"At the age of nineteen I had a medal "For courage". At the age of nineteeen, my hair turned grey.

At the age of nineteen in my last battle I was shot through both lungs, the bullet went in between
two vertebrae. My legs were paralysed... They thought I was dead... At the age of nineteen... My
granddaughter is this age now. I look at her in disbelief. Such a child!"

"We're walking... About 200 girls, and behind us 200 men. It's hot. The summer is hot. And we have to
walk 30 kilometers. Thirty! The heat is terrible... And behind us there are red stains on the sand... Red
stains... Well, our women's thing, you know... How could we hide that? The soldiers follow us and pretend
that they don't see it. They are not looking at the ground..."

"Somebody betrayed us... The Germans learned the location of our partisan troop. They
surrounded the forest from all sides. We were hiding in the deep woods, hiding in the swamps
where the torturers did not go [...] A radio operator was with us. She gave birth recently. The baby
was hungry... Wanting the breast... But the mother is starving, she has no milk, and the baby is
crying. The Germans are nearby... With dogs... If the dogs hear the baby, we're all dead. All of us -
thirty people... Do you understand? We make a decision... Nobody dares to tell her the
commader's order, but the mother guesses it herself. She puts the bundle with the baby into the
water and holds it there for a long time... The baby does not cry... Not a sound... And we cannot lift
our eyes. We cannot look at the mother or at each other..."

"After my insistent requests [the husband] reluctantly gave up the spotlight with the words [to his wife],
"Tell everything the way I taught you. Without tears and girly insignificant stuff: I wanted to be beautiful, I
cried when they cut off my hair". Later, she confessed to me, whispering, "All night, he was studying the
'History of the Great Patriotic War' with me. He was worried about me. And he's afraid now that I will
remember the wrong thing. That I will tell it not the way I'm supposed to."This happened many times, in
many different homes.
Yes, they cry a lot. They scream. After I leave, they swallow their heart pills. Call the ambulance. But they
keep asking me, "Please, come. Definitely come. We've been silent for so long. We were silent for forty
years..."

"When the war was over, I wished for three things: first - I finally will not have to crawl around on my belly
but will ride in a trolleybus, second - to buy and eat an entire loaf of white bread, and third - to sleep in a
white bed, on crispy sheets. White sheets..."

When I returned from the front, my sister showed me a grave ... They'd buried me..

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 War Has Not a Womans Face was published in book form in 1985 and eventually
sold more than two million copies in Russian, and won Alexievich one of the highest
Soviet civilian honors, the Lenin Komsomol Prize. An uncensored edition was not
published until after the Soviet Union fell, six years later.

We usually think of wars as something that men do. Boys play with toy soldiers and
toy guns, and play with real things when they get older, right? But women have been
fighting in wars throughout history. We just don't know their stories. We know the stories
of men. The women remain in the background, mostly silent, occasionally telling
the stories of the war from the accepted 'manly' perspective. Until now.

This book is a confession, a document and a record of people's memory. More than 200
women speak in it, describing how young girls, who dreamed of becoming brides,
became soldiers in 1941.

THE WAR'S UNWOMANLY FACE

...All that we know about Woman is best described by the word "compassion". There
are other words, too-sister, wife, friend and, the noblest of all, mother. But isn't
compassion a part of all these concepts, their very substance, their purpose and their
ultimate meaning? A woman is the giver of life, she safeguards life, so "Woman" and
"life" are synonyms.
But during the most terrible war of the 20th century a woman had to become a soldier.
She not only rescued and bandaged the wounded; she also fired a sniper's rifle,
dropped bombs, blew up bridges, went reconnoitering, and captured identification
prisoners. A woman killed. She killed the enemy who, with unprecedented cruelty, was
attacking her land, her home, her childre...
The things that men did not have to face when they joined the troops was the lack of
basics. Like having to wear size 43 boots when you wore size 35, falling out of shoes
and having too-big shoes fill with blood from blisters. Like uniforms not coming with
bras. Like having to wear men's underwear that you were falling out of. Like having your
menstrual period in the middle of long marches. Like being sexually harassed (not all of
course; there seem to have been way more camaraderie and support on the front lines,
but the ugliness was still there). Like being pregnant and fighting battles. Like being
treated as inferior and incompetent because of your gender. Like having to drown
your newborn child so that the baby's cries would not disclose the location of
your partisan troop to the surrounding Germans.