A review by larryerick
Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II by Svetlana Alexiévich

3.0

Can anyone really like this book? It was written in 1985, when most of the people telling their stories in it were probably in their 40s or 50s, for this is a collection of "reports" by former children of the Soviet Union, when Nazi Germany attacked, with the children asked being about 2 years old to about 16 years old. Most of the children, from what I can tell were Belarusian. The book I read was a very recent translation from the native language into English. Each story essentially starts with the actual beginning of the war for that child, with a few commenting about how life was as a child just before the attacks. For whatever reason, I found myself thinking back often to Elie Wiesel's book, Night, while reading this. The impact of that book had been deadened quite a bit for me by accounts of treatments of the Jews during the Holocaust from other sources that were much more extensive and graphic than even Wiesel had related, but there was something simple and direct about the Wiesel book that I felt also in the stories by adults telling their childhood stories in this book. To be frank, this book at times seems endless in its reports, one story seemingly blending and blurring into another, but then, every so often, sometimes too often, like a punch in the gut, a child tells about something no child should ever know about, let alone live through. I really cannot relay adequately how bad some of these stories, these moments are. The adults telling these stories are scarred. And yet somehow they were still alive physically, if not entirely emotionally, to tell them some 40 years after the fact. So, here we are the readers, another 35 years later still, trying to make sense of it -- during a global pandemic. Arghh!