radchik1313's review against another edition
5.0
Heartbreaking but necessary to understand the horrors of war from a human’s perspective.
People sometimes think woman are only in charges of food or nursing at war, and while these are honorable and appear in the book it also shows that in war woman do all sorta of things as snipering.
People sometimes think woman are only in charges of food or nursing at war, and while these are honorable and appear in the book it also shows that in war woman do all sorta of things as snipering.
suz_n_van's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
reflective
sad
4.75
summerwxlfe's review against another edition
5.0
A Must Read
What a painfully gorgeous collection of voices. Anyone feeling overwhelmed by current events should read this for a dose of humility and humanity. There has been no greater suffering than that which is immortalized here.
What a painfully gorgeous collection of voices. Anyone feeling overwhelmed by current events should read this for a dose of humility and humanity. There has been no greater suffering than that which is immortalized here.
drakkos's review
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
5.0
‘You ask me: what is happiness? I answer… to suddenly find a living man among the dead.’
Some books are going to stay with you for the rest of your life.
You read them, and you come away from the experience changed. Perhaps they’re beautifully written and introduce you to a new appreciation of the power of words. Perhaps they are thought-provoking works of genius, revealing the contours of human experience in greater clarity than before. Perhaps they are instructional and teach you something valuable about how to do something important. In my experience, they tend to be rare but instantly incandescent. They explode into your life, dividing it into two new periods. The ‘before’ and the ‘after’.
Sometimes though it’s not because the book is especially wise, or elegant, or useful. Sometimes it’s because it’s pure and raw and difficult and heart-breaking. It’s something that rings authentically true and as such it’s upsetting and horrible but feels so important that you can’t stop reading. That’s what the Unwomanly Face of War is – a book that feels like it has broken something inside me.
I make no secret of the fact that books often make me cry. Video games too. Some movies. It’s cathartic, but it’s usually a kind of ‘surface’ emotional response. It’s a shallow kind of empathy – a learned reaction to narrative cues that rarely burrows in any deeper. It’s easy to feel attached to fictional characters – they’re designed to fulfil a story goal and they have no need for the complex messiness of the real world. Real life accounts of real world people are – at least to a sociopath like me – more difficult to care about because they have all the ambiguity that comes from living in a complicated context full of compromise. People aren’t flawless heroes or irredeemable villains. Everyone contains multitudes.
So, when I say that I wept at this book I’m not saying it in the same way that I say ‘I wept at Life is Strange’ or ‘I wept at Sayonara Wild Hearts’. Those were laser focused experiences designed around the goal of making my eyes leak. Here, I’m an irrelevant observer – my emotional response is a distant byproduct of real tragedy. It’s just the stories of old women, recounting the exploits of themselves as young girls, in the face of the grinding horror of a destructive war.
Each of them telling the story of how, when the Nazis came to invade their country, they picked up arms to defend their motherland. They tell brief, mesmerising stories – few of them more than a page long – about what it was like for them and the people around them. The author, Svetlana Alexievich, won a Nobel prize partially on the basis of this book and it’s easy to see why. In itself it’s a work of remarkable biographical excavation – thousands of hours of conversations with hundreds of women across the length and breadth of Russia and its bordering countries. It’s an important work of curation, serving to give brief flashes of insight into representative moments of horror, and love, and hate and triumph. But it’s also written in stark, clear terms that never shy away from the experiences of the women documented. It is searing in its clarity, and that’s what gives it its phenomenal power.
Alexievich points out in the early parts of the book that the story of war is primarily the story of men. Of facts. Of logistics and statistics. This number of soldiers fought this number of soldiers and took this amount of land thanks to the strategies of this general versus that general. Studs Terkel wrote a fantastic oral history of World War 2 from the perspective of the American troops that fought in the conflict. While that book pulls the focus away from the leaders, it keeps it mostly on the men who went to war. It’s a powerful book – a compelling work of scholarship deserving of study. But it still follows the contours of expectation – that war is the pursuit of men. The first book I read this year was A Thousand Ships, and it purported to tell a woman’s history of the siege of Troy. ‘The casualties of war aren’t just the ones that die’, is the core of its thesis.
But what happens when a woman’s history of war does focus on the women who actually went to war? Not in terms of serving the larger war effort in the background (such as in A Game of Birds and Wolves) or in terms of serving in largely support roles in caring professions. But women who actually picked up guns and shot Nazis in response to an existential threat against their own country? That’s what this book documents, and the stories are heart-breaking. Even when they’re triumphant, they’re tinged with horror. Even when they are stories of goodness, the context of suffering makes them terrible.
When the British and Americans went to fight in World War 2, it was to strains of ‘Over there’. Over there, over there, send the word over there’.
The thing for these girls though is that it wasn’t over there. It was happening everywhere around them. The war for them was something they had to fight, because the alternative was oblivion. At one point one of the women telling the story talks about how she wanted the war to keep on going, purely because she dreaded finding out what was left behind her. ‘They all wanted to go home, and they were afraid to go. No one knew what awaited them there’.
Many of the girls who volunteered did so out of a hate for the fascists, because they’d watched their families killed in front of them. Houses burned down with the occupants inside. Whole villages slaughtered out of the suspicion that inhabitants had been working with partisan forces. German tanks rolling over children as they tried to escape to the forests. Torture. Rape. All the brutal indignities that could be inflicted by the worst kind of marauding monsters.
