In a Nutshell:

This book was published in 1986 and it was translated into English and published a couple of years ago.

It tells the story of the children, now adults, who survived the Nazi invasion on the eastern front of WW2. This book documents the memories of children who survived. Over 100 testimonies, which recount the sieges, deprivations, terrors, and also the monotony of war.

A hard read, but a necessary read. It does me think now of the wars that are ongoing in the world and the impact this will have on the today’s children.

Quotes:

“Dostoevsky once posed a question: can we justify our world, our happiness, and even eternal harmony, if in its name, to strengthen its foundation, at least one little tear of an innocent child will be spilled? And he himself answered: this tear will not justify any progress, any revolution. Any war. It will always outweigh them. Just one little tear…”

“I remember everything … I remember the adults saying, “He’s little. He doesn’t understand.” I was surprised: ‘They’re strange, these adults, why have they decided that I don’t understand anything? I understand everything.'”

Details:

Book: Last Witnesses: Unchildlike Stories

Author: Svetlana Alexievich

Svetlana Alexievich was born on May 31st, 1948.

In 1983 she wrote the book The Unwomanly Face of War. It wasn’t able to be published until 1985, as Alexievich was accused of “pacifism, naturalism and de-glorification of the heroic Soviet woman”.

In the same year her second book came out: The Last Witnesses: 100 Unchildlike Stories, which sat also unpublished for the same reasons. It was reissued in 2020 by Penguin Books Ltd.

1989 saw the publication of The Boys in Zinc, a book about the criminal Soviet-Afghan war.

In 1993, Alexievich published Enchanted with Death, a book about attempted suicides as a result of the downfall of the socialist Soviet Union. In 1997, Alexievich published her book The Chernobyl Prayer: the Chronicles of the Future. The book is not so much about the Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster as about the world after it.

Alexievich has said, “If you look back at the whole of our history, both Soviet and post-Soviet, it is a huge common grave and a blood bath – an eternal dialogue of the executioners and the victims. The accursed Russian questions: what is to be done and who is to blame. The revolution, the gulags, the Second World War, the Soviet-Afghan war hidden from the people, the downfall of the great empire, the downfall of the giant socialist land, the land-utopia, and now a challenge of cosmic dimensions – Chernobyl. This is a challenge for all the living things on earth. Such is our history. And this is the theme of my books, this is my path, my circles of hell, from man to man.”

At present, the writer lives in Minsk, Belarus. Her books have been translated into 45 languages and published in 47 countries. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 2013 Peace Prize of the German Book Trade,  the 2013 French Prix Médicis essai; the 2013 Best Book of the Year  Prize by  the French literary magazine Lire for her book Time Second Hand; the 2011 Ryszard Kapuściński Award for literary reportage (Poland); the 2011 Angelus Central European Literature Award (Poland) ; the 2006 National Book Critics Circle nonfiction award for “Voices from Chernobyl (New York); the 2001 Erich Maria Remarque Peace Prize (Osnabrück); the 2000 Robert Geisendörfer Radio Play Prize of the German Academy of the Performing Arts (Berlin); the 1999 “Témoin du Monde award (Paris); the 1998 Best Book on Politics of the Year award of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (Bremen); the 1997 Andrei Sinyavsky Prize (Moscow); and the 1996 Kurt Tucholsky Prize of the Swedish PEN Club (Stockholm).

Translators: Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky

Richard Pevear (USA) and Larissa Volokhonsky (Russia) Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky are literary translators best known for their collaborative English translations of classic Russian literature. Individually, Pevear has also translated into English works from French, Italian, and Greek. The couple’s collaborative translations have been nominated three times and twice won the PEN Book of the Month club Translation Prize for Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov. Their translation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot also won the first Efim Etkind Translation Prize.

Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd

Publishing Date: 5.11.2020

A bit about me!

A bit about me, my name is Jess Andoh-Thayre. I am from Brixton, South London. I currently live in Cambodia. Before living here in Cambodia, I lived in Tanzania with my husband, who is a diplomat. I have also lived in Chile and Spain. I am a French, Spanish and English as an Additional Language (EAL) teacher. I recently qualified as a SENCo (Special Educational Needs Coordinator). After taking three years off to have a baby in a pandemic and also retrain, I have just returned to work as an Elementary Learning Support Teacher.