A
Genre: Nonfiction
Trigger warnings for the explicit and implied deaths of children and animals, torture, PTSD, and sexual assault.
The Unwomanly Face of War is an oral history of women who fought for the Soviets in WWII. These women filled an incredible variety of roles. In addition to the famous Night Witches, the women who gave interviews for this book were sappers, partisans, underground resistance fighters, nurses, surgeons, antiaircraft gunners, front line soldiers, tankmen, telephone and radio operators, snipers, and more. The book is harrowing and discusses atrocities and moments of intense tragedy and pain. There is also humor, however, and the book puts a lot of attention on the women’s efforts to preserve a sense of normality by doing things like using baby pinecones as hair curlers, and their joy in finding a wildflower to keep in the bunker.
This book is a great read for people who are prepared to read about some awful emotional stuff, and for people who are interested in the roles women have played in history that have been largely erased. If you were a fan of the Kickass Women posts on this site, then you might like this book for the amazing variety of roles that women played. There are love stories, but many are tragic.
In the former Soviet Union, people were taught a very specific, and glorified, history of WWII. This history prized a “heroic” view in which things like dirt, lice, blood, doubt, and fear were excised. American readers, who are usually less well-versed in Soviet contributions to the war, may need to spend some time catching up on Wikipedia or elsewhere. However, the author’s decision to omit framing information and rely solely on women’s voices and their daily experiences, as opposed to larger scope information about battles and politics, is not only deliberate but revolutionary. Both the interviewees and the censors struggled with the concept that the daily struggle could be worth depicting. The current edition (2017) is the first to appear in English in a non-censored form.
One of the most fascinating elements of the book is how the author and interviewer, Svetlana Alexievich, has to struggle to convince her subjects that their experiences, including their more day-to-day experiences, are valid. Many contacted her after their interviews, panicked that they had painted an “unheroic” picture. Often male relatives tried to coach the women before the interview or interrupt the interview to present the facts that they thought really mattered (dates, locations, etc.). In one case, a woman confided that her husband coached her for two days. She went on to reveal that they had gotten married at the Front, and that she had made her wedding dress out of bandages.
The women in the book entered the war at all ages and their experiences were intertwined with biology and family. Some were as young as thirteen or fourteen. Others were already mothers and often already widowed. One young woman got her first period right after a battle and thought she had been shot. Her commander, she said, “explained it to me like a father.” Another very young teen went to war with nothing but a family photo and a suitcase full of candy. Mothers who were partisans or underground fighters went on missions with their babies on their backs, or used their children as cover, and had to accept the fact that their own mothers often paid a terrible price for their daughter’s service. During the war, women who served were lauded, but after the war they were shunned due to a belief that since they lived in such close proximity to men they must have been sexually “loose.”
Alexievich presents the interviews non-judgmentally. It’s important to understand this going in, because both the Soviets and the Germans committed atrocities, many of which are described in the book. Soviet armies were notorious for committing rapes, and the women interviewed in the book generally seem to regard this fact with mingled disgust and shame. This is an extremely dark and painful book, though not without humor and hope. As mentioned, trigger warnings for the explicit and implied deaths of children and animals, torture, PTSD, and sexual assault. My personal reading tactic was to keep the book in the bathroom so that I could only read a little bit at a time. It’s such tough going that I had not intended to review it here, but so fascinating in its focus on women’s voices and experiences that I couldn’t NOT review it.
If I was left with any single impression, it is that people are capable of amazing kindness in the face of overwhelming cruelty. One woman said, in defense of her actions in saving both a German and a Soviet soldier from a battlefield,
“There can’t be one heart for hatred and another for love. We only have one, and I always thought about how to save my heart.”
This book is available from:
As an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases.
We also may use affiliate links in our posts, as well.
Thanks!
Wow. Thanks for this review. I’m so glad this book exists and I’m also not sure I can read it. But I’m glad it exists.
The sample that I downloaded was intense, but so, so good. It’s on my “to buy” list, but I think the idea of keeping it in the bathroom to ensure short sessions with it is a good one.
As I listen to various politicians (men) all over the world blithely threaten or promise war I’m continually disgusted. Of course it is war where other men are sent to kill or be killed– not themselves, their children that are supposed to make these sacrifices.
War is mad, bad and horrifying in reality, not fine uniforms, marching and parades. Sometimes it seems needed. Sometimes it proves a mistake. But never should it be seen as easy. Books that tell the true story of war ARE hard to read as the true story of war is hard. World War I is reported to have had 41 MILLION casualties. If we can’t bear to read these true accounts of war, start out smaller with novels that show the costs of war on veterans and on survivors on the homefront left to worry and mourn.
I have Voices from Chernobyl, which uses the same tactic of no obvious authorial hand, only the voices of those interviewed (and also needs Red Siren trigger alerts). The stories of Alexievich’s subjects are so intense I can only read one every so often, after which I have to absorb, catalogue, and decompress. Reading her work is both difficult and intensely rewarding. I come away feeling as though her goal is to create a sense of being brought into a little-known experience and made a witness, so that history won’t forget.
This has also received favourable reviews here in the UK. I think it sounds wonderful, and I am pleased that it exists. But whilst I may recommend it to others, particularly to men, and to young people, and to some of the more gung ho types of my acquaintance, I don’t think I can read it.
Maybe I’ll buy a copy anyway.
In a similar vein, but with less traumatic subject matter – War Wives by Eileen and Colin Townsend is an oral history of British women during WWII – not all married, despite the title. I bought a copy in London in 1990 but it’s still available on Kindle.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/B005S1VDW0/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
I bought it to read on the train while I was studying abroad (at Uni of Sussex) – I fell in love with the subject so much that I actually chose to write my senior history thesis / independent study on the actions and experiences of British Women during WWII. And I used that book as one of my primary sources. FWIW.
