Svetlana Alekseevich war does not have a feminine face. War does not have a woman's face. separate chapters. from what in. About life and being

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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, the word add more one word - 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).

“A man, he could bear it. He’s 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 anything: sleep next to the murdered man, and shoot myself , and I saw blood, I remember very well that the smell of blood in the snow is somehow especially strong... So I’m talking, and I already feel bad... But then nothing, then I could do everything. I began to tell my granddaughter, but my daughter-in-law pulled me back: why would a girl know such a thing? 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 in the 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 approached at the ticket office, showed it. And some girl, about fourteen years old, probably 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. 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 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.

What is collected in this book, according to what principle? The stories will not be told by famous snipers or famous female pilots or partisans; 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 heard more than once. But it was to them that I went, I looked for them. It is in their minds that what we highly call folk memory is stored. “When you look at the war with our women’s eyes, it’s worse than the worst,” said Alexandra Iosifovna Mishutina, sergeant, medical instructor. These words of a simple woman who went through the entire war, then got married, gave birth to three children, and now nurses her grandchildren, contain the main idea of ​​the book.

In optics there is the concept of “aperture ratio” - the ability of a lens to capture a captured image worse or better. So, women’s memory of the war is the most “luminous” in terms of intensity of feelings and pain. It is emotional, it is passionate, it is full of details, and it is in the details that a document acquires its incorruptible power.

Signal operator Antonina Fedorovna Valegzhaninova fought at 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 she combined them into a single image: “I remember one battle. There were a lot of dead... They were scattered like potatoes when they are turned out of the ground with a plow. A huge, large field... As they moved, they still lie... They are like potatoes... Even horses, such a delicate animal, she walks and is afraid to put her foot so as not to step on a person, but they also stopped being afraid of the dead...” And the partisan Valentina Pavlovna Kozhemyakina kept the following detail in her memory: the first days of the war, our units were retreating with heavy fighting, the whole village came out to see them off, and she and her mother were standing there. “: An elderly soldier walks past, stops near our hut and bows low, right at his mother’s feet: “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 remember another incident, how she would cry over the first wounded man, and he, dying, would tell her: “Take care of yourself, girl. You will still have to give birth... Look how many men have died..."

Women's memory covers that continent of human feelings in war, which usually eludes men's attention. If a man was captivated by war as an action, then a woman felt and endured it differently due to her feminine psychology: bombing, death, suffering - for her this is not the whole war. The woman felt more strongly, again due to her psychological and physiological characteristics, the overload of war - physical and moral, she had a harder time enduring the “male” nature of war. And what she remembered, took from mortal hell, today has become a unique spiritual experience, an experience of limitless human possibilities, which we have no right to consign to oblivion.

Perhaps these stories will contain 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 for everyone to win, for the whole people to win, everyone, each individually, had to strive to win.

They are still alive - participants in the battles. But human life is not endless; it can only be extended by memory, which alone conquers time. The people who endured the great war and won it realize today the significance of what they did and experienced. They are ready to help us. More than once I have come across thin student notebooks and thick general notebooks in families, written and left for children and grandchildren. This grandfather's or grandmother's inheritance was reluctantly transferred into the wrong hands. They usually justified themselves in the same way: “We want the children to have a memory…”, “I’ll make a copy for you, and keep the originals for my son...”

But not everything is written down. Much disappears, dissolves without a trace. Forgotten. If you don't forget the war, a lot of hatred appears. And if a war is forgotten, a new one begins. That's what the ancients said.

Collected together, the stories of women paint a picture of a war that does not have a feminine face at all. They sound like evidence - accusations against the fascism of yesterday, the fascism of today and the fascism of the future. Mothers, sisters, wives blame fascism. A woman accuses fascism.

Here one of them is sitting in front of me, telling how just before the war her mother did not let her go to her grandmother without an escort, supposedly she was still little, and two months later this “little one” went to the front. She became a medical instructor and fought from Smolensk to Prague. She returned home at twenty-two years old, her peers were still girls, and she was already a lived person who had seen and experienced a lot: wounded three times, one serious wound - in the chest area, was shell-shocked twice, after the second shell-shock, when she was dug out from a filled-up trench, turned gray. But I had to start my life as a woman: learn to wear a light dress and shoes again, get married, give birth to a child. A man, even if he returned crippled from the war, he still started a family. And women's post-war fate was more dramatic. The war took away their youth, took away their husbands: few of their age returned from the front. They knew this even without statistics, because they remembered how the men lay in heavy sheaves on the trampled fields and how it was impossible to believe, to come to terms with the thought that these tall guys in sailor peacoats could no longer be lifted, 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).

So what were they like, the girls of '41, how did they go to the front? Let's walk their path with them.

“I don’t want to remember...”

An old three-story house on the outskirts of Minsk, one of those that was built immediately after the war, long ago and comfortably overgrown with jasmine bushes. This is where the search began, which will last four years and has not stopped even now, when I am writing these lines. True, then I still didn’t suspect it.

What brought me here was a small note in the city newspaper that recently the retired senior accountant Maria Ivanovna Morozova was seen off at the Minsk Udarnik road machinery plant. And during the war, as the note read, she was a sniper and has eleven military awards. It was difficult to connect this woman’s military profession with her peaceful occupation in her mind. But in this discrepancy the answer to the question was anticipated: who became a soldier in 1941-1945?

... A small woman with a touching, girlish crown of a long braid around her head, completely different from her blurry newspaper photograph, sat in a large chair, covering her face with her hands:

- No, no, I don’t want to remember... My nerves are going nowhere. I still can’t watch war films...

Then she asked:

- Why to me? If only I could talk to my husband, someone would tell me... What were the names of the commanders, generals, unit numbers - he remembers everything. But not me. I only remember what happened to me. What sits like a nail in the soul...

She asked me to remove the tape recorder:

“I need your eyes to tell the story, but he will get in the way.”

But after a few minutes I forgot about him...

Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina), corporal, sniper:

“Where my native village of Dyakovskoye stood, now the Proletarsky district of Moscow. The war began, I was not quite eighteen years old. I went to a collective farm, then completed accounting courses, began to work. And at the same time we took courses at the military registration and enlistment office. We were trained to shoot there from a combat rifle. There were forty people in the circle. There were four people from our village, five from the neighboring village, in a word, several people from each village. And all the girls... The men had already all gone, whoever could...

Soon there was a call from the Central Committee of the Komsomol and youth, since the enemy was already near Moscow, to defend the Motherland. Not only me, all the girls expressed a desire to go to the front. My father already fought. We thought we were the only ones... But we came to the military registration and enlistment office and there were a lot of girls there. The selection was very strict. The first thing, of course, was to have good health. I was afraid that they wouldn’t take me, because as a child I was often sick and weak. Then, if there was no one left in the house, except for the girl who was going to the front, they were also refused, because it was impossible to leave the mother alone. Well, I still had two sisters and two brothers, although they were all much smaller than me, but they still counted. But there was one more thing - their collective farm had all left, there was no one to work in the field, and the chairman did not want to let us go. In a word, we were refused. We went to the district Komsomol committee, and they turned us down.

Then we, as a delegation from our region, went to the regional committee of the Komsomol. We were refused again. And we decided, since we were in Moscow, to go to the Komsomol Central Committee. Who will report which of us is brave? We thought that we would be the only ones there, but there it was impossible to squeeze into the corridor, let alone reach the secretary. There were young people there with all the Union, many who had been in the occupation and were eager to take revenge for the death of their loved ones.

