Szvetlana Alekszijevics - Utolsó tanúk (2017)

In 1985, Svetlana Alexievich, an unknown young Belarusian journalist, published two books about the Second World War at the same time (Women in the Fire Line, Last Witnesses), both of which revealed an almost completely unknown world of feelings, experiences and suffering. In war literature, women and children could only be secondary characters next to men. With Aleksijevics, they were in the center - and with this female and childish point of view, it was as if he rewrote, made the previously "known" history more precise and sensitive.
These two books were then published all over the world, and Aleksievich was praised by critics as the creator of a new genre. Meanwhile, in the troubled and falling apart Soviet Union, many branded him a traitor who tramples the most sacred feelings into the mud.
The Last Witnesses contains a hundred recollections, full of heartbreaking stories from people who lived through the Second World War as children or teenagers. From people who had no childhood: many of them lost their parents; many ended up in concentration camps; many of them lived among the partisans, and often even fought against the Germans at the age of twelve or thirteen... And many simply starved and tried somehow to survive the horror.
Aleksievich later revised the book: the new version also includes the reminiscences that could not be published in Soviet times because they painted too alarming a picture of the wartime everyday life of the Soviet people.

Author: Svetlana Aleksievich