Book talk

    I don’t know how Svetlana Alexievich gets people to relive memories like these. Perhaps it has less to do with trusting her, than with the mourning process. In Last Witnesses, she has strung the anguished WWII recollections of now-grown Russian children into a work that transcends page-after-page of horror and misery into unspoken testament to the persistent miracle of their life-force; even as it has left them in its wreckage.

    The memories of these children, ages 2 -15 at the time the war ended their childhoods, recount the specific personal experiences that destroyed their dear families and home-life as the ravages of Nazi occupation marched through their lives.

    It is humbling to read and yet cathartic to acknowledge such crushing despair, yet desire to live.

    Again and again, children witness the death of their mothers, the destruction of their villages. Children of six become caretakers for siblings of  two. Hunger, homelessness, constant running and fear are their very real lives for years. But again and again, distant aunts, fearless neighbors, and the “community” of war offer food, provide shelter, become “mama.”

    The crimes of armies become imaginable for me in these wrenching memories.  The losses are children’s losses; dolls and sweets, then the reality of security and mama; always mama. The tragedy, dislocation, and cruelty they survived are never really balanced in later years by reunion, rebuilding, or time - their words.

    If the testament of their retellings can never serve them, then let it serve us. These human beings had so much taken from them, that when they decide to give, so painfully, the memories they have left, I must read them; their “last full measure of devotion.”