The war does not have the female face of the head. War has no woman's face.... From fascist camps to Stalin's

WOMEN IN WAR: THE TRUTH THAT IS NOT COMMON TO SPEAK

Memoirs of female veterans from the book by Svetlana Aleksievich from the book "War does not have a woman's face." The Truth About Women in War That Wasn't in the Newspapers

“Daughter, I gathered a bundle for you. Leave. Leave. You have two younger sisters growing up. Who will marry them? Everyone knows that you were at the front for four years, with men...”.

"We traveled for many days... We went out with the girls to some station with a bucket to get water. They looked around and gasped: one by one the trains went, and there were only girls. They sing. They wave to us - some with headscarves, some with caps. It became clear: there are not enough men, they died in the ground. Or in captivity. Now we are instead of them ... Mom wrote me a prayer. I put it in a locket. Maybe it helped - I returned home. I kissed the locket before the fight ... "

“Once at night, a whole company conducted reconnaissance in combat in the sector of our regiment. By dawn, she moved away, and a groan was heard from the neutral zone. Left wounded. “Don’t go, they’ll kill you,” the fighters didn’t let me in, “you see, it’s already dawn.” Didn't listen, crawled. She found the wounded man, dragged him for eight hours, tying his hand with a belt. Dragged alive. The commander found out, hastily announced five days of arrest for unauthorized absence. And the deputy commander of the regiment reacted differently: "Deserves a reward." At the age of nineteen I had a medal "For Courage". She turned gray at nineteen. At the age of nineteen, in the last battle, both lungs were shot, the second bullet went between two vertebrae. My legs were paralyzed... And I was considered murdered... At the age of nineteen... My granddaughter is like that now. I look at her - and do not believe. Baby!"

"I had a night shift... Went to the critically ill. The captain is lying... The doctors warned me before the shift that he would die at night... He would not make it until the morning... I asked him: "Well, how? How can I help you?" I will never forget ... He suddenly smiled, such a bright smile on his exhausted face: "Unbutton your robe ... Show me your chest ... I haven't seen my wife for a long time ..." I felt ashamed, I answered him something . She left and came back an hour later. He lies dead. And that smile on his face...

"And when he appeared for the third time, this is one moment- it will appear, then it will disappear, - I decided to shoot. I made up my mind, and suddenly such a thought flashed through: this is a man, even though he is an enemy, but a man, and my hands somehow began to tremble, a shiver went through my whole body, chills. Some kind of fear... Sometimes in a dream this feeling comes back to me... After the plywood targets, it was difficult to shoot at a living person. I can see him through the optical sight, I see him well. It's like he's close... And something inside me resists. Something does not give, I can not decide. But I pulled myself together, pulled the trigger ... We did not succeed right away. It's not a woman's business to hate and kill. Not ours... We had to convince ourselves. Persuade..."

"And the girls rushed to the front voluntarily, and the coward himself will not go to war. They were brave, extraordinary girls. There are statistics: the losses among the doctors of the front line took second place after the losses in the rifle battalions. In the infantry. What is, for example, to pull the wounded from the battlefield? I'll tell you now ... We went on the attack, and let's mow us down with a machine gun. And the battalion was gone. Everyone was lying down. They were not all killed, many were wounded. The Germans are beating, the fire does not stop. Quite unexpectedly for everyone, first one girl jumps out of the trench, then a second, a third ... They began to bandage and drag the wounded away, even the Germans were dumbfounded for a while. By ten o'clock in the evening, all the girls were seriously injured, and each saved a maximum of two or three people. They were rewarded sparingly, at the beginning of the war they were not scattered with awards. It was necessary to pull out the wounded man along with his personal weapon. The first question in the medical battalion: where are the weapons? At the beginning of the war it was not enough. A rifle, a machine gun, a machine gun - this also had to be dragged. In the forty-first, order number two hundred and eighty-one was issued on the presentation for an award for saving the lives of soldiers: for fifteen seriously wounded, carried out from the battlefield along with personal weapons - the medal "For Military Merit", for saving twenty-five people - the Order of the Red Star, for the salvation of forty - the Order of the Red Banner, for the salvation of eighty - the Order of Lenin. And I described to you what it meant to save at least one in battle ... From under the bullets ... "

"What was going on in our souls, such people, what we were then, probably never will be again. Never! So naive and so sincere. With such faith! When our regiment commander received the banner and gave the command: "Regiment, under the banner! On your knees!", we all felt happy. We stand and cry, each with a tear in our eyes. You won’t believe it now, my whole body tensed up from this shock, my illness, and I fell ill with “night blindness”, it happened to me from malnutrition, from nervous overwork, and so, my night blindness has passed. You see, the next day I was healthy, I recovered, through such a shock to my whole soul ... "

"I was thrown by a hurricane against a brick wall. She lost consciousness... When she came to, it was already evening. She raised her head, tried to squeeze her fingers - they seemed to be moving, barely pierced her left eye and went to the department, covered in blood. In the corridor I meet our older sister, she did not recognize me, she asked: "Who are you? Where are you from?" She came closer, gasped and said: "Where have you been carried for so long, Ksenya? The wounded are hungry, but you are not." They quickly bandaged my head, left arm above the elbow, and I went to get dinner. His eyes were dark, sweat was pouring down. She began to distribute dinner, fell. Brought to consciousness, and only heard: "Hurry! Quick!" And again - "Hurry! Faster!" A few days later they took blood from me for the seriously wounded."

“We were young and went to the front. Girls. I even grew up for the war. Mom measured at home ... I grew ten centimeters ... "

"Organized a nursing course, and my father took my sister and me there. I am fifteen years old and my sister is fourteen. He said: "That's all I can give to win. My girls..." There was no other thought then. A year later, I got to the front ... "

"Our mother had no sons... And when Stalingrad was besieged, they voluntarily went to the front. Together. The whole family: mother and five daughters, and father had already fought by this time ... "

"I was mobilized, I was a doctor. I left with a sense of duty. And my dad was happy that his daughter was at the front. Defends the Motherland. Dad went to the draft board early in the morning. He went to get my certificate and went early in the morning on purpose so that everyone in the village could see that his daughter was at the front ... "

“I remember they let me go on leave. Before I went to my aunt, I went to the store.
Before the war, she was terribly fond of sweets. I say: - Give me candy.
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 have a bigger rifle than me. When they were given to us, I looked and thought: "When will I grow up to this rifle?" And all of a sudden they began to ask, the whole queue: - Give her candy. Cut out our coupons.
And they gave me."

"I went to the front as a materialist. Atheist. She left as a good Soviet schoolgirl, who was well taught. And there... There I began to pray... I always prayed before a fight, read my prayers. The words are simple... My words... There is only one meaning for me to return to my mom and dad. I didn’t know real prayers, and I didn’t read the Bible. Nobody saw me pray. I am secret. I prayed furtively. Carefully. Because... We were different then, other people lived then. You understand?"

