Shoot, if the press is going to swooning in Second World War nostalgia for the next two weeks as a result of the Ken Burns series The War, I may as well indulge a bit, too.
I'm glad to see that Burns has collected a new set of oral histories. But he's by no means the first to collect such stories. Not only Tom Brokaw's famous Greatest Generation books, but a number of others have been published.
One example is Remembering War: A U.S.-Soviet Dialogue (1990) by Helen Kyssar and Vladimir Pozner, which grew out of a 1985 documentary which presented a dialogue of Soviet and American participants in the Second World War. (For those who may have forgotten, the godless Commie Russians were on the same side as the US and Britain during that war.) Building on the ground laid by the documentary, the authors pursued the project in more detail for their book.
One Soviet participant whose memories are included in the book was a well-known writer Grigory Yakovlevich Baklanov. He says:
I abhor reminiscing about the war. I have grown children, a son and a daughter, and I have almost never talked to them about the war. My growing grandson, who is in the second grade, once asked me, "Is the face of the enemy horrible?" I laughed. If the enemy's face were terrible, it would be easy to recognize him. But there are enemies with charming faces.
This is not unusual for combat veterans. Some of them like to tell their war stories, accurate and imaginative. Others would prefer not to think or talk about them any more than they have to.
He continues with the face-of-the-enemy motif in this part of his remembrance:
When I saw the first German POWs at the start of the war, I experienced true wonder, because we had been brought up with the naive notion that no fellow-worker, no proletarian, would ever fight against us. Yet their tank units, on the whole, were composed of German factory workers. At that time on the Northwest Front, I was nearly killed because of my curiosity and desire to understand, to understand who were these Germans fighting against us, because it in no way correlated with the prewar notions—including the time when I met Germans at the factory in Voronezh where I was working. Anyway, here's what happened. We were in a marsh on a reconnaissance foray, and we ambushed a bunch of Germans. There was a bright moon, so they were an easy target. So they fell down in the bushes, in the-water. And I, a young kid eighteen years old, out of stupidity decided I had to see what kind of faces they had. Who were these people? Because they couldn't be the same German workers I had known. And I just missed being killed, because one of them fired at me. ... He tried to kill me before dying. By then we were familiar with the terrible horrors; we listened to people's stories that chilled the soul; already by then the very word "German" evoked hatred. After the war, after much time, I was able to understand, first in my mind, then with my heart, that fascism was a tragedy not only for the Germans but for all of humanity. One people had suffered through this tragedy, and now they were carrying this terrible disaster to another people. I came to realize it was not a purely German phenomenon, it wasn't just a national feature. It was a tragedy that could happen to all mankind.
Baklonov mentions that he joined the Soviet Communist Party early in the war:
At the worst time, when the Germans were approaching Stalingrad, I joined the party. Communists were not taken into captivity; they were killed. But I didn't conceive of another life for myself. Nor did I really think I might die - as I said, youth is a most astonishing time of life, when we think we are immortal.
It's not surprising if his political perspective should color his memories of the event. That's part of how our memories work. And the victory of the Soviets in the Great Patriotic War - which is what it's called in Russia - was something emphasized by the Soviet regime, and by the Russian government today, as a point of national pride and as a method of legitimizing their own government. In itself, there's not wrong about that. There's certainly nothing unusual, because all countries do it.
This was also an eloquent piece of his contribution to the book:
There are people who, after the war, lived quite ordinary, commonplace lives. And for them, that time when they performed heroic feats or, as it seemed to them, made history, for them, of course, that time became their finest hour. Many others have gone on in life, achieved success, and so theirs is a more forward-looking view of things. But even I, a successful writer, must say that if there was ever something significant that I achieved, it was namely then, when I helped determine the fate of our homeland. That has remained a proud feeling in me. More than anything, it was with this knowledge that my son and even my grandson grew up. Grandpa fought in the war! Not because Grandpa killed anyone, no but because Grandpa fought in the war when it was to be decided whether or not our land and nation were going to exist. Of course, this feeling never disappears; one cannot escape it.
This sense of having been part of a larger cause together with others equally committed to it is a powerful memory for many veterans.
It's important to remember also the phenomenon that Robert Jay Lifton calls the survivor's mission". Whenever someone close to us dies, one thing that often happens is that the survivors channel some of their grief into some sort of survivor's mission which they connect with the one lost. This often becomes a way of reconnecting to life with a new perspective after tragedy. Something like this can also happen to those who lost members of their unit to whom they felt close.
Personal memories, especially ones of events decades past, are not simply factual replays of events. They are also interpretations and constructions which may have become a key part of a person's view of himself and the world.
Soviet soldiers in the Great Patriotic War