In the evening we finally reached the secretary. They ask us: “Well, how will you go to the front if you don’t know how to shoot?” And we say that we have already learned... “Where?.. How?.. Do you know how to bandage?” And, you know, in the same circle at the military registration and enlistment office, the district doctor taught us how to bandage. Well, we had a trump card in our hands, that we were not alone, that we had forty more people and everyone knew how to shoot and provide first aid. They told us: “Go and wait. Your issue will be resolved positively." And literally a couple of days later we had summonses in our hands...

We came to the military registration and enlistment office, they immediately led us through one door and out another: I have a very beautiful braid, I was proud of it. I already left without her... And the dress was taken away. I didn’t have time to give my mother either the dress or the braid... She really asked that she keep something of me, mine... We were immediately dressed in tunics, caps, given duffel bags and loaded onto a freight train...

We still didn’t know where we would be enrolled, where we were going? In the end, it didn't really matter to us who we were. If only we could go to the front. Everyone is at war - and so are we. We arrived at Shchelkovo station, not far from there was a women's sniper school. It turns out that we are there.

We started studying. We studied the regulations - garrison service, disciplinary, camouflage on the ground, chemical protection. The girls all tried very hard. With our eyes closed, we learned to assemble and disassemble a sniper rifle, determine wind speed, target movement, distance to the target, dig cells, crawl on our bellies - we already knew how to do all this. At the end of the fire and combat courses, I passed with an A. The hardest thing, I remember, was getting the alarm and getting ready in five minutes. We took boots one or two sizes larger so as not to waste time and get ready quickly. In five minutes it was necessary to get dressed, put on shoes and get into formation. There were cases of people running into formation wearing boots on bare feet. One girl almost froze her feet. The foreman noticed, made a remark, and then taught us how to twist footcloths. He will stand above us and buzz: “How can I, girls, make soldiers out of you, and not targets for the Krauts?”

Well, we arrived at the front. Near Orsha... To the sixty-second rifle division... The commander, as I remember now, Colonel Borodkin, he saw us and got angry: the girls were forced on me. But then he invited me over and treated him to lunch. And, we hear, he asks his adjutant: “Do we have any sweets for tea?” We were offended: who does he take us for? We came to fight... And he received us not as soldiers, but as girls. We were his daughters in age. “What am I going to do with you, my dears?” – that’s how he treated us, how he met us. But we imagined that we were already warriors...

The next day he forced us to show how we could shoot and camouflage ourselves on the ground. We shot well, even better than the male snipers who were recalled from the front line for a two-day course. And then camouflage on the ground... The colonel came, walked around inspecting the clearing, then stood on one hummock - nothing was visible. And then the “bump” under him begged: “Oh, Comrade Colonel, I can’t do it anymore, it’s hard.” Well, there was a lot of laughter! He couldn't believe that he could disguise himself so well. “Now,” he says, “I take back what I said about girls.” But he was still very tormented, he was afraid for us when they went to the front line, every time he warned us to be careful and not take unnecessary risks.

The first day we went out “hunting” (that’s what snipers call it), my partner Masha Kozlova. I disguised myself and lie down: I am conducting observations, Masha is with a rifle. And suddenly Masha told me:

- Shoot, shoot! See, German...

I tell her:

- I am watching. You shoot!

“While we’re trying to figure this out,” she says, “he’ll leave.”

And I give her mine:

– First you need to draw up a shooting map. Place landmarks: where is the barn, birch tree...

-Are you going to do paperwork like you did at school? I didn’t come to do paperwork, but to shoot!

I see that Masha is already angry with me.

- Well, then shoot, what are you doing?

So we argued. And at this time, indeed, the German officer was giving instructions to the soldiers. A cart approached, and the soldiers were passing some kind of cargo along the chain. This officer stood, said something, then disappeared. We argue. I see that he has already appeared twice, and if we miss this time, we will miss him. And when he appeared for the third time, in one moment - he would appear and then disappear - I decided to shoot. I made up my mind, and suddenly such a thought flashed: this is a man, even though he is an enemy, but a man, and my hands somehow began to tremble, trembling and chills began to spread throughout my body. Some kind of fear... After the plywood targets, it was difficult to shoot at a living person. But I pulled myself together, pulled the trigger... He waved his hands and fell. Whether he was killed or not, I don’t know. But after that I began to tremble even more, some kind of fear appeared: I killed a man...

When we arrived, our platoon began to tell what happened to me, and held a meeting. Our Komsomol organizer was Klava Ivanova, she convinced me: “We shouldn’t feel sorry for them, but hate them...” The Nazis killed her father. We used to start singing, and she would ask: “Girls, don’t, we’ll defeat these bastards, and then we’ll sing.”

In a few days, Maria Ivanovna will call me and invite me to her front-line friend Klavdia Grigorievna Krokhina. And I will hear again about how difficult it was for girls to become soldiers - to kill.

Klavdia Grigorievna Krokhina, senior sergeant, sniper:

“We lay down, and I watched. And then I saw: one German stood up. I clicked, and he fell. And so, you know, I was shaking all over, I was pounding all over. I cried. When I was shooting at the targets, nothing, but here: How did I kill a man?..

Then it passed. And that's how it went. We were walking, it was near some small village in East Prussia. And there, when we were walking, there was a barracks or a house near the road, I don’t know, it was all on fire, it had already burned down, only coals remained. And in these coals there are human bones, and among them there are charred stars, these are our wounded or prisoners who burned... After that, no matter how much I killed, I did not feel sorry. When I saw these burning bones, I couldn’t come to my senses, only evil and vengeance remained.

...I came from the front gray-haired. Twenty-one years old, and I’m already white. I had a wound, a concussion, and I couldn’t hear well in one ear. My mother greeted me with the words: “I believed that you would come. I prayed for you day and night.” My brother died at the front. She cried:

– It’s the same now – give birth to girls or boys. But he is still a man, he was obliged to defend his Motherland, and you are a girl. I asked for one thing: if they hurt me, then it’s better to kill her, so that the girl doesn’t remain crippled.

Here, and I’m not Belarusian, my husband brought me here, I’m originally from the Chelyabinsk region, so we had some kind of ore mining there. As soon as the explosions started, and this happened at night, I immediately jumped out of bed and the first thing I did was grab my overcoat - and run, I had to run somewhere. Mom will grab me, hold me close and coax me like a child. How many times will I fall head over heels from my bed and grab my overcoat..."

The room is warm, but Maria Ivanovna wraps herself in a heavy woolen blanket - she is shivering. And he continues:

“Our scouts took one German officer, and he was extremely surprised that many soldiers were knocked out in his position and all the wounds were only in the head. A simple shooter, he says, cannot make so many hits in the head. “Show me this,” he asked. shooter, who killed so many of my soldiers. I received a large reinforcement, and every day up to ten people dropped out." The regiment commander says: "Unfortunately, I can’t show you, this is a girl sniper, but she died." It was Sasha Shlyakhova. She died in a sniper fight. And what let her down was the red scarf. She loved this harp very much. And the red scarf is visible in the snow, unmasking. And when the German officer heard that it was a girl, he lowered his head, did not know what to say ...