"The forms could not attack us: always in the blood. My first wounded man was Senior Lieutenant Belov, my last wounded man was Sergey Petrovich Trofimov, mortar platoon sergeant. In the seventieth year, he came to visit me, and I showed my daughters his wounded head, on which there is still a large scar. In total, I carried four hundred and eighty-one wounded out of the fire. One of the journalists calculated: a whole rifle battalion ... They dragged men on themselves, two or three times heavier than us. And the wounded are even worse. You are dragging him and his weapons, and he is also wearing an overcoat and boots. You take eighty kilograms on yourself and drag. You drop... You go for the next one, and again seventy or eighty kilograms... And so five or six times in one attack. And in you yourself forty-eight kilograms - ballet weight. I can't believe it now..."

“I later became a squad leader. All department from young boys. We are on the boat all day. The boat is small, there are no latrines. If necessary, the guys can go overboard, and that's all. Well, how about me? A couple of times I got to the point that I jumped right overboard and swim. They yell, "Sergeant major overboard!" They'll pull it out. Here is such an elementary trifle ... But what is this trifle? I then received treatment...

"I returned from the war gray-haired. Twenty-one years old, and I'm all white. I had a serious injury, a concussion, I could not hear well in one ear. Mom met 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."

"I'll tell you something else... The worst thing for me in the war is to wear men's underpants. That was scary. And this is somehow for me ... I won’t express myself ... Well, firstly, it’s very ugly ... You are in the war, you are going to die for the Motherland, and you are wearing men’s shorts. In general, you look funny. Ridiculous. Men's shorts were then worn long. Wide. Sewn from satin. Ten girls in our dugout, and they are all in men's shorts. Oh my God! Winter and summer. Four years... They crossed the Soviet border... They finished off, as our commissar used to say at political classes, the beast in its own lair. Near the first Polish village, we were changed, given new uniforms and... And! AND! AND! They brought women's underpants and bras for the first time. For the first time in the whole war. Ha-ah... Well, I see... We saw normal lingerie... Why aren't you laughing? You cry... Well, why?

"At the age of eighteen, on the Kursk Bulge, I was awarded the medal "For Military Merit" and the Order of the Red Star, at the age of nineteen - the Order of the Patriotic War of the second degree. When new recruits arrived, the guys were all young, of course, they were surprised. They are also eighteen or nineteen years old, and they asked with a sneer: "What did you get your medals for?" or "Have you been in combat?" They pester with jokes: "Do the bullets pierce the armor of the tank?" I later bandaged one of these on the battlefield, under fire, and I remembered his last name - Dapper. He had a broken leg. I put a tire on him, and he asks for forgiveness from me: "Sister, I'm sorry that I offended you then ..."

“She shielded a loved one from a fragment of a mine. Fragments fly - these are some fractions of a second ... How did she manage to do it? She saved Lieutenant Petya Boychevsky, she loved him. And he stayed alive. Thirty years later, Petya Boychevsky came from Krasnodar and found me at our front-line meeting, and told me all this. We went with him to Borisov and found the clearing where Tonya died. He took the earth from her grave... He carried it and kissed it... There were five of us, Konakovo girls... And I returned to my mother alone..."

"A separate smoke masking detachment was organized, which was commanded by the former commander of the division of torpedo boats, Lieutenant Commander Alexander Bogdanov. Girls, mostly with a secondary technical education or after the first courses of the institute. Our task is to protect the ships, cover them with smoke. The shelling will begin, the sailors are waiting: "The girls would rather hang the smoke. It's calmer with him." They drove out in cars with a special mixture, and at that time everyone hid in a bomb shelter. We, as they say, called fire upon ourselves. The Germans, after all, were hitting this smoke screen ... "

"I'm bandaging the tanker... The battle is on, the roar. He asks: "Girl, what is your name?" Even a compliment. It was so strange for me to pronounce my name in this roar, in this horror - Olya.

"And now I'm the commander of the gun. And, therefore, me - in one thousand three hundred and fifty-seventh anti-aircraft regiment. At first, blood was flowing from the nose and ears, indigestion set in completely ... The throat dried up to vomiting ... At night it’s not so scary, but during the day it’s very scary. It seems that the plane is flying right at you, exactly at your gun. Ramming at you! This is one moment ... Now it will turn all, all of you into nothing. Everything is over!"

“And while they found me, I got severe frostbite on my legs. Apparently, I was covered with snow, but I was breathing, and a hole formed in the snow ... Such a tube ... Sanitary dogs found me. They dug up the snow and brought my hat with earflaps. There I had a death passport, everyone had such passports: what relatives, where to report. They dug me up, put me on a raincoat, there was a full coat of blood ... But no one paid attention to my legs ... I was in the hospital for six months. They wanted to amputate a leg, amputate above the knee, because gangrene was starting. And here I was a little faint-hearted, I did not want to remain a cripple. Why should I live? Who needs me? Neither father nor mother. A burden in life. Well, who needs me, stump! I'll suffocate..."

"They got a tank there. We were both senior drivers, and there should only be one driver in a tank. The command decided to appoint me as the commander of the IS-122 tank, and my husband as a senior driver. And so we came to Germany. Both are wounded. We have awards. There were a lot of female tankers in medium tanks, but in heavy tanks, I was the only one."

"We were told to put on all the military, and I'm fifty feet. I got into trousers, and the girls upstairs tied me up with them.

"While he hears ... Until the last moment you tell him, no, no, how can you die. Kiss him, hug him: what are you, what are you? He is already dead, his eyes are on the ceiling, and I whisper something else to him ... I calm him down ... The names are now erased, gone from memory, but the faces remain ... "

"We have a nurse captured... A day later, when we recaptured that village, dead horses, motorcycles, and armored personnel carriers lay everywhere. They found her: her eyes were gouged out, her chest was cut off ... They put her on a stake ... It was frost, and she was white-white, and her hair was all gray. She was nineteen years old. In her backpack we found letters from home and a green rubber bird. Children's toy..."

"Near Sevsk, the Germans attacked us seven or eight times a day. And even that day I carried out the wounded with their weapons. I crawled up to the last one, and his arm was completely broken. Dangling in pieces... On the veins... All covered in blood... He urgently needs to cut off his hand in order to bandage it. No other way. I don't have a knife or scissors. The bag telepals-telepalsya on its side, and they fell out. What to do? And I gnawed this pulp with my teeth. I gnawed it, bandaged it ... I bandaged it, and the wounded man: "Hurry, sister. I'll fight again." In a fever..."

