Author of quotes: Svetlana Alexievich. Page 2

We are together. We are all witnesses. Witnesses and participants, executioners and victims in one person - on the wreckage of what until recently was known as a gigantic socialist empire, was called socialism, a socialist choice. And it was also just the life we lived. This was also our time. And let's be sincere. Let's try. Although this is given to us the most difficult. We want to seem now either better than we are, or worse than we really are. We are afraid to be ourselves. Or we don't know how. For some reason, we are scared, now ashamed, sometimes embarrassed. Everyone screams about their own, and no one hears each other. We do not even recognize the past as an inviolable, unchanging reality. We encroach on it too. Now it seems to us that we have been deceived by the future, then it seems to us that we have been deceived by the past. Lost and never find ourselves, naively sharim in the darkness of history.

I am writing, writing down contemporary, current history. Living voices, living destinies. Before they become history, they are still someone's pain, someone's cry, someone's victim or crime. Countless times I ask myself the question: how to get through evil without increasing evil in the world, especially now, when evil takes on some cosmic dimensions? Before every new book, I ask myself this. This is my burden. And my destiny.

We were fulfilling our international duty, everything was laid out on the shelves ... Only now I started thinking when the stereotype crumbled ... But I could never read Turgenev's Mumu without tears! In a war with a person, something happens, there the person is and is no longer the same. Did they teach us: "Thou shalt not kill!" The war veterans came to school, to the institute and told how they killed. They all had medal strips pinned to their ceremonial costumes. I have never heard that you cannot kill in war. I knew that only those who kill in peacetime are judged. They are murderers, and in war they are called differently: "filial duty to the Motherland", "holy man's cause", "defense of the Fatherland." They explained to us that we are repeating the feat of the soldiers of the Great Patriotic War. How could I doubt? We have always been told that we are the best; if we are the best, then why should I think myself - everything is right with us. Then I thought a lot. Friends said: "You either have gone crazy, or you want to go crazy." And I (my mother raised me, a strong, domineering person) never wanted to interfere in my fate ...

We do not pity them, carrying this heavy memory, but ourselves. To truly regret, one must not abandon cruel knowledge, but share it, take a part on one's soul. In addition, this is a document, you cannot rewrite it, it was written in blood, it was written with life on white sheets of the 41st, 42nd, 43rd, 44th, 45th years ...

Sometimes I hear: how much can you write about the war? Yes, I thought that the knowledge with which I fill my notebooks, load my soul, is hard and unbearable for a person. We, living in such an improved technical age that we are threatened not by one of the wars similar to those known to mankind, but by an ecological catastrophe, there is still the hope that the most powerful weapon, the most invincible is human memory. Memory! But how complex, how tangled her lines, her drawings! - I am more and more convinced with each day of the search. Much more complicated than the drawings of the hellish machine itself, which was invented or wants to be invented in order to kill not hundreds, not thousands, but millions of people at once, and together with them their memory, this immaterial matter, without which we, people, would cease to be people. How to catch it, to materialize it in the word?

The history of the facts, and the emotions left behind. They decided not to admit into history. I look at the world through the eyes of a scholar, not a historian. Surprised man...

To write such a book about the war, that war was sick, and the thought of it would have been nasty. Insane. Themselves generals would be sick...

We all thought that after the war, after this human suffering, the sea of tears will have a wonderful life. It seemed to us that all the people are very kind and will love each other... Because we all had such a great grief. We siblings did! We've been waiting for this day... the Day of Victory. And it really was lovely. Even nature felt in human souls was created. But people? When I see evil people, I see selfish people who only live for ourselves, I can't understand how it happened, how it happened?

Wishing a happy love, we wish for immortality. This does not happen. But there are moments...

A mouth full of blood, and they are still talking.

Not so experience person. People will not stand these tests.

Follow me the guy with the dancing, I suddenly bad-bad, heart zatarahtit. Go-go and sit in a snowdrift. "What's wrong with you?" - "Oh, nothing. Netanalysis". And these are my two wounds... This is war... And we must learn to be gentle. To be weak and fragile, and his boots echoed - fortieth the size.

Came to Berlin. Married to the Reichstag: "I, Sofia Kuntsevich came here to kill war."

After the war, so long it was impossible to get used to, that it is not necessary to be afraid of the sky.