We walked in pairs, it was hard to sit alone from dark to dark, our eyes were watering, our hands were going numb, and the body was also going numb from tension. It's especially difficult in winter. Snow, it melts under you. As soon as dawn broke, we went out and returned from the front line as darkness fell. For twelve or even more hours we lay in the snow or climbed to the top of a tree, onto the roof of a barn or a destroyed house and disguised ourselves there so that the enemy would not see where we were, where our position was, from where we were observing. And we tried to find a position as close as possible: seven hundred, eight hundred, or even five hundred meters separated us from the trench where the Germans were.

I don’t know where our courage came from? Although God forbid a woman be a soldier. I'll tell you one case...

We went on the offensive, advancing very quickly. And we were exhausted, the supply fell behind us: the ammunition ran out, the food ran out, the kitchen was destroyed by a shell. For the third day they sat on breadcrumbs, their tongues were all peeled off so that they could not move them. My partner was killed, I was going to the front line with a new girl. And suddenly we see a foal in neutral. So handsome, his tail is fluffy... He walks around calmly, as if there was nothing, no war. And the Germans, we hear, made a noise and saw him. Our soldiers also talk to each other:

- He will go away. And there would be soup...

- You can’t take it from a machine gun at such a distance...

Saw us:

- The snipers are coming. They are now... Come on, girls!..

What to do? I didn’t even have time to think. She took aim and fired. The foal's legs buckled and fell on its side. And thinly, thinly, the wind brought it and neighed.

It then dawned on me: why did I do this? So beautiful, but I killed him. I'll put it in the soup! Behind me I hear someone sobbing. I looked around and it was new.

- What are you? - I ask.

“I feel sorry for the foal...” and his eyes filled with tears.

- Ah-ah-ah, subtle nature! And we are all hungry for three days. It’s a pity because I haven’t buried anyone yet, you don’t know what it’s like to walk thirty kilometers in a day with full equipment, and even hungry. First we need to kick out the Krauts, and then we’ll worry...

I look at the soldiers, they just egged me on, shouted, asked. No one looks at me, as if they don’t notice, everyone is buried and minding their own business. And do whatever you want for me. At least sit down and cry. As if I’m some kind of knacker, as if whoever you want to kill doesn’t cost me anything. Since childhood, I have loved all living things. Here, I was already going to school, the cow got sick and she was slaughtered. I cried for two days. Mom was afraid that something would happen to me, so she cried. And then - bam! – and fired at the defenseless foal.

In the evening they bring us dinner. Cooks: “Well, well done sniper... Today there is meat in the pot...” They put the pots on us and went. And my girls sit and don’t touch dinner. I realized what was going on, burst into tears and left the dugout... The girls behind me began to console me with one voice. We quickly grabbed our pots and let’s eat... That’s how it was...

At night, of course, we have conversations. What could we talk about? Of course, about home, everyone talked about their mother, whose father or brothers fought. And about who we will be after the war. And how will we get married, and will our husbands love us? Our captain laughed and said:

- Eh, girls! You are good to everyone, but after the war they will be afraid to marry you. A well-aimed hand, throw a plate at the forehead and kill.

I met my husband during the war, we were in the same regiment. He has two wounds and a concussion. He went through the war from beginning to end, he was a military man all his life. There is no need to explain to him that I have nerves. Even if I speak in a raised voice, he either won’t notice or will remain silent. And we have been living with him for thirty-five years, soul to soul. They raised two children and gave them higher education.

I’ll tell you what else... Well, I was demobilized and I came to Moscow. And from Moscow we still have to go and walk several kilometers. This is where the metro is now, but then there were cherry orchards and deep ravines. One ravine is very large, I need to cross it. And it was already dark by the time I arrived and got there. Of course, I was afraid to go through this ravine. I stand and don’t know what to do: should I go back and wait for the day, or should I gather up my courage and go. Now that I think about it, it’s so funny - the front has passed, I’ve seen everything: deaths, and other things, but here it’s scary to cross the ravine. It turns out that the war did not change anything in us. In the carriage, when we were traveling, when we were returning home from Germany, a mouse jumped out of someone’s backpack, so all our girls jumped up, the ones that were on the upper shelves, squealing head over heels from there. And the captain was traveling with us, he was surprised: “Everyone has an order, but you’re afraid of mice.”

Luckily for me, the truck gasped. I think: I'll vote.

The car stopped.

“I care about Dyakovsky,” I say.

“And I care about Dyakovsky,” the young guy laughs.

I went into the cab, he took my suitcase into the back, and off we went. He sees that I’m wearing a uniform and awards. Asks:

– How many Germans did you kill?

I tell him:

- Seventy five.

He chuckles a little:

“You’re lying, maybe you haven’t even seen a single one?”

And here I recognized him:

- Kolka Chizhov? Is that you? Do you remember I tied a tie for you?..

Composition

Fifty-seven years ago our country was illuminated by the light of victory, victory in the Great Patriotic War. She got it at a difficult price. For many years, the Soviet people walked the paths of war, walked to save their Motherland and all of humanity from fascist oppression.
This victory is dear to every Russian person, and this is probably why the theme of the Great Patriotic War not only does not lose its relevance, but every year finds more and more new incarnations in Russian literature. In their books, front-line writers trust us with everything they personally experienced during the war. firing lines, in front-line trenches, in partisan detachments, in fascist dungeons - all this is reflected in their stories and novels. “Cursed and Killed”, “Overtone” by V. Astafiev, “Sign of Trouble” by V. Bykov, “Blockade” by M. Kuraev and many others - a return to the “kroshevo” wars, to the nightmarish and inhuman pages of our history.
But there is another topic that deserves special attention - the topic of the difficult lot of women in war. Such stories as “The Dawns Here Are Quiet...” by B. Vasiliev and “Love Me, Soldier” by V. Bykov are devoted to this topic. But the novel by the Belarusian writer and journalist S. Alexievich “War Has Not a Woman’s Face” makes a special and indelible impression.
Unlike other writers, S. Alexievich made the heroes of her book not fictional characters, but real women. The clarity, accessibility of the novel and its extraordinary external clarity, the apparent simplicity of its form are among the merits of this wonderful book. Her novel has no plot, it is built in the form of a conversation, in the form of memories. For four long years, the writer walked “burnt kilometers of other people’s pain and memory,” recording hundreds of stories of nurses, pilots, partisans, and paratroopers who recalled the terrible years with tears in their eyes.
One of the chapters of the novel, entitled “I don’t want to remember...” tells about those feelings that live in the hearts of these women to this day, which I would like to forget, but there is no way. Fear, along with a true sense of patriotism, lived in the hearts of the girls. This is how one of the women describes her first shot: “We lay down and I watched. And then I see: one German stood up. I clicked and he fell. And so, you know, I was shaking all over, I was pounding all over. I started crying. When I was shooting at targets - nothing, but here: how did I kill a man?
The women's memories of the famine, when they were forced to kill their horses in order not to die, are also shocking. In the chapter “It Wasn’t Me,” one of the heroines, a nurse, recalls her first meeting with the fascists: “I bandaged the wounded, a fascist was lying next to me, I thought he was dead... but he was wounded, he wanted to kill me. I felt someone push me, and I turned to him. I managed to kick the machine gun with my foot. I didn’t kill him, but I didn’t bandage him either, I left. He was wounded in the stomach."
War is, first of all, death. Reading the memories of women about the death of our soldiers, someone’s husbands, sons, fathers or brothers, it becomes scary: “You can’t get used to death. To death... We were with the wounded for three days. They are healthy, strong men. They didn't want to die. They kept asking for something to drink, but they couldn’t drink because they were wounded in the stomach. They died before our eyes, one after another, and we could do nothing to help them.”
Everything we know about a woman fits into the concept of “mercy.” There are other words: “sister”, “wife”, “friend” and the highest - “mother”. But mercy is present in their content as the essence, as the purpose, as the ultimate meaning. A woman gives life, a woman protects life, the concepts “woman” and “life” are synonymous. Roman S. Alexievich is another page of history, presented to readers after many years of forced silence. This is another terrible truth about war. In conclusion, I would like to cite the phrase of another heroine of the book “War Has Not a Woman’s Face”: “A woman in war... This is something about which there are no human words yet.”