“I was afraid throughout the war that my legs would not be crippled. I had beautiful legs. Man - what? He is not so afraid even if he loses his legs. Still, a hero. Groom! And a woman will be crippled, so her fate will be decided. Women's fate..."

"The men will make a fire at the bus stop, shake the lice, dry. Where are we? Let's run for some shelter, and undress there. I had a knitted sweater, so lice sat on every millimeter, in every loop. Look, it's boring. There are head lice, body lice, pubic lice ... I had them all ... "

“Near Makiivka, in the Donbass, I was wounded, wounded in the thigh. Such a fragment, like a pebble, climbed in, sitting. I feel - blood, I put an individual package there too. And then I run, bandaging. I'm ashamed to tell anyone, the girl was wounded, but where - in the buttock. In the ass... At sixteen, it's embarrassing to tell anyone. It's embarrassing to admit. Well, and so I ran, bandaged, until I lost consciousness from loss of blood. Full boots leaked ... "

"The doctor came, they did a cardiogram, and they ask me Q: When did you have a heart attack?
- What heart attack?
- Your heart is in scars.
And these scars, apparently, from the war. You go over the target, you are shaking all over. The whole body is covered with trembling, because there is fire below: fighters fire, anti-aircraft guns shoot ... We mostly flew at night. For some time they tried to send us on assignments during the day, but they immediately abandoned this idea. Our "Po-2s" were shot from a machine gun ... They made up to twelve sorties per night. I saw the famous ace pilot Pokryshkin when he flew in 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 had time to take off his shirt and unscrew it. She was dripping, as if he'd been out 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 could no longer carry the tablet, they pulled it along the ground.

"We aspired ... We did not want to be said about us:" Oh, these women! And we tried harder than men, we still had to prove that we were no worse than men. And for a long time there was an arrogant, condescending attitude towards us: "These women will fight ..."

"Three times wounded and three times shell-shocked. In the war, who dreamed of what: who would return home, who would reach Berlin, and I thought of one thing - to live to see my birthday, so that I would be eighteen years old. For some reason, I was afraid to die earlier, not even live to be eighteen. I went in trousers, in a cap, always torn, because you always crawl on your knees, and even under the weight of the wounded. I could not believe that someday it would be possible to get up and walk on the ground, and not crawl. It was a dream! One day a division commander came, saw me and asked: "What kind of teenager is this? Why are you keeping him? He should be sent to study."

"We were happy when we got a pot of water to wash our hair. If they walked for a long time, they looked for soft grass. They tore her and her legs ... Well, you see, they washed off with grass ... We had our own characteristics, girls ... The army did not think about it ... Our legs were green ... It’s good if the foreman was an elderly man and I understood everything, I didn’t take excess linen out of my duffel bag, and if I’m young, I’ll definitely throw out the excess. And how superfluous it is for girls who need to change clothes twice a day. We tore the sleeves off our undershirts, and there were only two of them. It's only four sleeves..."

"Let's go ... A man of two hundred girls, and behind a man of two hundred men. The heat is worth it. Hot Summer. March throw - thirty kilometers. Wild heat... And after us, red spots on the sand... Red footprints... Well, these things... Ours... How can you hide something here? The soldiers follow and pretend not to notice anything... They don't look under their feet... Our trousers withered, as if they were made of glass. They cut it. There were wounds, and the smell of blood could be heard all the time. They didn’t give us anything ... We guarded: when the soldiers would hang their shirts on the bushes. We'll steal a couple of pieces ... Later they already guessed, laughed: "Sergeant, give us another linen. The girls took ours." There was not enough cotton wool and bandages for the wounded... But not that... Women's underwear, perhaps, only appeared two years later. We walked in men's shorts and T-shirts ... Well, let's go ... In boots! The legs are fried too. Let's go... To the crossing, ferries are waiting there. We got to the crossing, and then they started bombing us. The bombing is terrible, men - who where to hide. They call us... But we do not hear the bombing, we are not in the mood for the bombing, we are more likely to the river. To the water... Water! Water! And they sat there until they got wet... Under the fragments... Here it is... Shame was worse than death. And a few girls died in the water..."

"Finally got the assignment. They brought me to my platoon... The soldiers look: some with mockery, some even with evil, and the other shrug his shoulders like that - everything is immediately clear. When the battalion commander introduced that, they say, you have a new platoon commander, everyone immediately howled: "Uuuuu..." One even spat: "Ugh!" And a year later, when I was awarded the Order of the Red Star, these same guys, who survived, carried me in their arms to my dugout. They were proud of me."

"We went on a mission at a fast pace. The weather was warm, we walked light. When the positions of truck artillerymen began to pass, suddenly one jumped out of the trench and shouted: "Air! Rama!" I raised my head and look for the "frame" in the sky. I don't see any aircraft. All around is quiet, no sound. Where is that "frame"? Then one of my sappers asked permission to get out of the line. I see, he goes to that gunner and gives him a slap in the face. Before I had time to figure something out, the gunner shouted: "Boys, they are beating us!" Other gunners jumped out of the trench and surrounded our sapper. My platoon, without hesitation, threw probes, mine detectors, knapsacks and rushed to his rescue. A fight ensued. I couldn't understand what happened? Why did the platoon get into a fight? Every minute counts, and here is such a mess. I give the command: "Platoon, get in line!" Nobody pays attention to me. Then I pulled out my gun and fired into the air. Officers jumped out of the dugout. While everyone was calmed down, a considerable time passed. The captain came up to my platoon and asked: "Who is in charge here?" I reported. His eyes widened, he was even confused. Then he asked: "What happened here?" I couldn't answer because I didn't really know the reason. Then my platoon commander came out and told how it all happened. So I learned what "frame" is, what an offensive word it was for a woman. Something like a whore. Frontal curse..."

"Are you asking about love? I'm not afraid to tell the truth ... I was a page, what stands for "field wife. Wife at war. Second. Illegal. First battalion commander ... I didn’t love him. He was a good man, but I didn’t love him. But I went to his dugout in a few months. Where to go? Only men are around, so it’s better to live with one than to be afraid of everyone. In battle it was not as scary as after the battle, especially when we leave for rest, to reorganize. How they shoot, fire, they call: " Sister! Sister!", and after the battle, everyone guards you... You won't get out of the dugout at night... Did the other girls tell you this or didn't they admit it? We were ashamed, I think... They were silent. Proud! But it was all... But about that they are silent... Not accepted... No... I, for example, there was one woman in the battalion, she lived in a common dugout. "What I waved my arms, then I'll give one on the cheeks, on the hands, then the other. I was wounded, got to the hospital and waved my arms there. The nanny will wake me up at night: "What are you doing? Who will you tell?"