I’ve always been curious about the women in the Russian army. Pictures of snipers periodically show up on my dash and I always feel a little surprised since the women’s war narrative I’m used to is in manufacturing, codebreaking, and maybe a little undercover operative work – but also why am I finding out about these whole other swathes of contributions by accident, like their efforts were historical trivia? This book is exactly what I am looking for so I will be picking up a copy and reading it in very, very small sections. The traumas you mentioned are the things that make me put a book down but since they are things that someone lived then I kind of feel like I owe it to them to pay attention and read it through.
Re: the problems of romance at the front; Ernst Pawel’s memoir Life in Dark Ages talks about the problems Tito’s partisans had in Yugoslavia. Officially, any kind of sex between soldiers was strictly forbidden. Hard to tell what actually happened in woods among those who were living as guerrillas, but Pawel talks about what happened to those who escaped or were evacuated over the border to Italy (where he was a liaison between the Partisans and the US army) to recover from wounds.
Apparently, birth control was a huge problem. The Allied soldiers in Italy were given condoms on request, but the Yugoslav partisans didn’t have that option, and obviously pregnancy was a disaster for soldiers expected to go back on active service. So since Pawel was a member of the US army, and American soldiers were allowed to walk into the “health” unit and request two condoms up to two times a day with no questions asked, he went every day for months and asked for the four condoms a day he was entitled to, and passed them on to a Yugoslav friend. I think he says something about doing his small part to contribute to the morale of gallant allies!
More seriously, @CK, you might want to check out Woody Guthrie’s song “Miss Pavlichenko.” Some kind soul has posted it on Youtube with some amazing photos of Russian women soldiers (including Lyudmila Pavlichenko).
There’s a Russian website online, I Remember, which features interviews with hundreds of Soviet veterans, including some women, some of which have been translated into English. Unfortunately the English translations tend to be heavy on the guns-and-aircraft-battles sections of the interviews and have less of the interesting interpersonal stuff. My favorite pair of them (alas, in Russian) was a woman, a former mechanic in various aviation regiments, and her husband, who had at one point been her boss. She was incredibly chatty with the interviewer, and when he asked how she and her husband met, she gave this long story about how she was being sexually harassed by an officer who tried to rape her, and she had to jump out a window, and her husband was the only person who would intervene while everyone else was like “no, don’t get involved in this, dude,” and so on; and then she discussed more incidents of sexual harassment and attempted rapes. So you have this lady saying this, and then, separately, the interviewer asks her husband how men’s interactions were with women on the front. “Oh, they were fine, I never saw anything inappropriate.” Really, dude? That’s your story? In general there’s a real tendency to sanitize and self-sanitize World War II narratives in Russia – it’s still the Great Patriotic War there – so I’m looking forward to reading this book immensely, but at the same time, I think I need to wait for winter (cocoa, blankets and book) before I can really brace myself for the impact it’s going to have.
Thanks for the review! I am so into World War II history, in fact you might say I’m fixated, so I know I will be reading this book. I’m that person who taped all the episodes of “The Unknown War” back in the day. It’s hagiographic about the heroic Soviet Union, but the historic film footage is amazing. And the one episode that sticks in my mind mentions a Yugoslavian woman partisan who worked as a maid for a Nazi officer during the German occupation of Yugoslavia. She assassinates him, and there’s a photo of her afterwards with a giant grin on her face.
I’m Russian and I still live here, and I can tell without a shadow of a doubt: the stuff that’s described in this book is sooooo not what we are taught in schools! We are not taught anything about women who fought in that war. Often not even about the famous night witches.
Though sometimes we get movies about them. There’s a very famous “The dawns here are quiet” is the old version and the new one was released in 2015. But it’s identical (Russian cinema these days is pretty horrible, unless it’s an independent movie or an art house one), so if you’re interested, watch the old one.
It’s based on a novel of the same name.
Also in 2015 we got a movie about a female Soviet sniper Ludmila Pavlichenko, is its wiki page. But I’m afraid it’s sexist as sh@t. It talks more about her men (who I’m not sure were even real) than about her work and achievements as a sniper. The worst thing is that the guys(!) who made it, are really sure they were honouring her. No, I’m wrong actually. The worst thing is that it was released in Russian cinemas under a name “The battle for Sevastopol”! They didn’t even mention or advertise that it was about her.
So for me as a Russian woman books like that one are even harder to read. Because after you’ve read through all the horrors you’ve got to live in the society that so patriarchal it’s not even funny and which forgot these women and their experience almost completely.
Though as @Tess mentioned it’s still the Great Patriotic War here. I think it’s gotten even worse now actually. There’s a cult of this war, it’s highly encouraged by the government, and it makes the Victory in it the basis of our whole national identity. Frankly, it’s scary. It’s like your white supremacists, except you can’t argue with them. ‘Cause that’s the official ideology.
To end on a less hopeless note, I’m old enough to have actually met some ladies who fought in WWII. Though they’ve never ever talked about their experiences as horrible. I don’t think they knew they could.
@greennily, thank you so much for your perspective.
@Rebecca, @Tess, Thank you for the recommendations, I will check them out!
@greennily, thank you for sharing, “I don’t think they knew they could,” is such a heavy statement, it really makes me think.
I read this book a long time ago in the German translation and was very impressed.
@greennily: I watched The Dawns Here Are Quiet (the original version) and I liked it a lot. A war movie about five young women and their grumpy male veteran commander which starts out like a comedy and then becomes very serious. Not a movie for people who want large actions scenes, things are small and personal here. A great (anti) war movie.
@BP, I’m so glad you liked it! There aren’t many like it but it’s so quietly brilliant and tragic.