Women appeared in the army already in the 4th century BC in Athens and Sparta; Slavic women sometimes went to war with their fathers and spouses.

During World War II in England, women first served in hospitals, later in aviation and in motor transport. About a million women fought in the Soviet Army. They mastered all military specialties, including the most “masculine” ones.

Svetlana Alexievich's novel is made up of real women's voices telling how their destinies were intertwined with the war. These voices are interrupted by the excited, sincere, lively commentary of the narrator.

“No matter what women talk about, they constantly have the thought: war is first of all killing, and then hard work. And then - just ordinary life: singing, falling in love, curling hair...

The focus is always on how unbearable it is and how you don’t want to die. And it is even more unbearable and more reluctant to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives. He carries her inside for a long time, nursing her. I realized that it is more difficult for women to kill..."

It is difficult to tell the whole truth about the war. Here is what one woman who fought writes:

“My daughter loves me very much, I am a heroine for her, if she reads your book, she will be very disappointed. Dirt, lice, endless blood - all this is true. I do not deny.

But are memories of this capable of giving rise to noble feelings? Prepare for the feat..."

Publishers and magazines refuse to publish Svetlana’s novel: “the war is too terrible.” Everyone needs exploits and noble feelings.

“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. Neither at mother, nor at each other—"

“When we took prisoners and brought them into the detachment... They were not shot, death was too easy for them, we stabbed them like pigs with ramrods, cut them into pieces. I went to see it... I was waiting! I've been waiting for a long time for the moment when their eyes-pupils begin to burst from pain...

What do you know about this?! They burned my mother and sisters at the stake in the middle of the village...”

“During the day we were afraid of the Germans and policemen, and at night of the partisans. The partisans took my last cow, leaving us with only one cat. The partisans are hungry and angry.

They led my cow, and I followed them... She walked about ten kilometers. I begged you to give it up. Three children were waiting in the hut...”

“I reached Berlin with the army-

She returned to her village with two orders of Glory and medals. I lived for three days, and on the fourth my mother lifted me out of bed and said: “Daughter, I put together a bundle for you. Go away... Go away... You still have two younger sisters growing up. Who will marry them? Everyone knows that you were at the front for four years, with men -

Don't touch my soul. Write, like others, about my awards...”

“It seems to me that I have lived two lives: one as a man’s, the second as a woman’s...”

"Many of us believed...

We thought that after the war everything would change—Stalin would believe his people. But the war had not yet ended, and the trains had already gone to Magadan. The trains with the victors—They arrested those who were prisoners, those who survived in German camps, those who were taken by the Germans to work—everyone who had seen Europe.

I could tell you how the people live there. Without communists. What kind of houses are there 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...”

“—I returned from the war gray-haired. Twenty-one years old, and I’m all white. I was seriously wounded, concussed, and I couldn’t hear well in one ear. My mother greeted me with the words: “I believed that you would come. I prayed for you day and night."

“Can films about war be in color?

Everything is black there. Only the blood has a different color... One blood is red...”

“Before the war, there were rumors that Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union, but these conversations were strictly suppressed. They were suppressed by the relevant authorities... Do you understand what kind of authorities these are? NKVD... Chekists... But when Stalin spoke... He turned to us: “Brothers and sisters...” Here everyone forgot their grievances... Our uncle was in the camp, my mother’s brother, he was a railway worker , old communist. He was arrested at work... Is it clear to you - who? NKVD... Our beloved uncle, and we knew that he was not guilty of anything. They believed. He had awards since the Civil War... But

After Stalin’s speech, my mother said: “We’ll defend the Motherland, and then we’ll figure it out.”

“They didn’t cry, our mothers, seeing off their daughters, they howled. My mother stood like a stone. She held on, she was afraid

so that I don't cry. I was my mother’s daughter, I was spoiled at home. And then they gave him a boy’s haircut, only leaving a small forelock.”

“Towards the end of the forty-first, they sent me a funeral note: my husband died near Moscow. He was a flight commander. I loved my daughter, but I took her to his family. And she began to ask to go to the front...

Last night... I stood on my knees by the crib all night..."

“And there was the famous Stalinist order number two hundred twenty-seven - “Not a step back!” If you turn back, you'll be shot! Execution on the spot. Or - to the tribunal and to specially created penal battalions. Those who ended up there were called suicide bombers. And those who escaped encirclement and escaped captivity went to filtration camps. Barrier detachments followed us from behind... Our own people shot at our own...

These pictures are in my memory."

“The Germans took the city, and I found out that I was Jewish. And before the war, we all lived together: Russians, Tatars, Germans, Jews... We were all the same. Oh, what are you talking about! Even I didn’t hear this word “Yids” because I lived with my dad, mom and books. We became lepers and were driven out from everywhere. They were afraid of us. Even some of our friends did not say hello. Their children did not say hello. Mom was shot...

I went to look for dad... I wanted to find him at least dead, so that we could be alone. I was fair, not black, with blonde hair and eyebrows, and no one touched me in the city. I came to the market... And I met my father’s friend there, he was already living in the village, with his parents. Also a musician, like my dad. Uncle Volodya. I told him everything... He put me on the cart and covered me with a casing.

The piglets squealed on the cart, the chickens clucked, and we rode for a long time. Oh, what are you talking about! We drove until evening. I slept, woke up...

That’s how I ended up with the partisans...”

“I didn’t shoot... I cooked porridge for the soldiers. They gave me a medal for this. I don’t even remember about it: did I fight? I cooked porridge and soldier’s soup.

© 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.

I sit in an unfamiliar house or apartment for a long time, sometimes all day. We drink tea, try on recently purchased blouses, discuss hairstyles and culinary recipes. We look at photographs of our grandchildren together. And then... After some time, you will never know after what time and why, suddenly that long-awaited moment comes when a person moves away 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 your life... You need to capture this moment. Don't miss it! But often, after a long day filled with words, facts, and tears, only one phrase remains in the 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, even though I have tens of meters on the tape recorder. Four or five cassettes...

What helps me? It helps that we are used to living together. Together. Cathedral people. We have everything in the world – 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 bravely set out on this journey...

* * *

How do they greet me?