At a time when the Russian forces didn’t have guns, or uniforms, or tanks, or ammunition they went out and fought because there was no alternative. When men returned from the front broken and brutalized, these women looked at the gradual emptying of the country and asked ‘Who next, if not me?’. Girls – children, really – of sixteen and seventeen heading out to become snipers and artillery commanders and sappers and surgeons. And then returning as young women, several years later, changed irrevocably and for the worse by the experience and the horrors they encountered. And yet – few regrets. Plenty of sorrows, plenty of sadness, but hardly any of them who wouldn’t have gladly shouldered those traumas again should the same situation come along. Some of it was the naivety of Stalinist fervour, even in a country where heroes are shot for being traitors on a daily basis. Mostly though, many of these young women seem to just be forged from a different kind of steel. Ukrainians, Belarusians, Romanians and more – just tempered better for adversity as a result of the perpetual hard winter of Stalinism.
This is a hard book to read, because you can’t go more than a couple of pages without finding something that forces you to screw up your eyes against the horror. Or a poignant aside that expresses an almost unbearable dignity in the face of the greatest indignity at all. These aren’t boastful stories. There’s no boasting in here. Just… a humanity I don’t think I could find in the same circumstances. One of the women briefly quoted says this: ‘I have no big decorations. Only medals. I don’t know whether you would be interested n my life, but I would like to tell it to somebody’. The author writes of how the more she interviewed these women, the more of them contacted her. Hundreds desperate for the simple honour of having someone listen to their stories and write them down. So many, in fact, that it’s clear the author gets a kind of second hand PTSD from the responsibility of recording them.
As is often the case, the accomplishments of women give way to the stories of men, and the treatment these women received upon returning from the front is predictably awful. They’re scorned as ‘frontline whores’, who ran away to war to tempt husbands with their ‘young c----‘. They fight with a different flavour of risk – a man who loses a leg in war is a hero and still a viable marriage prospect. A woman in the same circumstances is unmarriable.
And remember, these are basically still children – they still dream of boys and nice clothes and chocolates after the war. They gave up their brief innocence to be rewarded by societal scorn. ‘My best years were spent there. Burned up. Afterward I aged quickly’.
One woman talks of her time as a clerk, taking photographs of the battlefields. Journalists would often contact her – they wanted photos of the dead, lined up like cordwood, so they could sell the tragedy of war to their readers. She didn’t have those to give because that wasn’t who she was documenting things for. It was for the soldiers, and they didn’t want that. ‘When someone was killed, the boys would ask me, ‘Have you got him alive?’. We wanted to see him alive… smiling’.
God, this book. I wanted to stop reading it two dozen times, but it always felt disrespectful. These women were brave enough to share these stories, of these experiences. How cowardly would it have been for me to turn away from it just because I couldn’t bear to keep on reading?
I don’t know if I would recommend you read it. It’s too sad. It’s too upsetting. It’s too stark a look into something that is too fucking unfair. But if you do want to read a book that is going to absolutely burn its way permanently into your synapses… there are few books that have left me feeling quite so hollowed out at the end. Unending human misery is here, but so is bravery and valour and the stories of a generation of brave women who have – as is often the case – been written out of the history books.
I’d say this is a five star book… but what would that even mean in this context? Not a damn thing.
mokey81's review against another edition
5.0
This book is so important. To hear the voices of women who fought on the front lines of WW2. It was powerful. Horrifying and beautiful. And made me think of my privilege. Here in America where we argue whether women should be in combat, but in Eastern Europe 14 year-old girls were running away from home to the front lines. I’m so grateful to this author and her subjects for recording their stories. Powerful read.
rachel281's review against another edition
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
Content Warnings
Moderate: Blood, Death, Injury/injury detail, Sexual violence, War, Suicide, Violence, Rape, and Child death
niccoyong's review
4.0
a moving and eye-opening account of the role of soviet women in wwii
first of all i just found it very informative and interesting so as historical information i was very engaged
but also i was very deeply moved by the stories and recounts throughout the book, both in the exceptional devastation and sorrow in some moments, but also in some of the minutiae that i found immensely fresh and surprising, things like a starving soldier taking two eggs not to eat but to clean her boots with because she so desperately craved for a little bit of beauty amidst the ugliness of war - it's such a surprising yet so painfully human act. and the fact that all these recounts are taken from reality made it even more affecting, realising that these moments of shock and sadness and joy actually happened and are not just works of imagination, was very sobering.
i suppose it was a little repetitive at points? but i think the book's more than a sum of its parts.
its choral nature makes the entire work almost an elegy to these women and their humanity amidst the awful horror of war. highly recommend.
first of all i just found it very informative and interesting so as historical information i was very engaged
but also i was very deeply moved by the stories and recounts throughout the book, both in the exceptional devastation and sorrow in some moments, but also in some of the minutiae that i found immensely fresh and surprising, things like a starving soldier taking two eggs not to eat but to clean her boots with because she so desperately craved for a little bit of beauty amidst the ugliness of war - it's such a surprising yet so painfully human act. and the fact that all these recounts are taken from reality made it even more affecting, realising that these moments of shock and sadness and joy actually happened and are not just works of imagination, was very sobering.
i suppose it was a little repetitive at points? but i think the book's more than a sum of its parts.
its choral nature makes the entire work almost an elegy to these women and their humanity amidst the awful horror of war. highly recommend.