"We buried him ... He was lying on a raincoat, he had just been killed. The Germans are firing at us. We must bury it quickly... Right now... We found old birch trees, chose the one that stood at some distance from the old oak. The biggest. Near it... I tried to remember so that I could go back and find this place later. Here the village ends, here is a fork... But how to remember? How to remember if one birch is already burning before our eyes ... How? They began to say goodbye ... They say to me: "You are the first!" My heart jumped, I realized ... What ... Everyone, it turns out, knows about my love. Everyone knows ... The thought hit: maybe he knew? Here... He lies... Now they will lower him into the ground... Bury him. They'll cover it with sand... But I was terribly glad at this thought, which, perhaps, he also knew. What if he liked me too? As if he is alive and will answer me something now ... I remembered how on New Year's Eve he gave me a German chocolate bar. I didn’t eat it for a month, I carried it in my pocket. Now it doesn’t reach me, I remember all my life ... This moment ... Bombs are flying ... He ... Lies on a raincoat ... This moment ... And I rejoice ... I stand and about I smile myself. Abnormal. I am glad that he, perhaps, knew about my love ... She came up and kissed him. Never kissed a man before... It was the first..."

“How did the Motherland meet us? I can’t do without sobs ... Forty years have passed, and my cheeks are still burning. The men were silent, and the women ... They shouted to us: "We know what you were doing there! They lured young p ... our men. Front-line b ... Military bitches ..." They insulted us in every way ... Rich Russian dictionary ... A guy escorts me from the dance, I suddenly feel bad, bad, my heart rumbles. I go and go and sit in a snowdrift. "What happened to you?" - "Yes, nothing. I danced." And these are my two wounds... This is war... And you have to learn to be gentle. To be weak and fragile, and her legs in boots were spread - the fortieth size. It's unusual for someone to hug me. I got used to taking responsibility for myself. She waited for tender words, but did not understand them. They are like children to me. At the front among men - a strong Russian mat. Got used to it. A friend taught me, she worked in the library: "Read poetry. Read Yesenin."

"The legs were gone... They cut off my legs... They saved me there, in the forest... The operation was in the most primitive conditions. They put it on the table to operate, and there was not even iodine, they sawed the legs with a simple saw, both legs ... They put it on the table, and there was no iodine. For six kilometers they went to another partisan detachment for iodine, and I was lying on the table. Without anesthesia. Without ... Instead of anesthesia - a bottle of moonshine. There was nothing but an ordinary saw ... A carpenter's saw ... We had a surgeon, he himself was also without legs, he spoke about me, other doctors said: “I bow to her. I operated on so many men, but I didn’t see such .Do not scream." I held on... I'm used to being strong in public..."

She ran to the car, opened the door and began to report: - Comrade General, on your orders ...
Heard: - Leave ...
Stretched out at attention. The general did not even turn to me, but through the glass of the car he was looking at the road. Nervous and often looks at the clock. I am standing.
He turns to his orderly: - Where is the commander of the sappers?
I again tried to report: - Comrade General ...
He finally turned to me and with annoyance: - The hell I need you!
I understood everything and almost burst out laughing. Then his orderly was the first to guess: - Comrade General, maybe she is the commander of the sappers?
The general stared at me: - Who are you?
- Sapper platoon commander, Comrade General.
Are you a platoon leader? - he was indignant.

- Are your sappers working?
- That's right, Comrade General!
- I got it: general, general ...
He got out of the car, walked a few steps forward, then came back to me. He stood and closed his eyes. And to his orderly: - Did you see it?

"My husband was a senior machinist, and I was a machinist. We traveled in a wagon for four years, and our son was with us. He never even saw a cat in my entire war. When I caught a cat near Kiev, our train was terribly bombed, five planes flew in, and he hugged her: "Dear kitty, I'm glad I saw you. I don't see anyone, well, sit with me. Let me kiss you." A child ... A child should have everything childish ... He fell asleep with the words: "Mommy, we have a cat. We now have a real home."

"Anya Kaburova is lying on the grass ... Our signalman. She dies - the bullet hit the heart. At this time, a wedge of cranes flies over us. Everyone raised their heads to the sky, and she opened her eyes. I looked: "What a pity, girls." Then she paused and smiled at us: "Girls, am I really going to die?" At this time, our postman, our Klava, is running, she is shouting: "Don't die! Don't die! You have a letter from home..." Anya does not close her eyes, she is waiting... Our Klava sat down next to her, opened the envelope. Letter from mom: "My dear,

“I stayed with him for one day, the second and I decide: “Go to the headquarters and report. I'll stay here with you. "He went to the authorities, but I'm not breathing: well, how do they say that at twenty-four hours her legs were gone? This is the front, that's understandable. And suddenly I see - the authorities are going to the dugout: major, Colonel: Everyone shakes hands. Then, of course, we sat down in the dugout, drank, and each said his word that the wife found her husband in the trench, this is a real wife, there are documents. This is such a woman! Let me see such a woman! They said such words, they all cried. I remember that evening all my life... What else do I have left? the mortar hits, and the commander shouts: "Where are you going, damn woman!!" I crawl - alive ... Alive!"

“Two years ago, our chief of staff, Ivan Mikhailovich Grinko, visited me. He has been retired for a long time. Sitting at the same table. I also baked pies. They are talking with my husband, remembering ... They started talking about our girls ... And I was like a roar: "Honor, say, respect. And the girls are almost all single. Unmarried. They live in communal apartments. Who took pity on them? Protected? Where are you going all gone after the war? Traitors!!" In a word, I spoiled their festive mood ... The chief of staff was sitting in your place. “Show me,” he pounded on the table with his fist, “who offended you. Just show him to me!” He asked for forgiveness: "Valya, I can't tell you anything but tears."

"I reached Berlin with the army ... She returned to her village with two Orders of Glory and medals. She lived for three days, and on the fourth day my mother lifted me out of bed and said: “Daughter, I gathered a bundle for you. Go away ... Go away ... You have two more younger sisters. Who will marry them? Everyone knows that you are four I was at the front for a year, with men ... "Don't touch my soul. Write, like others, about my awards ... "

"Near Stalingrad... I'm dragging two wounded. I will drag one - I leave, then - another. And so I pull them in turn, because they are very seriously wounded, they cannot be left, both of them, as it is easier to explain, their legs are beaten off high, they bleed. Here a minute is precious, every minute. And suddenly, when I crawled away from the battle, there was less smoke, suddenly I find that I am dragging one of our tankers and one German ... I was horrified: ours are dying there, and I am saving the German. I was in a panic... There, in the smoke, I couldn't figure it out... I see: a man is dying, a man is screaming... Ah-ah-ah... They are both burnt, black. The same. And then I saw: someone else's medallion, someone else's watch, everything is someone else's. This form is cursed. And now what? I pull our wounded man and think: "To return for the German or not?" I understood that if I left him, he would soon die. From loss of blood... And I crawled after him. I continued to drag them both... This is Stalingrad... The most terrible battles. The best of the best. You are my diamond ... There cannot be one heart for hate, and the second for love. Man has one."