Names: “girl”, “daughter”, “baby”, probably if I were from their generation, they would have treated me differently. Calm and equal. Without the joy and amazement that the meeting of youth and old age gives. This is a very important point that they were young then, but now they remember the old ones. Through life they remember - after forty years. They carefully open their world to me, they spare me: “Immediately after the war, I got married. She hid behind her husband. For everyday life, for baby diapers. She willingly hid. And my mother asked: “Be quiet! Shut up! Don’t confess.” I fulfilled my duty to my Motherland, but I am sad that I was there. That I know this... And you are just a girl. I feel sorry for you...” I often see them sitting and listening to themselves. To the sound of your soul. They compare it with the words. Over the years, a person understands that this was life, and now he must come to terms with it and prepare to leave. I don’t want to and it’s a shame to disappear just like that. Carelessly. On the run. And when he looks back, he has a desire not only to talk about his own, but also to get to the secret of life. Answer the question for yourself: why did this happen to him? He looks at everything with a slightly farewell 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 discerned in a person. Its mystery exists above everything.

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

Once a woman (a pilot) refused to meet with me. She explained over the phone: “I can’t... I don’t want to remember. I was at war for three years... And for three years I didn’t 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... This was already in Berlin, at the Reichstag... He said: “The war is over. We survived. We were lucky. Marry me". I wanted to cry. Scream. Hit him! What's it like to get married? Now? Among all this - get married? Among the black soot and black bricks... Look at me... Look at what I am! First, make a woman out of me: give flowers, look after me, speak beautiful words. I want it so much! So I'm waiting! I almost hit him... I wanted to hit him... And he had a burnt, purple cheek, and I see: he understood everything, tears were flowing down his cheek. By the still fresh scars... And I myself don’t believe what I’m saying: “Yes, I will marry you.”

Forgive me... I can’t...”

I understood her. But this is also a page or half a page of a future book.

Texts, texts. There are texts everywhere. In city apartments and village huts, on the street and on the train... I listen... More and more I am turning into one big ear, always turned towards another person. “Reading” the voice.

* * *

Man is greater than war...

What is remembered is exactly where it is larger. He is guided there by something that is stronger than history. I need to take it more broadly - write the truth about life and death in general, and not just the truth about the war. Ask Dostoevsky’s question: how much person is there in a person, and how to protect this person in yourself? There is no doubt that evil is tempting. It is more skillful than good. More attractive. I am plunging deeper and deeper into the endless world of war, everything else has faded slightly and has become more ordinary than usual. A grandiose and predatory world. I now understand the loneliness of a person who returned from there. Like 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 convey something in words, he has a feeling of disaster. The person goes numb. He wants to tell, others would like to understand, but everyone is powerless.

They are always in a different space than the listener. The invisible world surrounds them. At least three people are participating in the conversation: the one who is telling now, the same person as he was then, at the time of the event, and me. My goal is, first of all, to get to the truth of those years. Those days. No false feelings. Immediately after the war, a person would tell about one war; after tens of years, of course, something changes for him, because he is already putting his entire life into memories. All of yourself. The way he lived these years, what he read, saw, who he met. Finally, is he happy or unhappy? We talk to him alone, or there is someone else nearby. Family? Friends - what kind? Front-line friends are one thing, everyone else is another. Documents are living beings, they change and fluctuate with us, you can endlessly get something from them. Something new and necessary for us right now. At this moment. What are we looking for? Most often, it is not feats and heroism, but small and human things that are most interesting and close to us. Well, what I would most like to know, for example, from the life of Ancient Greece... The history of Sparta... I would like to read how and what people talked about at home then. How they went to war. What words were spoken to your loved ones on the last day and last night before parting? How the soldiers were seen off. How they were expected after the war... Not heroes and generals, but ordinary young men...

History is told through the story of its unnoticed witness and participant. Yes, I am interested in this, I would like to turn it into literature. But storytellers are not only witnesses, least of all witnesses, but actors and creators. It is impossible to get closer to reality, head-on. Between reality and us are our feelings. I understand that I am dealing with versions, each has its own version, and from them, from their number and intersections, the image of time and the people living in it is born. But I wouldn’t want it to be said about my book: its characters are real, and nothing more. This is, they say, history. Just a story.

I am writing not about war, but about a person at war. I am not writing a history of war, but a history of feelings. I am a historian of the soul. On the one hand, I study a specific person living at a specific time and participating in specific events, and on the other hand, I need to discern in him an eternal person. Trembling of eternity. Something that always exists in a person.

They tell me: well, memories are neither history nor literature. This is just life, littered and not cleaned by the hand of the artist. The raw material of speaking, every day is full of it. These bricks are lying everywhere. But bricks are not yet a temple! But for me everything is different... It is there, in the warm human voice, in the living reflection of the past, that the primordial joy is hidden and the irremovable tragedy of life is exposed. Her chaos and passion. Uniqueness and incomprehensibility. There they have not yet been subjected to any processing. Originals.

I build temples from our feelings... From our desires, disappointments. Dreams. From what was, but may slip away.

* * *

Once again about the same thing... I am interested not only in the reality that surrounds us, but also in the one that is inside us. What interests me is not the event itself, but the event of feelings. Let's put it this way – the soul of the event. For me, feelings are reality.

What about history? She is on the street. In crowd. I believe that each of us contains a piece of history. One has half a page, the other two or three. Together we are writing the book of time. Everyone shouts their truth. A nightmare of shades. And you need to hear it all, and dissolve in it all, and become all of it. And at the same time, don’t lose yourself. Combine the speech of the street and literature. Another difficulty is that we talk about the past in today’s language. How to convey to them the feelings of those days?

* * *

In the morning, a phone call: “We don’t know each other... But I came from Crimea, I’m calling from the railway station. Is it far from you? I want to tell you my war...”

And my girl and I were planning to go to the park. Ride the carousel. How can I explain to a six-year-old what I do? She recently asked me: “What is war?” How to answer... I want to release her into this world with a tender heart and teach her that you can’t just pick a flower. It would be a pity to crush a ladybug and tear off a dragonfly’s wing. How can you explain war to a child? Explain death? Answer the question: why do they kill there? Even little ones like her are killed. We adults seem to be in cahoots. We understand what we are talking about. And here are the children? After the war, my parents once explained this to me, but I can no longer explain it to my child. Find words. We like war less and less, it is increasingly difficult for us to find an excuse for it. For us, this is just murder. At least for me it is.

I would like to write a book about war that would make me sick of war, and the very thought of it would be disgusting. Mad. The generals themselves would be sick...

My male friends (unlike my female friends) are dumbfounded by this “feminine” logic. And again I hear the “male” argument: “You weren’t in the war.” Or maybe this is good: I don’t know the passion of hatred, I have normal vision. Non-military, non-male.

In optics there is the concept of “aperture ratio” - the ability of a lens to capture a captured image worse or better. So, women’s memory of the war is the most “luminous” in terms of intensity of feelings and pain. I would even say that a “female” war is more terrible than a “male” one. Men hide behind history, behind facts, war captivates them as an action and confrontation of ideas, different interests, and women are captured by feelings. And one more thing - men are trained from childhood that they may have to shoot. Women are not taught this... they did not intend to do this work... And they remember differently, and they remember differently. Able to see what is closed to men. I repeat once again: their war is with smell, with color, with a detailed world of existence: “they gave us duffel bags, we made skirts from them”; “at the military registration and enlistment office I walked into one door in a dress, and came out the other in trousers and a tunic, my braid was cut off, and only one forelock remained on my head...”; “The Germans shot the village and left... We came to that place: trampled yellow sand, and on top - one child’s shoe...”. More than once I have been warned (especially by male writers): “Women are making things up for you. They’re making it up.” But I was convinced: this cannot be invented. Should I copy it from someone? If this can be written off, then only life, it alone has such a fantasy.

