Last Witnesses : An Oral History of the Children of World War II

I heard papa’s voice outside the window and couldn’t believe that it was my papa. We were so used to waiting for him that I couldn’t believe I could see him. For us papa was someone you had to wait for and only wait for. That day classes were interrupted—the whole school gathered around our house. They waited for papa to come out. He was the first papa to come back from the war. My sister and I were unable to study for another two days, everybody kept coming to us, asking questions, writing notes: “What is your papa like?” And our papa was special: Anton Petrovich Brinsky, Hero of the Soviet Union…

Like our Tolik before, papa didn’t want to be alone. He couldn’t be. It made him feel bad. He always dragged me with him. Once I heard…He told someone about some partisans coming to a village and seeing a lot of freshly dug earth. They stopped and stood on it…A boy came running across the field shouting that his whole village had been shot and buried there. All the people.

Papa turned and saw that I had fainted. Never again did he tell about the war in front of us…

We talked little about the war. Papa and mama were sure that there would never again be such a terrible war. They believed it for a long time. The only thing the war left in my sister and me was that we kept buying dolls. I don’t know why. Probably because we hadn’t had enough childhood. Not enough childhood joy. I was already studying at the university, but my sister knew that the best present for me was a doll. My sister gave birth to a daughter. I went to visit.

“What present can I bring you?”

“A doll…”

“I’m asking what to give you, not your girl.”

“And my answer is—give me a doll.”

Our children were growing up, and we kept giving them dolls. We gave dolls to all our acquaintances.

Our marvelous mama was the first to go; then papa followed her. We sensed, we felt at once that we were the last ones. At that limit…that brink…We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak…

Our words will be the last…

1978–2004

* Arkady Gaidar (1904–1941) was a Soviet writer. The short novel Timur and His Gang (1940), his most famous work, was based partly on the life of his own son, Timur Gaidar (1926–1999), who served in the navy, became a rear admiral, and was also a writer and journalist.

BY SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH

Secondhand Time

Voices from Chernobyl

Zinky Boys

Last Witnesses

The Unwomanly Face of War

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

SVETLANA ALEXIEVICH was born in Ivano-Frankovsk, Ukraine, in 1948 and has spent most of her life in the Soviet Union and present-day Belarus, with prolonged periods of exile in Western Europe. Starting out as a journalist, she developed her own nonfiction genre, which brings together a chorus of voices to describe a specific historical moment. Her works include The Unwomanly Face of War (1985), Last Witnesses (1985), Zinky Boys (1990), Voices from Chernobyl (1997), and Secondhand Time (2013). She has won many international awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature for “her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”

ABOUT THE TRANSLATORS

Together, RICHARD PEVEAR and LARISSA VOLOKHONSKY have translated works by Pushkin, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Chekhov, Leskov, Bulgakov, and Pasternak. They have twice received the PEN Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize (in 1991 for The Brothers Karamazov and in 2002 for Anna Karenina). In 2006 they were awarded the first Efim Etkind International Translation Prize by the European University of St. Petersburg. Most recently they have been collaborating with the playwright Richard Nelson on plays by Turgenev, Gogol, Chekhov, and Bulgakov.

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