experience. And as infinite as human life...

Once a woman (pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained on the phone: “I can’t ... I don’t want to remember. I was in the war for three years ... And for three years I did not feel like a woman. My body is dead. There was no menstruation, almost no female desires. And I was beautiful ... When my future husband proposed to me ... It was already in Berlin, at the Reichstag ... He said: “The war is over. We stayed alive. We were lucky. Marry me". I wanted to cry. scream. Hit him! How is it married? Now? In the midst of all this, getting married? Among black soot and black bricks... Look at me... Look at me! You first make a woman out of me: give flowers, take care, say beautiful words. I want it so much! So I'm waiting! I almost hit him... I wanted to hit him... And he had a burned, crimson one cheek, and I see: he understood everything, he had tears flowing down that cheek. For still fresh scars ... And I myself do not believe what I say: “Yes, I will marry you.”

But I can't tell. There is no strength ... It is necessary to live everything again ... "

I understood her. But this is also a page or half a page of the book that I am writing.

Texts, texts. Texts are everywhere. In apartments and country houses, on the street and on the train... I listen... More and more I turn into one big ear, all the time turned to the other person. I "read" the voice...

* * *

Man is more than war...

It is remembered exactly where it is more. They are led there by something that is stronger than history. I need to take a wider view - to write the truth about life and death in general, and not just the truth about the war. Ask Dostoevsky's question: how many people are there in a person, and how can you protect this person in yourself? Undoubtedly, evil is seductive. It is more than good. More attractive. Deeper and deeper I plunge into the endless world of war, everything else has slightly faded, it has become more ordinary than usual. A grandiose and predatory world. Now I understand the loneliness of a person who has returned from there. As from another planet or from the other world. He has knowledge that others do not have, and it can only be obtained there, near death. When he tries to put something into words, he has a sense of disaster. The person is dumb. He wants to tell, the rest would like to understand, but everyone is powerless.