Best Quotes from Last Witnesses by Svetlana Alexievich with Page Numbers

I remember it. I was very little, but I remember everything.

Then I also shouted: 'Papa! Papa!'

He was afraid to look back.

I can’t believe that my father left that morning for the war.

It became connected like that in my memory, that war is when there’s no papa.

I sat by mama’s little mound till night, till we were picked up and put on a cart.

In those moments I realized: she looks like my mama…

It’s funny, but nobody laughs.

I find it unbearable that they’re here. Do you understand me?

But I still want my mama.

I want to go home! Everybody wants to go home, to the warmth! But there is no more home, only a heap of smoking embers.

Ah, my cottage! Ah, my cottage! I was a young girl in i-i-i- it…Here the matchmakers ca-a-a-ame…Here the children were bo-o-orn.

They said he was one of our pilots. At night I dreamed about him.

I pictured war as people in budenovki on horseback. Now we’ll show ourselves, we’ll help our fighters. Become heroes.

I don’t want to go to that school anymore. I came home and kissed all the portraits in my schoolbook…

"Papa was tall..."

"He begins to cry, because he wasn’t there when papa was there..."

"Mama made it out of foot-cloths. They were white, and she dyed them with ink."

"We were saved by cow dung. You get up early in the morning and wait till the cows come out..."

"Even now I…All my life I’ve cried in the happiest moments of my life."

"We took turns licking it. And after us our cat also licked it, she was hungry, too."

"That tinkling...When we were liberated, father went to the front."

"They taught us to act so that it’s good for everybody, not for some one person."

"There were three of us, the neighbors led us away from the road, but they were afraid to take us..."

"We didn’t believe that there could be a life like that."

Our village is burning, our house is burning... Mama took the frying pan out with her hands: "Eat, children." It was impossible to eat those pancakes, they smelled so much of smoke, but we ate them, because we had nothing else but grass.

So young... As yet neither suitors nor soldiers... Why have I told you this? It's more frightening for me now than then.

They didn't betray him... So... they didn't betray him.

I heard her say to father, "If only one son could be left..." Then father said, "Let them run for it. They're young, maybe they'll save themselves." But I felt so sorry for mama that I didn't go.

In a children's center, also surrounded by barbed wire. We were guarded by German soldiers and German shepherds.

Not a single human being. Hungry cats... I remember after the war we had one primer in the village, and the first book I found and read was a collection of arithmetic problems. I read it like poetry.

You’ll be my children now... As soon as she said it, my brother and I fell asleep right there at the table. We felt so good. We had a home now.

We kissed their hands... And a woman at the station saw him and took off her kerchief to use as a diaper.

I remember my grandfather's words: "And these innocent ones, why must they perish? They can't even say anything."

I want everybody to know the name of the woman who saved me: Olympia Pozharitskaya, from the village of Genevichi... Whenever the Germans appeared, they would send me off somewhere at once.

"Don’t hurry. Listen to how the leaves fall. How the forest sounds…"

"You’re like him. Very much like him," mama reassured me.

"We’ll dig potatoes, and you’ll go to the Suvorov School in Minsk."

"It was the first time in my life that I rode in a truck."

"They poured our grains out and indicated to us that we should line up to be shot."

"I laughed and laughed, ten minutes went by and I still laughed."

"You, too, are my only one, so we should address each other informally. We’re the closest to each other in the world."

"During the war we recalled all the time how we lived before the war."

"What is it? During the winter we took rides several times on frozen German corpses."

"How did I survive, after dying a hundred times?"

"I never thought about war…But this is how I pictured war: a big black forest, and there’s some sort of war in it. Something scary."

"I didn’t understand what these toys were…And here is something my aunt told me…"},{

Our childish imagination pictured meeting the Germans, who would open our suitcases and there would be our Pioneer neckerchief.

We were still children of peace.

With a heroic air, Misha went past the orphans who were left with nothing and came running back to his orphanage.

To steal something at a market wasn’t regarded as shameful, on the contrary — it was heroism!

We didn’t care what we pilfered, so long as it was something to eat.

Each one had a norm—three cubic feet. We had to fell the trees, trim them, then cut them into three-foot lengths and stack them up.

Somebody’s little son cried out… He fired five times… He looked at me… I couldn’t hide behind the broom, I couldn’t do it.

I crawled toward it as if following a thread... the scream hung in the air.

We didn't even know how to bury... but now we somehow recalled it.

I really didn’t want to die... I especially didn’t want to die at dawn.

"I’m with First Sergeant Vera Redkina."

"Only fear or something good stays in a child’s memory…"

"The little trunk was just his size…"

"I always waited for him…"

"You’ll never save your mama, children."

"Next to the bull, I felt warm and safe."

"The wooden sandals and striped pajamas were brought back to the estate."

"We ran in the direction of the sunrise, to the east."

"One day, the soldiers burst in shouting, 'Dear children!'"

"Did God watch this? And what did He think?"

We wanted either the sky or the sea. The whole globe!

For two years I had lived in a town occupied by Germans. I had forgotten how people sang.

I remember the blue, blue sky. And our planes in that sky. We had been waiting for them, waiting all through the war.

I saw how they died…How they were scared...

Mama saved her children. Before the war, she had been a 'firebrand.' My little brother Slavik was born in 1941.

People even ate dirt…At the market, we could buy dirt from the destroyed and burned-down warehouses.

But to this day, I still can’t look at a hungry man.

I bend down, he comes up to me and looks me in the face: am I smiling or crying?

I don’t want to remember. But I need to tell people about my misfortune.

The only memory I have of my mother is how afraid I was to lose her.

"If something has stayed in my memory, it’s like a big family photograph…"

"A big photograph… One big photograph…"

"How will I repay the people?"

"They took away his shovel, yelled something at him in their own language…"

"We lived by charity…"

"We would come to a cottage…‘Give us something…’"

"Mama spun it herself, she wove it…"

"The war didn’t end soon… They count it as four years. There was shooting for four years…"

"Our school was called 'the green school'…"

"But I wanted to study… When my daughter was in the first grade, her mama was in the tenth. At night school."

I killed him myself, I didn’t just see him dead.

I wasn’t frightened that I had killed him… And I didn’t think about him during the war.

People who haven’t seen a man kill another man are completely different people…

Everybody wanted to kiss the word Victory…

Little daughter, remember this all your life…

I waited a long time for my father… All my life…

I have always believed in your destiny, children.

If they kill us, we’ll die together. Or else just me…

We are the last witnesses. Our time is ending. We must speak…

Our words will be the last…