“The war ended, they were terribly unprotected. Here is my wife. She is a smart woman, and she treats military girls badly. He believes that they were going to the war for suitors, that everyone was spinning novels there. Although in fact, we have a sincere conversation, it was most often honest girls. Clean. But after the war... After the dirt, after the lice, after the deaths... I wanted something beautiful. Bright. Beautiful women... I had a friend, he was loved at the front by a beautiful, as I now understand, girl. Nurse. But he did not marry her, was demobilized and found himself another, prettier one. And he is unhappy with his wife. Now he remembers that, his military love, she would be his friend. And after the front, he did not want to marry her, because for four years he saw her only in worn out boots and a man's padded jacket. We tried to forget the war. And they also forgot their girls ... "

"My friend... I won't give her last name, she'll suddenly be offended... Military assistant... Wounded three times. The war ended, she entered the medical institute. She did not find any of her relatives, they all died. She was terribly poor, washing the porches at night to feed herself. But she did not admit to anyone that she was a war invalid and had benefits, she tore all the documents. I ask: "Why did you break?" She cries: "And who would marry me?" - "Well, well," I say, "I did the right thing." He cries even louder: "I could use these papers now. I'm seriously ill." Can you imagine? Crying."

“We went to Kineshma, this is the Ivanovo region, to his parents. I rode a heroine, I never thought that you could meet a front-line girl like that. We have gone through so much, saved so many children for mothers, husbands' wives. And suddenly... I recognized the insult, I heard hurtful words. Before that, except for: “dear sister”, “dear sister”, I didn’t hear anything else ... They sat down to drink tea in the evening, the mother took her son to the kitchen and cries: “Who did you marry? two younger sisters. Who will marry them now?" And now, when I think about it, I want to cry. Imagine: I brought a record, I loved it very much. There were such words: and you are rightfully supposed to walk in the most fashionable shoes ... This is about a front-line girl. I put it on, the older sister came up and smashed it in front of my eyes, saying that you have no rights. They destroyed all my front-line photographs... Enough for us front-line girls. And after the war we got it, after the war we had another war. Also terrible. Somehow the men left us. They didn't cover it. It was different at the front."

“It was then that they began to honor us, thirty years later ... Invite to meetings ... And at first we hid, we didn’t even wear awards. The men wore it, the women didn't. Men are winners, heroes, suitors, they had a war, but they looked at us with completely different eyes. Quite different ... We, I tell you, they took away the victory ... They did not share the victory with us. And it was a shame ... It is not clear ... "

"The first medal" For Courage "... The battle began. Heavy fire. The soldiers lay down. Command:" Forward! For the Motherland!", and they lie. Again the team, again lie. I took off my hat so that they could see: the girl got up ... And they all got up, and we went into battle ... "

Svetlana ALEKSIEVICH

WAR IS NOT A FEMALE FACE…

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained 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 an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? A woman gives life, a woman protects life, a woman and life are synonyms.

In the most terrible war of the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She not only rescued and bandaged the wounded, but also fired from a "sniper", bombed, undermined bridges, went on reconnaissance, took language. The woman killed. She killed the enemy, who fell with unprecedented cruelty on her land, on her house, on her children. “It’s not a woman’s lot to kill,” one of the heroines of this book will say, accommodating 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." That 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 the letters of Nicholas Roerich, 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 such a place: “The Oxford Dictionary has legalized some Russian words now accepted in the world: for example, add one more the word is an untranslatable, meaningful Russian word "feat". Strange as it may seem, but not a single European language has a word of at least an approximate meaning ... "If the Russian word" feat "is ever included in the languages of the world, it will be the share of what was accomplished during the war years by a Soviet woman who held the rear on her shoulders who saved the kids and defended the country along with the men.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, paratroopers, sailors, traffic controllers, drivers, ordinary field bath and laundry detachments, cooks, bakers, testimonies of partisans and underground workers. “There is hardly at least one military specialty that our brave women would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls were Komsomol members of the tank battalion, and heavy tank drivers, and in the infantry - machine-gun company commanders, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

Only on 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 the girls sent by the Komsomol were in the active army. In total, over 800 thousand women served in various branches of the military during the war years ...

The partisan movement became popular. Only in Belarus in partisan detachments there were about 60 thousand courageous Soviet patriots. Every fourth person on Belarusian soil was burned or killed by the Nazis.

Those are the numbers. We know them. And behind them are destinies, whole lives turned upside down, twisted by war: the loss of loved ones, lost health, female 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 heart 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 am so glad that I can tell 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 will 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 all this must be forgotten, or I will 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).

“Man, he could bear it. He's still a man. But how a woman could, I myself do not know. Now, as soon as I remember, I am terrified, but then I could do anything: I could sleep next to the dead, and I myself shot, and I saw blood, I remember very well that in the snow the smell of blood is somehow especially strong ... So I say, and I already feel bad ... And then nothing, then everything could. She began to tell her granddaughter, and my daughter-in-law pulled me up: why would a girl know this? This, they say, woman is growing ... 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 with her for forty years now, we were underground together during the war. We wanted to get tickets, but the queue was long. She just had a certificate of a participant in the Great Patriotic War with her, and she went to the cash register and showed it. And some girl, about fourteen years old, probably says: “Did you women fight? It would be interesting to know for what such feats you were given these certificates?

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking like in a fever…” (Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

I, too, was born after the war, when the trenches were already overgrown, the soldiers' trenches swam, the dugouts "in three runs" collapsed, 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 for the war. Eleven people were missing from my family: the Ukrainian grandfather Petro, my mother’s father, lies somewhere near Budapest, the Belarusian grandmother Evdokia, my father’s mother, died of starvation and typhus during the partisan blockade, the Nazis burned two families of distant relatives with their children in a barn in my native in the village of Komarovichi, Petrikovsky district, Gomel region, his father's brother Ivan, a volunteer, went missing in 1941.

Four years and "my" war. Many times I was scared. I have been hurt many times. No, I will not tell a lie - this path was not within my power. How many times I wanted to forget what I heard. I wanted to and couldn't. All this time I kept a diary, which I also decide to include in the story. It contains what I felt, experienced, it also contains 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 have the right to write in this book “I feel”, “I suffer”, “I doubt”. What are my feelings, my torments next to their feelings and torments? Will 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 explicit or secret passion of the one whose hand moved the pen over the paper. And this passion after many years is also a document.

