War has no female face

The 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature Svetlana Alexievich, "the voice of the voiceless", shows in this masterpiece a perspective of the war ignored until now: that of the women who fought in the Second World War.

Almost a million women fought in the ranks of the Red Army during the Second World War, but their story has never been told. This book brings together the memories of hundreds of them, women who were snipers, drove tanks or worked in field hospitals. Their story is not a history of war, nor of combat, it is the history of men and women at war.

What happened to them? How did it transform them? What were they afraid of? What was it like to learn to kill? These women, most of them for the first time in their lives, tell the non-heroic part of the war, often absent from veterans' accounts. They talk about dirt and cold, hunger and sexual violence, anguish and the omnipresent shadow of death. Alexievich lets their voices resonate in this shocking book, which she was able to rewrite in 2002 to introduce the fragments crossed out by censorship and material she had not dared to use in the first version.

"[...] for her polyphonic writing, which is a monument to courage and suffering in our time.", words of the Jury of the Swedish Academy when awarding the author the 2015 Nobel Prize in Literature.

"I am a historian of souls [...]. On the one hand, I study the concrete person who has lived in a concrete era and participated in concrete events; on the other hand, I want to discern in that person the eternal human being. The vibration of eternity. What is immutable in him."
Svetlana Alexievich

Reviews:
"Thanks to Alexievich, the story of a million women who participated in the Soviet army or as partisans against the Germans is somewhat less unknown."
Felipe Sahagún, El Cultural de El Mundo

"It is not possible to emerge unscathed from reading Alexievich's books (Stanislaviv, 1948)."
Gabriel Albiac, ABC Cultural