I like to keep up what little foreign language skills I have by listening to podcasts and reading newspapers. For a Swedish paper I chose Svenska Dagbladet over Dagens Nyheter. I was reading the former on my iPhone when I came across an article about Soviet women in WWII.
This has a special interest because we are going to a book club meeting tomorrow about "City of Thieves" by David Benioff, a novel set in the siege of Leningrad. It is very grim tale of the deprivations and horrors as the hero goes on a quixotic quest for a dozen eggs.
The article in Svenska Dagbladet is "Kriget enligt kvinnorna (The war according to the women)". It is about the book "Kriget har inget kvinnligt ansikte. Utopins Röster (The war has no womanly face. Utopians Voices)" The author, Svetlana Alexievitch, interviewed hundreds of women about their experiences, including active combat.
I wanted to give an English reference to the other attendees of the "City of Thieves" discussion. I went round and round with various translations of the Swedish, having no Russian title. Finally by using a translation of the title of the series "Utopia's Voices", I found it. The English title is "War's Unwomanly Face" and is widely available.
I don't know if I could read it after "City of Thieves". Consider that the Germans began the siege of Leningrad before the bombing of Pearl Harbor and the Soviet Army and partisans didn't push them back until 1944, before the Allied landing at Normandy. Residents were starved and bombed and more. Getting supplies into the city took a lot of ingenuity, including Allied truck convoys over the frozen Lake Ladoga. We were in Leningrad in 1973 and saw the mass graves, dozens of furrows of mounded earth.
Is it any wonder the Soviets wanted a big, secure buffer between themselves and Germany? They weren't nice about it and made themselves quite unwanted. They only withdrew when their crumbling economy couldn't support the occupation any longer.
Are there any others who could learn from this lesson?