It just so happens that our memory of the war and all our ideas about the war are masculine. This is understandable: it was mostly men who fought, but this is also an acknowledgment of our incomplete knowledge of the war. Although hundreds of books have been written about women who participated in the Great Patriotic War, there is considerable memoir literature, and it convinces us that we are dealing with a historical phenomenon. Never before in the history of mankind have so many women participated in war. In the past, there were legendary units, like the cavalry girl Nadezhda Durova, the partisan Vasilisa Kozhana, during the years of the civil war there were women in the Red Army, but mostly sisters of mercy and doctors. The Great Patriotic War gave the world an example of the mass participation of Soviet women in the defense of their Fatherland.

Pushkin, publishing an excerpt from the notes of Nadezhda Durova in Sovremennik, wrote in the preface: “What reasons made a young girl, of a good noble family, leave her father’s house, renounce her sex, take on labors and duties that frighten both men and appear on the battlefield - and what else? Napoleonic! What prompted her? Secret, family afflictions? Inflamed imagination? An innate indomitable tendency? Love?.. ”It was only about one incredible fate, and there could be many guesses. It is quite another when eight hundred thousand women served in the army, and even more were asked to go to the front.

They went because "we and the motherland - for us it was one and the same" (Tikhonovich K.S., anti-aircraft gunner). They were allowed to go to the front, because it was thrown on the scales of history: to be or not to be a people, a country? That was the question.

Svetlana ALEKSIEVICH

WAR IS NOT A FEMALE FACE…

“... I am so glad that I can tell someone that our time has come ...” (Tamara Illarionovna Davydovich, senior sergeant, driver).


	One of the world's most famous books about the war, which laid the foundation for Svetlana Aleksievich's famous documentary cycle "Voices of Utopia". It has been translated into more than twenty languages and is included in school and university programs in many countries. The latest author's edition: the writer, in accordance with her creative method, is constantly updating the book, removing censorship edits, inserting new episodes, supplementing the recorded women's confessions with pages of her own diary, which she kept during the seven years of working on the book. “War does not have a woman’s face” is the experience of a unique penetration into the spiritual world of a woman who survives in the inhuman conditions of war.

One of the world's most famous books about the war, which laid the foundation for Svetlana Aleksievich's famous documentary cycle "Voices of Utopia". It has been translated into more than twenty languages and is included in school and university programs in many countries. The latest author's edition: the writer, in accordance with her creative method, is constantly updating the book, removing censorship edits, inserting new episodes, supplementing the recorded women's confessions with pages of her own diary, which she kept during the seven years of working on the book. “War does not have a woman’s face” is the experience of a unique penetration into the spiritual world of a woman who survives in the inhuman conditions of war.


"I don't want to remember..." “Grow up, girls… You are still green…” “Alone I returned to my mother…” There are two wars in our house “The handset does not shoot…” “We were awarded small medals…” "It was not me…" “I still remember those eyes…” "We didn't shoot..." “A soldier was required ... But I wanted to be even more beautiful ...” "Just look once..." "... About a small bulb" “Mom, what is dad?” “I can’t see how children play ‘war’…”

"I don't want to remember..."
“Grow up, girls… You are still green…”
“Alone I returned to my mother…”
There are two wars in our house
“The handset does not shoot…”
“We were awarded small medals…”
"It was not me…"
“I still remember those eyes…”
"We didn't shoot..."
“A soldier was required ... But I wanted to be even more beautiful ...”
"Just look once..."
"... About a small bulb"
“Mom, what is dad?”
“I can’t see how children play ‘war’…”

Everything that we know about a woman is best contained 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 an essence, as a purpose, as an ultimate meaning? Woman gives life, woman protects life, woman and life are synonyms.

... For four agonizing years I have been walking burnt kilometers of someone else's pain and memory. Hundreds of stories of women front-line soldiers were recorded: doctors, signalmen, sappers, pilots, snipers, shooters, anti-aircraft gunners, political workers, cavalrymen, tankers, 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 would not have coped with as well as their brothers, husbands, fathers,” wrote Marshal of the Soviet Union A.I. Eremenko. Among the girls were Komsomol organizers of a tank battalion, and mechanics-drivers of heavy tanks, and in the infantry - commanders of a machine-gun company, submachine gunners, although in our language the words "tanker", "infantryman", "machine gunner" do not have a feminine gender, because this job never done by a woman.

“... I am so glad that I can tell someone that our time has come ...” (Tamara Illarionovna Davydovich, senior sergeant, driver).

This is how we protect them, and then we are surprised that our children know little about us ... ”(Tamara Mikhailovna Stepanova, sergeant, sniper).

Of course, other people in the queue let us through, but we didn't go to the cinema. We were shaking like in a fever…” (Vera Grigoryevna Sedova, underground worker).

They went because "we and the motherland - for us it was one and the same" (Tikhonovich K.S ... anti-aircraft gunner). They were allowed to go to the front, because it was thrown on the scales of history: to be or not to be a people, a country? That was the question.

What is collected in this book, according to what principle? It will not be famous snipers and not famous pilots or partisans who will tell, 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 had to hear more than once. But it was to them that she went, she was looking for them. It is in their minds that what we highly call the people's memory is stored. “When you look at the war with our, woman’s, eyes, it’s more terrible than terrible,” said Alexandra Iosifovna Mishutina, sergeant, medical instructor. In these words of a simple woman who went through the whole war, then got married, gave birth to three children, now she is nursing her grandchildren, and the main idea of the book is concluded.

In optics, there is the concept of "aperture" - the ability of the lens to fix the captured image worse or better. So, the female memory of the war is the most “aperture-fast” in terms of tension of feelings, in terms of pain. It is emotional, it is passionate, full of details, and it is in the details that the document acquires its incorruptible power.

The signalman Antonina Fedorovna Valegzhaninova fought near 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 combined them into a single image: “I remember one battle. A lot of people were killed ... Scattered like potatoes when they are turned out of the ground with a plow. A huge, large field ... They just kept moving and lying ... They are like potatoes ... Even a horse, such a delicate animal, she walks and is afraid to put her foot so as not to step on a person, but they have ceased to be afraid of the dead ... "And the partisan Valentina Pavlovna Kozhemyakina kept in mind such a detail: the first days of the war, our units are retreating with heavy fighting, the whole village came out to see them off, they are standing with their mother. “An elderly soldier passes by, stopped near our hut and bows low, low, right at the feet of his mother:“ 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 recall another case, how she will cry over the first wounded man, and he, dying, will tell her:“ Take care of yourself, girl. You still have to give birth ... Look how many men died ... ”.

Women's memory covers that continent of human feelings in war, which usually eludes men's attention. If a man was captured by war as an action, then a woman felt and endured it differently due to her female psychology: bombing, death, suffering - for her, the whole war is not yet. The woman felt more strongly, again due to her psychological and physiological characteristics, the overload of war - physical and moral, she endured the "male" being war more difficult. And what she remembered, brought out of mortal hell, today has become a unique spiritual experience, an experience of limitless human possibilities, which we have no right to forget.