No matter what women talk about, they constantly have the idea: war is first of all killing, and then hard work. And then - just ordinary life: singing, falling in love, curling hair...

The focus is always on how unbearable it is and how you don’t want to die. And it is even more unbearable and more reluctant to kill, because a woman gives life. Gives. He carries her inside for a long time, nursing her. I realized that it is more difficult for women to kill.

* * *

Men... They are reluctant to let women into their world, into their territory.

I was looking for a woman at the Minsk Tractor Plant; she served as a sniper. She was a famous sniper. They wrote about her more than once in front-line newspapers. Her friend's home phone number was given to me in Moscow, but it was old. My last name was also written down as my maiden name. I went to the plant where, as I knew, she worked, in the personnel department, and heard from the men (the plant director and the head of the personnel department): “Are there not enough men? Why do you need these women's stories? Women's fantasies..." The men were afraid that the women would tell the wrong story about the war.

I was in the same family... A husband and wife fought. They met at the front and got married there: “We celebrated our wedding in a trench. Before the fight. And I made myself a white dress from a German parachute.” He is a machine gunner, she is a messenger. The man immediately sent the woman to the kitchen: “Cook us something.” The kettle had already boiled, and the sandwiches had been cut, she sat down next to us, and her husband immediately picked her up: “Where are the strawberries? Where is our dacha hotel? After my insistent request, he reluctantly gave up his seat with the words: “Tell me how I taught you. Without tears and feminine trifles: I wanted to be beautiful, I cried when my braid was cut off.” Later she confessed to me in a whisper: “I spent the whole night studying the volume “History of the Great Patriotic War.” He was afraid for me. And now I’m worried that I’ll remember something wrong. Not the way it should be."

This happened more than once, in more than one house.

Yes, they cry a lot. They scream. After I leave, they swallow heart pills. They call an ambulance. But they still ask: “You come. Be sure to come. We were silent for so long. They were silent for forty years..."

More than 1 million women fought in the Soviet army on the fronts of the Great Patriotic War. No less of them took part in the partisan and underground resistance. They were between 15 and 30 years old. They mastered all military specialties - pilots, tank crews, machine gunners, snipers, machine gunners... Women not only saved, as was the case before, working as nurses and doctors, but they also killed.

In the book, women talk about the war that men did not tell us about. We have never known such a war. The men talked about exploits, about the movement of the fronts and military leaders, and the women talked about something else - how scary it is to kill for the first time... or to walk after a battle across a field where the dead lie. They lie scattered like potatoes. Everyone is young, and I feel sorry for everyone - both the Germans and their Russian soldiers.

After the war, women had another war. They hid their military books, their certificates of injury - because they had to learn to smile again, walk in high heels and get married. And the men forgot about their fighting friends and betrayed them. Victory was stolen from them. They didn't divide it.
Svetlana Aleksandrovna Alexievich
writer, journalist.

Memoirs of women veterans. Excerpts from the book by Svetlana Alexievich.

“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 perished in the ground. Or in captivity. Now we are in their place...

Mom wrote me a prayer. I put it in the locket. Maybe it helped - I returned home. I kissed the medallion before the fight..."
Anna Nikolaevna Khrolovich, nurse.

“Dying... I wasn’t afraid to die. Youth, probably, or something else... Death is all around, death is always nearby, but I didn’t think about it. We didn't talk about her. She circled and circled somewhere close, but still missed.

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. Left wounded.
“Don’t go, they’ll kill you,” the soldiers wouldn’t let me in, “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.”
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... At nineteen... My granddaughter is like this now. I look at her and don’t believe it. Child!
When I arrived home from the front, my sister showed me the funeral... I was buried..."
Nadezhda Vasilyevna Anisimova, medical instructor of the machine gun company.

“At this time, a German officer was giving instructions to the soldiers. A cart approached, and the soldiers were passing some kind of cargo along the chain. This officer stood there, commanded something, and then disappeared. I see that he has already appeared twice, and if we miss one more time, then that’s it. We'll miss him. And when he appeared for the third time, in one moment - he would appear and then disappear - I decided to shoot. I made up my mind, and suddenly such a thought flashed: this is a man, even though he is an enemy, but a man, and my hands somehow began to tremble, trembling and chills began to spread throughout my body. Some kind of fear... Sometimes in my dreams this feeling comes back to me... After the plywood targets, it was difficult to shoot at a living person. I see him through the optical sight, I see him well. It’s as if he’s close... And something inside me resists... Something won’t let me, I can’t make up my mind. But I pulled myself together, pulled the trigger... He waved his hands and fell. Whether he was killed or not, I don’t know. But after that I began to tremble even more, some kind of fear appeared: did I kill a man?! I had to get used to this very thought. Yes... In short - horror! Not forget…

When we arrived, our platoon began to tell them what had happened to me, and held a meeting. Our Komsomol organizer was Klava Ivanova, she convinced me: “We shouldn’t feel sorry for them, but hate them.” The Nazis killed her father. We used to start singing, and she would ask: “Girls, don’t, we’ll defeat these bastards, and then we’ll sing.”

And not right away... We didn’t succeed right away. It’s not a woman’s business to hate and kill. Not ours... We had to convince ourselves. Persuade…"
Maria Ivanovna Morozova (Ivanushkina), corporal, sniper.

“Once two hundred people were wounded in a barn, and I was alone. The wounded were brought straight from the battlefield, a lot of them. It was in some village... Well, I don’t remember, so many years have passed... I remember that for four days I didn’t sleep, didn’t sit down, everyone shouted: “Sister! Sister! Help, dear!” I ran from one to the other, tripped and fell once, and immediately fell asleep. I woke up from a scream, the commander, a young lieutenant, also wounded, stood up on his good side and shouted: “Silence! Silence, I order!” He realized that I was exhausted, and everyone was calling me, they were in pain: “Sister! Sister!” I jumped up and ran - I don’t know where or what. And then for the first time, when I got to the front, I cried.

And so... You never know your heart. In winter, captured German soldiers were led past our unit. They walked frozen, with torn blankets on their heads and burnt overcoats. And the frost was such that the birds fell in flight. The birds were freezing.
There was one soldier walking in this column... A boy... Tears froze on his face...
And I was transporting bread to the dining room in a wheelbarrow. He can’t take his eyes off this car, he doesn’t see me, only this car. Bread... Bread...
I take and break off one loaf and give it to him.
He takes... He takes and doesn’t believe. He doesn’t believe... He doesn’t believe!
I was happy…
I was happy that I couldn't hate. I surprised myself then...”
Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva, private, nurse.

“On the thirtieth of May forty-three...
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 already evening. She raised her head, tried to squeeze her fingers - they seemed to be moving, barely opened her left eye and went to the department, covered in blood.
In the corridor I meet our older sister, she didn’t recognize me and asked:
- "Who are you? Where are you 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.
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!” And again - “Hurry! Faster!”

A few days later they took more blood from me for the seriously wounded. People were dying... ...I changed so much during the war that when I came home, my mother didn’t recognize me.”
Ksenia Sergeevna Osadcheva, private, sister-hostess.

