Last Witnesses - Svetlana Alexievich

This is a bit of a tough read in many ways.  The author spent several years in the 1980s interviewing Russian adults who had been children during the Second World War.  Now translated into English, this book is pretty harrowing.  We know nothing about them as adults, only their names and professions, but and we get a brief glimpse into their lives.  We only get a page or two and their experiences are often just about one particular incidence or day. 

These adults tell us about how as children many of them saw family members, siblings, neighbors and parents killed in front of them.  Starving and forced into eating bark off trees, grass or even dirt to try to survive. How children as young as 10 going off to work or at 12 trying to sign up to fight.  Children left alone after their homes and villages are burnt to the ground, left in the forest or with strangers, and some put on trains and sent to Siberia or to concentration camps.  So many experiences that so hard for us to understand in our modern world.  Yet part of you is reminded that these were the lucky ones, the ones who survived such hardships and got to grow up when so many children died or were killed.  5/5