Perhaps in these stories there will be 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 to win for everyone, for the whole people to win, it was necessary to strive to win for everyone, each individually.

They are still alive - participants in the battles. But human life is not infinite; only memory, which alone conquers time, can prolong it. People who endured the great war, who won it, realize today the significance of what they have done and experienced. They are ready to help us. I have often come across in families thin student and thick common notebooks, written and left for children and grandchildren. This grandfather's or grandmother's inheritance was reluctantly passed into the wrong hands. They were usually justified in the same way: “We want the children to have a memory ...”, “I will make a copy for you, and I will keep the originals for my son ...”

But not everyone is recording. Much disappears, dissolves without a trace. Forgotten. If you do not forget the war, there is a lot of hatred. And if the war is forgotten, a new one begins. That's what the ancients said.

Collected together, the stories of women paint the face of a war that is not at all a woman's face. They sound like evidence - accusations against fascism of yesterday, fascism of today and fascism of the future. Fascism is blamed on mothers, sisters, wives. Fascism is blamed by a woman.

Here is one of them sitting in front of me, telling how, just before the war, her mother would not let her go to her grandmother without an escort, they say, she was still small, and two months later this “little one” went to the front. She became a medical instructor, fought from Smolensk to Prague. She returned home at the age of twenty-two, her peers were still girls, and she was already an old man, who had seen a lot and felt a lot: she was wounded three times, one severe wound in the chest area, she was shell-shocked twice, after the second concussion, when she was dug out of filled trench, turned gray. But it was necessary to start a woman's life: again learn to wear a light dress, shoes, get married, give birth to a child. A man, even if he was a cripple, he returned from the war, but he still created a family. And women's post-war fate was more dramatic. The war took away their youth, took away their husbands: few of their peers returned from the front. They knew this even without statistics, because they remembered how the men lay on the trampled fields in heavy sheaves and how it was impossible to believe, come to terms with the idea that you could no longer lift these tall guys in sailor jackets, 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).
Part 46 -

“Can I find such words? I can tell about how I shot. But how I cried, no. It will remain unspoken. I know one thing: in war a person becomes terrible and incomprehensible. How to understand him?

You are a writer. Come up with something yourself. Something beautiful. Without lice and dirt, without vomit... Without the smell of vodka and blood... Not as terrible as life..."

Anastasia Ivanovna Medvedkina, ordinary, machine gunner

“I reached Warsaw ... And everything was 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 the war. About the heroes… We walked sick, coughing, not getting enough sleep, dirty, poorly dressed. Often hungry… But we won!”

Lyubov Ivanovna Lyubchik, commander of a platoon of machine gunners

“In the war, who dreamed of what: who would return home, who would reach Berlin, and I thought of one thing - to live to see my birthday, so that I would be eighteen years old. For some reason, I was afraid to die earlier, not even live to be eighteen. I went in trousers, in a cap, always torn, because you always crawl on your knees, and even under the weight of the wounded. I could not believe that someday it would be possible to get up and walk on the ground, and not crawl. It was a dream!..

Came to Berlin. She signed the Reichstag: "I, Sofya Kuntsevich, came here to kill the war."

Sofia Adamovna Kuntsevich, foreman, medical officer of a rifle company

“It is terrible to remember how nightmarish the first march was. I was ready to accomplish a feat, but I was not ready to wear size forty-two instead of the thirty-fifth. It's so hard and so ugly! So ugly!

The commander saw me walking, called me out of action:

Smirnova, how do you go as a drill? What, you weren't taught? Why don't you lift your feet? I announce three outfits out of turn...

I answered:

There are, comrade senior lieutenant, three outfits out of turn! She turned to go and fell down. She fell out of her boots... Her legs were covered in blood....

Then it turned out that I could no longer walk. The company shoemaker Parshin was ordered to sew boots for me from an old raincoat, size thirty-five ... "

Nonna Alexandrovna Smirnova, ordinary, anti-aircraft gunner

“Now I’m watching films about the war: a nurse is on the front line, she’s neat, clean, not in wadded trousers, but in a skirt, she has a cap on a tuft. Well, not true! How could we pull out the wounded, if we were like that ... You don’t crawl very much in a skirt when there are only men around. And to tell the truth, skirts were only given to us at the end of the war as elegant ones. At the same time, we also received lower jersey instead of men's underwear. They did not know where to go from happiness. The gymnasts were unbuttoned so that it was visible ... "

Sofia Konstantinovna Dubnyakova, senior sergeant, medical officer

“I close my eyes, I see everything in front of me again ...

The shell hit the ammunition depot, a fire broke out. The soldier stood nearby, guarded, he was scorched. It was already a black piece of meat…. He only jumps... He jumps in one place... And everyone is watching from the trenches, and no one will budge, everyone is confused. I grabbed a sheet, ran up, covered this soldier and immediately lay down on him. Pressed to the ground. The earth is cold... Like this... He left until his heart broke, and calmed down...

And then the battle began again ... Near Sevsk, the Germans attacked us seven to eight times a day. And even that day I carried out the wounded with their weapons. I crawled up to the last one, and his arm was completely broken. Dangling in pieces... On the veins... All covered in blood... He urgently needs to cut off his hand in order to bandage it. No other way. I don't have a knife or scissors. The bag telepals-telepalsya on its side, and they fell out. What to do? And I gnawed this pulp with my teeth. I gnawed it, bandaged it ... I bandage it, and the wounded man: “Hurry, sister. I will fight again." In a fever…”

Olga Yakovlevna Omelchenko, medical officer of a rifle company

“They gave me some special coupons for my orders and medals so that I could go to the military department and buy something. I bought myself rubber boots, then the most fashionable, bought a coat, dress, boots. The overcoat decided to sell. I'm going to the market... I came in a light summer dress... With a hairpin in my hair... And what did I see there? Young guys without arms, without legs ... All the people who fought ... With orders, with medals ... Who has whole hands, sells homemade spoons. Women's bras, panties. And the other... Without arms, without legs... He sits and washes himself with tears. He asks for a penny ... They didn’t have any wheelchairs, they rode on makeshift boards, pushing them with their hands, whoever had them. Drunk. They sang "Forgotten, abandoned." These are the scenes ... I left, I did not sell my overcoat. And as long as I lived in Moscow, about five years, I probably could not go to the market. I was afraid that one of these cripples would recognize me and shout: "Why did you pull me out from under the fire then? Why did you save me?" I remembered one young lieutenant... He had legs... One was cut off by shrapnel, the other was still hanging on something... I bandaged him... Under the bombs... And he shouted to me: "Don't pull! Finish it off! Finish it... I order you..." Do you understand? And so I was always afraid to meet this lieutenant ... "

Zinaida Vasilievna Korzh, medical officer of the cavalry squadron

“People did not want to die ... We responded to every moan, to every cry. One of the wounded, when he felt that he was dying, grabbed me by the shoulder, hugged me and did not let go. It seemed to him that if someone was near him, if his sister was nearby, then life would not leave him. He asked: “Just five more minutes to live. Two more minutes…” Some of them died inaudibly, slowly, others shouted: “I don’t want to die!” They were cursing: fuck it… One of them suddenly sang… He sang a Moldavian song… A man dies, but still doesn’t think, doesn’t believe that he is dying. And you see how a yellow-yellow color comes from under the hair, how the shadow first moves over the face, then under the clothes ... He lies dead, and there is some surprise on his face, as if he is lying and thinking: how did I die? Am I dead?