“The first guards division of the people’s militia was formed, and several of us girls were taken to the medical battalion.
I called my aunt:
- I'm leaving for the front.
At the other end of the line they answered me:
- March home! Lunch is already cold.
I hung up. Then I felt sorry for her, incredibly sorry. The blockade of the city began, the terrible Leningrad blockade, when the city was half extinct, and she was left alone. Old.

I remember they let me go on leave. Before going to my aunt, I went to the store. Before the war, I loved candy terribly. I say:
- Give me some sweets.
The saleswoman looks at me like I'm crazy. I didn’t understand: what are cards, what is a blockade? All the people in line turned to me, and I had a rifle bigger than me. When they gave them to us, I looked and thought: “When will I grow up to this rifle?” And everyone suddenly began to ask, the whole line:
- Give her some sweets. Cut out the coupons from us.
And they gave me...

The medical battalion treated me well, but I wanted to be a scout. She said that I would run to the front line if they didn’t let me go. They wanted to expel me from the Komsomol for this, for not obeying the military regulations. But I still ran away...
The first medal "For Courage"…
The battle has begun. The fire is heavy. The soldiers lay down. The command: “Forward! For the Motherland!”, and they lie down. Again the command, again they lie down. I took off my hat so they could see: the girl stood up... And they all stood up, and we went into battle...

They gave me a medal, and that same day we went on a mission. And for the first time in my life, it happened... Ours... Women's... I saw my blood, and I screamed:
- I was hurt...
During reconnaissance, we had a paramedic with us, an elderly man.
He comes to me:
-Where did it hurt?
- I don’t know where... But the blood...
He, like a father, told me everything...

I went to reconnaissance for fifteen years after the war. Every night. And the dreams are like this: either my machine gun failed, or we were surrounded. You wake up and your teeth are grinding. Do you remember where you are? There or here?
The war ended, I had three wishes: first, I would finally stop crawling on my stomach and start riding a trolleybus, second, buy and eat a whole white loaf, third, sleep in a white bed and have the sheets crunch. White sheets..."
Albina Aleksandrovna Gantimurova, senior sergeant, intelligence officer.

“I’m expecting my second child... My son is two years old, and I’m pregnant. There is war here. And my husband is at the front. I went to my parents and did... Well, you understand?
Abortion…
Although this was prohibited then... How to give birth? There are tears all around... War! How to give birth in the midst of death?
She graduated from cryptographer courses and was sent to the front. I wanted to take revenge for my baby, for the fact that I didn’t give birth to him. My girl... A girl was supposed to be born...
She asked to go to the front line. Left at headquarters..."
Lyubov Arkadyevna Charnaya, junior lieutenant, cryptographer.

“We couldn’t get enough uniforms: they gave us a new one, and a couple of days later she was covered in blood.
My first wounded was Senior Lieutenant Belov, my last wounded was Sergei Petrovich Trofimov, sergeant of the mortar platoon. In 1970, he came to visit me, and I showed my daughters his wounded head, which still has a large scar on it.

In total, I carried out four hundred and eighty-one wounded from under fire.
One of the journalists calculated: a whole rifle battalion...
They carried men two to three times heavier than us. And they are even more seriously wounded. You drag him and him, and he’s also wearing an overcoat and boots.
You put eighty kilograms on yourself and drag it.
Reset...
You go for the next one, and again seventy to eighty kilograms...
And so five or six times in one attack.
And you yourself have forty-eight kilograms - ballet weight.
Now I can’t believe it anymore... I can’t believe it myself..."
Maria Petrovna Smirnova (Kukharskaya), medical instructor.

"Forty-second year...
We're going on a mission. We crossed the front line and stopped at some cemetery.
The Germans, we knew, were five kilometers away from us. It was night, they kept throwing flares.
Parachute.
These rockets burn for a long time and illuminate the entire area for a long time.
The platoon commander led me to the edge of the cemetery, showed me where the rockets were being thrown from, where the bushes were from which the Germans could appear.
I’m not afraid of the dead, I haven’t been afraid of cemeteries since childhood, but I was twenty-two years old, the first time I stood on duty...
And in these two hours I turned gray...
I discovered my first gray hair, a whole stripe, in the morning.
I stood and looked at this bush, it rustled, moved, it seemed to me that the Germans were coming from there...
And someone else... Some monsters... And I’m alone...

Is it a woman’s job to stand guard at a cemetery at night?
Men had a simpler attitude to everything, they were already ready for the idea that they had to stand at the post, they had to shoot...
But for us it was still a surprise.
Or make a trek of thirty kilometers.
With combat gear.
In the heat.
The horses were falling..."
Vera Safronovna Davydova, private infantryman.

"Melee attacks...
What did I remember? I remember the crunch...
Hand-to-hand combat begins: and immediately there is this crunch - cartilage breaks, human bones crack.
Animal screams...
When there is an attack, I walk with the fighters, well, a little behind, consider it close.
Everything is before my eyes...
Men stab each other. They are finishing off. They break it down. They hit you with a bayonet in the mouth, in the eye... In the heart, in the stomach...
And this... How to describe it? I'm weak... I'm weak to describe...
In a word, women don’t know such men, they don’t see them like that at home. Neither women nor children. It's a terrible thing to do...
After the war she returned home to Tula. At night she screamed all the time. At night, my mother and sister sat with me...
I woke up from my own scream..."
Nina Vladimirovna Kovelenova, senior sergeant, medical instructor of a rifle company.

“The doctor arrived, did a cardiogram, and they asked me:
– When did you have a heart attack?
- What heart attack?
– Your whole heart is scarred.
And these scars are apparently from the war. You approach the target, you are shaking all over. The whole body is covered with trembling, because there is fire below: fighters are shooting, anti-aircraft guns are shooting... Several girls were forced to leave the regiment, they could not stand it. We flew mostly at night. For a while they tried to send us on missions during the day, but they immediately abandoned this idea. Our "Po-2" shot down from a machine gun...

We made up to twelve flights per night. I saw the famous ace pilot Pokryshkin when he arrived from a combat flight. He was a strong man, he was not twenty or twenty-three years old like us: while the plane was being refueled, the technician managed to take off his shirt and unscrew it. It was dripping as if he had been in the rain. Now you can easily imagine what happened to us. You arrive and you can’t even get out of the cabin, they pulled us out. They couldn’t carry the tablet anymore; they dragged it along the ground.

And the work of our girls-gunsmiths!
They had to hang four bombs - that's four hundred kilograms - from the car manually. And so all night - one plane took off, the second landed.
The body was rebuilt to such an extent that we were not women throughout the war. We don’t have any women’s affairs... Menstruation... Well, you understand...
And after the war, not everyone was able to give birth.

We all smoked.
And I smoked, it feels like you calm down a little. When you arrive, you’ll tremble all over, if you light a cigarette, you’ll calm down.
We wore leather jackets, trousers, a tunic, and a fur jacket in winter.
Involuntarily, something masculine appeared in both his gait and his movements.
When the war ended, khaki dresses were made for us. We suddenly felt that we were girls..."
Alexandra Semenovna Popova, guard lieutenant, navigator

“We arrived at Stalingrad...
There were mortal battles going on there. The deadliest place... The water and the ground were red... And now we need to cross from one bank of the Volga to the other.
Nobody wants to listen to us:
- “What? Girls? Who the hell needs you here! We need riflemen and machine gunners, not signalmen.”
And there are many of us, eighty people. By the evening, the girls who were bigger were taken, but they didn’t take us together with one girl.
Small in stature. They haven't grown up.
They wanted to leave it in reserve, but I made such a noise...

