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plpietra

Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster

5.0

I used to travel among other people's suffering, but here I'm just as much a witness as the others. My life is part of this event. I live here, with all of this.

I perceive the world through the medium of human voices. They never cease to hypnotise, deafen and bewitch me at one and the same time. I have great faith in life itself—I suppose I'm an optimist by nature. At first I feared that the experience of my first two books [about World War II] in this 'voice genre', as I call it, might actually get in the way of this third venture. I needn't have worried, for this was a totally different war with much more powerful and merciless weaponry: take, for example, the 'Grad' rocket-launcher, which is capable of dislodging a mountainside. The bitter psychology of this conflict was also very different from the positive mood of the nation as a whole during World War II: Afghanistan wrenched boys from their daily life of school and college, music and discos, and hurled them into a hell of filth. These were eighteen-year-olds, mere school-leavers who could be induced to believe anything. It was only much later that we began to hear such thoughts expressed as, 'We went to fight a Great Patriotic War, namely World War II, but found something totally different.' Or, 'I wanted to be a hero but now I don't know what kind of a person they've turned me into.' Such insights will come, but not soon and not to everyone.

Last Witnesses: An Oral History of the Children of World War II

Svetlana Alexiévich, Larissa Volokhonsky, Richard Pevear

5.0

Dostoevsky once posed a question: can we justify our world, our happiness, and even eternal harmony, if in its name, to strengthen its foundation, at least one little tear of an innocent child will be spilled? And he himself answered: this tear will not justify any progress, any revolution. Any war. It will always outweigh them.
Just one little tear...