NOVANEWS
Children in Stalingrad hiding from bombing by German planes in a 1942 photo taken by L.I. Konov. | Photo: AFP
Thirty-five diaries that Soviet children wrote between 1941 and 1945 have been compiled into one book that has been translated into English and which contain testimonies of the horrors of the war against the Nazis.
The book which covers the years of the Great Patriotic War is especially interesting because it is documented with a child’s honesty, RT reported Sunday.
“In adults’ diaries, the author is still trying to build some sort of drama, while children have been sincerely writing about what they saw and felt, and that’s the main value of these documents,” the editor of the book, Tatyana Kuznetsova, told RT. “They haven’t been edited by anyone, they’ve been written honestly, with no censorship or self-censorship applied.”
In one case, a boy who lived in a foster home wrote in his small diary about his many friends who were dying of hunger, Kuznetsova explains, adding that the boy also drew some incredible images of food such as ham and chicken.
The book has been titled “Children of War and includes diaries written by minors during the 1941 to 1944 siege of Leningrad, in Nazi concentration camps and while living in occupied territories and on the frontline.
One of the writers, Zoya Khabarova narrated one of her most vivid memories which is that of a ship with hundreds of people being attacked by Nazi bombers and how the vessel was destroyed and sunk in a matter of three minutes.
The book was translated by one of the most renowned translators from Russian into English, Andrew Bromfield. He has worked on famous books by Leo Tolstoy and Mikhail Bulgakov, among others. The Great Patriotic War in Russia is considered to be one of the largest and by far the deadliest military in conflict in history as it left over 27 million Soviet citizens dead. In fact, according to RT, of all the Soviet men born between 1921 and 1923, only 3 percent survived.
