Svetlana Alexievich, the Ukraine-born journalist and oral historian, was largely unknown in the English-speaking world until she was awarded the Nobel prize in 2015. As often happens with translated Nobel laureates, her books have appeared in oddly arbitrary order. Her latest — which brings all but one of her six non-fiction books into print in English — was first published in the USSR in 1985. Last Witnesses offers a harrowing picture of the lives of Russian children caught up in Hitler’s invasion on the Eastern Front, and was intended as a companion to her best-selling first book, The Unwomanly Face of War, which gathered the testimonies of Red Army women active in that same dreadful conflict.
The Hitler-Stalin war disrupted Russian children’s lives differently, depending on whether they were Jewish, or involved in partisan activity, or well-off or poor. Children left orphaned by the invading Germans nevertheless all speak of compromised adult relationships, morbid self-recriminations and a lasting dread. “I never married. Never knew love”, says Vera Zhdan, later a dairy farmer, who at 14 was forced to watch as German polizei shot dead her brother and father.
There are more than a hundred accounts of childhood here, told variously by lawyers, locksmiths, librarians, construction engineers and taxi drivers. Unsurprisingly, very few of them are Jewish. As potential enemies of the Third Reich, Russian Jewish children were murdered in their thousands. “I’ve often remembered it,” says Vasya Baikachev, later a teacher, who was tortured by Germans at the age of 12. “Those were the last days of my childhood.” An entire shtetl culture was wiped out in a blink of historical time.
Last Witnesses, like all of Alexievich’s books, is a collage of testimonies and a work of documentary literature. Typically there is no editorial comment, as the voices are left to speak for themselves. Alexievich herself was born in 1948 into a family scarred by disaster. Close relations had been killed in the war, died of typhus or been burned alive by the Germans. Her best-known oral history, Chernobyl Prayer, a chronicle of the 1986 nuclear meltdown, served as a resource for the recent TV drama Chernobyl.
Though Alexievich has documented other events relating to more recent history (the fate of Russian soldiers in Afghanistan, suicide rates in post-Soviet Moscow), it is the Second World War, and the moral and material bankruptcy attendant on Stalinist and Hitlerite Europe, that has provided her most enduring subject matter. The neurotic aftermath for the child survivors she interviewed in the late Seventies and early Eighties is clear enough. “How do I live as a grown-up?”, asks Faina Lyutsko, who at 15 saw the Germans first shoot children and then their parents. (“They shot and watched how the parents suffered.”) Last Witnesses remains an important historical document, that builds a detailed picture of juvenile life in the wartime bloodlands of Russia and the mass destruction of childhood innocence.
Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories by Svetlana Alexievich, trans Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Penguin, £12.99)