In the first battle, the officers pushed me off the parapet, I stuck my head out to see everything for myself. There was some kind of curiosity, childish curiosity...
Naive!
The commander shouts:
- “Private Semenova! Private Semenova, you’re crazy! Such a mother... She’ll kill!”
I couldn’t understand this: how could this kill me if I had just arrived at the front?
I didn’t yet know how ordinary and indiscriminate death was.
You can’t beg her, you can’t persuade her.
They transported the people's militia in old lorries.
Old men and boys.
They were given two grenades and sent into battle without a rifle; the rifle had to be obtained in battle.
After the battle there was no one to bandage...
All killed..."
Nina Alekseevna Semenova, private, signalman.

“Before the war, there were rumors that Hitler was preparing to attack the Soviet Union, but these conversations were strictly suppressed. Stopped by the relevant authorities...
Do you understand what organs these are? NKVD... Chekists...
If people whispered, it was at home, in the kitchen, and in communal apartments - only in their room, behind closed doors or in the bathroom, having first opened the water tap.

But when Stalin spoke...
He addressed us:
- "Brothers and sisters…"
Here everyone has forgotten their grievances...
Our uncle was in the camp, my mother’s brother, he was a railway worker, an old communist. He was arrested at work...
Is it clear to you - who? NKVD...
Our beloved uncle, and we knew that he was not to blame for anything.
They believed.
He had awards since the Civil War...
But after Stalin’s speech, my mother said:
- “We’ll defend our homeland, and then we’ll figure it out.”
Everyone loved their homeland. I ran straight to the military registration and enlistment office. I ran with a sore throat, my fever had not yet completely subsided. But I couldn't wait..."
Elena Antonovna Kudina, private, driver.

“From the first days of the war, changes began in our flying club: the men were taken away, and we, the women, replaced them.
They taught the cadets.
There was a lot of work, from morning to night.
My husband was one of the first to go to the front. All I have left is a photograph: we are standing with him near the plane, in pilot’s helmets...

Now we lived together with our daughter, we lived all the time in camps.
How did you live? I’ll close it in the morning, give you some porridge, and from four o’clock in the morning we’ll be flying. I come back in the evening, and she will eat or not eat, all smeared with this porridge. She doesn't even cry anymore, she just looks at me. Her eyes are big, like her husband’s...
Towards the end of forty-one, they sent me a funeral note: my husband died near Moscow. He was a flight commander.
I loved my daughter, but I took her to his family.
And she began to ask to go to the front...
On the last night...
I stood on my knees by the baby’s crib all night...”
Antonina Grigorievna Bondareva, guard lieutenant, senior pilot.

“My baby was small, at three months I was already taking him on assignments.
The commissioner sent me away, but he cried...
She brought medicines from the city, bandages, serum...
I’ll put him between his arms and legs, wrap him in diapers and carry him. The wounded are dying in the forest.
Need to go.
Necessary!
No one else could get through, no one else could get through, there were German and police posts everywhere, I was the only one who got through.
With a baby.
He's in my diapers...
Now I’m scared to admit... Oh, it’s hard!
To ensure that the baby had a fever and cried, she rubbed it with salt. Then he is all red, a rash breaks out on him, he screams, he crawls out of his skin. They will stop at the post:
- "Typhus, sir... Typhus..."
They are urging her to leave quickly:
- "Vek! Vek!"
And she rubbed it with salt and put in garlic. And the baby is small, I was still breastfeeding him. 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’m going again...”
Maria Timofeevna Savitskaya-Radyukevich, partisan liaison officer.

“We were sent to the Ryazan Infantry School.
They were released from there as commanders of machine gun squads. The machine gun is heavy, you carry it on yourself. Like a horse. Night. You stand on duty and catch every sound. Like a lynx. You guard every rustle...

In war, as they say, you are half man and half beast. This is true…
There is no other way to survive. If you are only human, you will not survive. It'll blow your head off! In war, you need to remember something about yourself. Something like that... To remember something from when a person was still not quite human... I’m not much of a scientist, just an accountant, but I know this.

Reached Warsaw...
And all on foot, the infantry, as they say, is the proletariat of war. They crawled on their belly... Don’t ask me anymore... I don’t like books about war. About the heroes... We walked sick, coughing, sleep-deprived, dirty, poorly dressed. Often hungry...
But we won!”
Lyubov Ivanovna Lyubchik, commander of a platoon of machine gunners.

“Once upon a time during a training exercise...
For some reason I can’t remember this without tears...
It was spring. We shot back and walked back. And I picked violets. Such a small bouquet. She grabbed a narwhal and tied it to a bayonet. So I go. We returned to camp. The commander lined everyone up and calls me.
I go out…
And I forgot that I have violets on my rifle. And he started scolding me:
- “A soldier should be a soldier, not a flower picker.”
He couldn’t understand how anyone could think about flowers in such an environment. The man didn’t understand...
But I didn’t throw away the violets. I quietly took them off and put them in my pocket. For these violets they gave me three outfits out of turn...

Another time I stand on duty.
At two o'clock in the morning they came to relieve me, but I refused. Sent the shift worker to bed:
- “You will stand during the day, and I will now.”
She agreed to stand all night, until dawn, just to listen to the birds. Only at night did something resemble the former life.
Peaceful.

When we left for the front, we walked along the street, people stood like a wall: women, old people, children. And everyone cried: “The girls are going to the front.” There was a whole battalion of girls coming towards us.

I'm driving…
We collect the dead after the battle; they are scattered across the field. All young. Boys. And suddenly - the girl is lying down.
Murdered girl...
Everyone is silent here..."
Tamara Illarionovna Davidovich, sergeant, driver.

“Dresses, high heels...
How sorry we are for them, they hid them in bags. During the day in boots, and in the evening at least a little in shoes in front of the mirror.
Raskova saw - and a few days later an order: all women's clothing should be sent home in parcels.
Like this!
But we studied the new aircraft in six months instead of two years, as is the norm in peacetime.

In the first days of training, two crews died. They placed four coffins. All three regiments, we all cried bitterly.
Raskova spoke:
- Friends, dry your tears. These are our first losses. There will be many of them. Squeeze your heart into a fist...
Then, during the war, they buried us without tears. Stop crying.

They flew fighter planes. The height itself was a terrible burden for the entire female body, sometimes the stomach was pressed directly into the spine.
And our girls flew and shot down aces, and what kind of aces!
Like this!
You know, when we walked, the men looked at us in surprise: the pilots were coming.
They admired us..."
Claudia Ivanovna Terekhova, aviation captain.

“Someone gave us away...
The Germans found out where the partisan detachment was camping. 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... Asks for breast...
But the mother herself is hungry, there is no milk, and the baby is crying.
Punishers are nearby...
With dogs...
If the dogs hear, we will all die. The whole group is about thirty people...
Do you understand?
The commander makes a decision...
No one dares to give the mother the order, but she 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...
Low sound...
But we cannot raise our eyes. Neither at mother, nor at each other..."

From a conversation with a historian.
- When did women first appear in the army?
- 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 they began to form hospitals 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...