A review by ellenguyenphuonglinh
The Unwomanly Face of War: An Oral History of Women in World War II by Svetlana Alexiévich

5.0

What do I want to hear decades later? How things were in Moscow or Stalingrad, descriptions of military operations, the forgotten names of captured heights and hillocks? Do I need stories about the movements of sites and fronts, about advances and retreats, about the number of blown-up troop trains and partisan raids—about all that has already been written in thousands of volumes? No, I am seeking something else. I gather what I would call knowledge of the spirit. I follow the traces of inner life; I make records of the soul. For me the path of a soul is more important than the event itself. The question of "how it was" is not so important, or not the most important; it does not come first. What disturbs and frightens me is something else: What happened to human beings? What did human beings see and understand there? About life and death in general? About themselves, finally? I am writing a history of feelings... A history of the soul... Not the history of a war or a state and not the lives of heroes, but the history of small human beings, thrown out of ordinary life into the epic depths of an enormous event. Into great History.