“When the war was going on, we were not awarded, and when it ended, they told me: “Reward two people.” I was outraged. She took the floor, spoke out, that I was the political officer of the laundry detachment, and what a hard work it was for laundresses, that many of them had hernias, eczema on their hands, and so on, that the girls were young, they worked more machines, like tractors. They ask me: “Can you present the award material by tomorrow? We'll give you more rewards." And the detachment commander and I spent the night sitting over the lists. Many girls received medals "For Courage", "For Military Merit", and one laundress was awarded the Order of the Red Star. The best laundress, she did not leave the trough: it happened that everyone no longer had strength, they fell, and she erased. It was an elderly woman, her whole family died.

Valentina Kuzminichna Bratchikova-Borschevskaya, lieutenant, political officer of the field laundry detachment

“They brought me to my platoon ... The soldiers look: some with mockery, some even with evil, and the other shrug his shoulders like that - everything is clear right away. When the battalion commander introduced that here, they say, you have a new platoon commander, everyone immediately howled: "Uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuu..." One even spat: "Ugh!"

And a year later, when I was awarded the Order of the Red Star, these same guys, who survived, carried me in their arms to my dugout. They were proud of me.

Appolina Nikonovna Litskevich-Bayrak, junior lieutenant, commander of a sapper-miner platoon

“We were at logging sites, carrying boxes of ammunition. I remember, I was dragging one box, and crashed down, it is heavier than me. This is one. And the second - how many difficulties it was for us, as for women. For example, this. I later became a squad leader. All department from young boys. We are on the boat all day. The boat is small, there are no latrines. If necessary, the guys can go overboard, and that's all. Well, how about me? A couple of times I got to the point that I jumped right overboard and swim. They yell, "Sergeant major overboard!" They'll pull it out. Here is such an elementary trifle ... But what is this trifle? Then I was treated ... Can you imagine?

Petty officer of the first article Olga Vasilievna Podvyshenskaya

“If we walked for a long time, we looked for soft grass. They tore her and her legs ... Well, you see, they washed off with grass ... We had our own characteristics, girls ... The army did not think about it ... Our legs were green ... It’s good if the foreman was an elderly man and I understood everything, I didn’t take excess linen out of my duffel bag, and if I’m young, I’ll definitely throw out the excess. And how superfluous it is for girls who need to change clothes twice a day. We tore the sleeves off our undershirts, and there were only two of them. It's only four sleeves..."

Clara Semyonovna Tikhonovich, senior sergeant, anti-aircraft gunner

“After the war… I lived in a communal apartment. The neighbors were all with their husbands, offended me. They scoffed: “Ha-ha-ah ... Tell me, how are you there ... with the men ...” Vinegar will be poured into my pot with potatoes. Pour a spoonful of salt ... Ha-ha-ah ...

My commander was demobilized from the army. He came to me and we got married. Signed up at the registry office, and that's it. No wedding. And a year later he went to another woman, the head of our factory canteen: “She smells of perfume, but you smell like boots and footcloths.”

So I live alone. I don't have anyone in the whole wide world. Thanks for coming…”

Ekaterina Nikitichna Sannikova, sergeant, gunner

“How did the Motherland meet us? I can’t live without sobs… Forty years have passed, and my cheeks are still burning. The men were silent, and the women… They shouted to us: “We know what you were doing there! They lured young p ... our men. Front-line b ... Military knots ... "Offended in every way ... Rich Russian dictionary ...

The guy from the dance escorts me, I suddenly feel bad, bad, my heart rumbles. I go and go and sit in a snowdrift. "What happened to you?" - "Never mind. Danced." And these are my two wounds ... This is war ... And you have to learn to be gentle. To be weak and fragile, and the legs in boots were spread - the fortieth size.

Claudia S-va, sniper

“Do you understand this? Can this be understood now? I want you to understand my feelings... You won't shoot without hatred. This is war, not hunting. I remember how we were read an article by Ilya Ehrenburg "Kill him!" How many times you meet a German, so many times kill him. The famous article, then everyone read it, memorized it. It made a strong impression on me, I had this article and my father's "funeral" in my bag throughout the war ... Shoot! Fire! I must avenge..."

Valentina Pavlovna Chudaeva, sergeant, anti-aircraft gun commander

“You never know your heart. In winter, captured German soldiers were led past our unit. They walked frozen, with torn blankets on their heads, burnt overcoats. And the frost is such that the birds fell on the fly. The birds were freezing. One soldier was walking in this column... A boy... Tears were frozen on his face... And I was carrying bread in a wheelbarrow to the dining room. 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 does not believe. Doesn't believe... Doesn't believe!

I was happy... I was happy that I couldn't hate. I surprised myself…”

Natalya Ivanovna Sergeeva, private, nurse

“We came to some village, the children run around - hungry, unhappy. They are afraid of us... They are hiding... I, who swore that I hate them all... I collected from my soldiers everything they had, what was left of the ration, any piece of sugar, and gave it to German children. Of course, I didn’t forget… I remembered everything… But I couldn’t look calmly into the hungry children’s eyes. Early in the morning there was already a queue of German children near our kitchens, they gave the first and second. Each child has a bag for bread thrown over his shoulder, a can for soup on his belt and something for the second - porridge, peas. We fed them and treated them. They even stroked… I stroked for the first time… I got scared… I… I! Stroking a German child ... My mouth was dry from excitement. But I soon got used to it. And they are used to…

Sofia Adamovna Kuntsevich, medical instructor

“I don't like military toys, children's military toys. Tanks, machine guns... Who came up with this? It turns my soul... I have never bought or given military toys to children. Neither their own, nor others. Once, someone brought a military airplane and a plastic machine gun into the house. I immediately threw it in the trash ... Immediately!

Tamara Stepanovna Umnyagina, guard junior sergeant, medical instructor

Svetlana Aleksievich's book "War has no woman's face"