
The Unwomanly Face of War
An Oral History of Women in World War II
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Narrated by:
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Julia Emelin
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Yelena Shmulenson
About this listen
A long-awaited English translation of the groundbreaking oral history of women in World War II across Europe and Russia - from the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature
“A landmark.” (Timothy Snyder, author of On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century)
For more than three decades, Svetlana Alexievich has been the memory and conscience of the twentieth century. When the Swedish Academy awarded her the Nobel Prize, it cited her invention of “a new kind of literary genre,” describing her work as “a history of emotions...a history of the soul.”
In The Unwomanly Face of War, Alexievich chronicles the experiences of the Soviet women who fought on the front lines, on the home front, and in the occupied territories. These women - more than a million in total - were nurses and doctors, pilots, tank drivers, machine-gunners, and snipers. They battled alongside men, and yet, after the victory, their efforts and sacrifices were forgotten.
Alexievich traveled thousands of miles and visited more than a hundred towns to record these women’s stories. Together, this symphony of voices reveals a different aspect of the war - the everyday details of life in combat left out of the official histories.
Translated by the renowned Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky, The Unwomanly Face of War is a powerful and poignant account of the central conflict of the 20th century, a kaleidoscopic portrait of the human side of war.
“But why? I asked myself more than once. Why, having stood up for and held their own place in a once absolutely male world, have women not stood up for their history? Their words and feelings? They did not believe themselves. A whole world is hidden from us. Their war remains unknown...I want to write the history of that war. A women’s history.” (Svetlana Alexievich)
Read by Julia Emelin, Yelena Shmulenson, Allen Lewis Rickman, and Alan Winter
THE WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
“[F]or her polyphonic writings, a monument to suffering and courage in our time.”
“A mighty documentarian and a mighty artist... Her books are woven from hundreds of interviews, in a hybrid form of reportage and oral history that has the quality of a documentary film on paper. But Alexievich is anything but a simple recorder and transcriber of found voices; she has a writerly voice of her own which emerges from the chorus she assembles, with great style and authority, and she shapes her investigations of Soviet and post-Soviet life and death into epic dramatic chronicles as universally essential as Greek tragedies.” (The New Yorker)
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- My Journey from the Shtetl Through the Holocaust
- By: Vic Shayne, Martin Small
- Narrated by: Peter Altschuler
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Remember Us is a look back at the lost world of the shtetl: a wise Zayde offering prophetic and profound words to his grandson, the rich experience of Shabbos, and the treasure of a loving family. All this is torn apart with the arrival of the Holocaust, beginning a crucible fraught with twists and turns so unpredictable and surprising that they defy any attempt to find reason within them. Through the eyes of 91-year-old Holocaust survivor Martin Small, we learn that these priceless memories that are too painful to remember are also too painful to forget.
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A Tragic and Rich Life, With Lessons For All
- By still reading on 03-17-16
By: Vic Shayne, and others
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Two Rings
- A Story of Love and War
- By: Millie Werber, Eve Keller
- Narrated by: Yelena Shmulenson, Eve Keller
- Length: 7 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Trapped in Poland in 1941, like many Jews, Millie Werber went from the Radom Ghetto to slave labor in an armaments factory, survived Auschwitz, and toiled in a second factory until liberation came on April 1, 1945. She faced death many times but lived to marry a good man and fellow survivor. Meanwhile, she concealed a photograph in her closet and carried a secret in her heart.
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What a love story
- By Sbear on 11-19-18
By: Millie Werber, and others
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Behind Enemy Lines
- The True Story of a French Jewish Spy in Nazi Germany
- By: Marthe Cohn, Wendy Holden
- Narrated by: Kirsten Potter
- Length: 10 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Marthe Cohn was a young Jewish woman living just across the German border in France when Hitler rose to power. Her family sheltered Jews fleeing the Nazis, including Jewish children sent away by their terrified parents. But soon her homeland was also under Nazi rule. As the Nazi occupation escalated, Marthe's sister was arrested and sent to Auschwitz and the rest of her family was forced to flee to the south of France. Always a fighter, Marthe joined the French Army and became a member of the intelligence service of the French First Army.
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Amazing story of a fighter and survivor
- By Magalie Busch on 05-06-19
By: Marthe Cohn, and others
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William & Rosalie
- A Holocaust Testimony (Mayborn Literary Nonfiction Series)
- By: William Schiff, Rosalie Schiff, Craig Hanley
- Narrated by: Michael Fischbein
- Length: 4 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually explicit view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.
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Speachless, I wont forget this book
- By Shad on 12-17-14
By: William Schiff, and others
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Last Witnesses
- An Oral History of the Children of World War II
- By: Svetlana Alexievich, Richard Pevear, Larissa Volokhonsky
- Narrated by: Julia Emelin, Allen Lewis Rickman
- Length: 9 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Bringing together dozens of voices in her distinctive style, Last Witnesses is Alexievich’s collection of the memories of those who were children during World War II. They had sometimes been soldiers as well as witnesses, and their generation grew up with the trauma of the war deeply embedded - a trauma that would change the course of the Russian nation. Collectively, this symphony of children’s stories, filled with the everyday details of life in combat, reveals an altogether unprecedented view of the war.
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And how many years to forget?
- By Darwin8u on 09-16-21
By: Svetlana Alexievich, and others
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Sapphire Skies
- By: Belinda Alexandra
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 15 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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2000: The wreckage of a downed WWII fighter plane is discovered in the forests near Russia's Ukrainian border.The aircraft belonged to Natalya Azarova, ace pilot and pin-up girl for Soviet propaganda, but the question of her fate remains unanswered. Was she a German spy who faked her own death, as the Kremlin claims? Her lover, Valentin Orlov, now a highly-decorated general, refuses to believe it. Lily, a young Australian woman, has moved to Moscow to escape from tragedy.
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A Disturbing Disappointment
- By Sara on 08-07-14
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Swansong 1945
- A Collective Diary of the Last Days of the Third Reich
- By: Walter Kempowski, Shaun Whiteside - translator
- Narrated by: Eric G. Dove, Christine Williams
- Length: 17 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Swansong 1945 chronicles the end of Nazi Germany and World War II in Europe through hundreds of letters, diaries, and autobiographical accounts covering four days that fateful spring: Hitler's birthday on April 20, American and Soviet troops meeting at the Elbe on April 25, Hitler's suicide on April 30, and finally the German surrender on May 8.
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Important, Tragic, Poignant...
- By Amazon Customer on 07-31-15
By: Walter Kempowski, and others
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Slaughterhouse-Five
- By: Kurt Vonnegut
- Narrated by: James Franco
- Length: 5 hrs and 13 mins
- Unabridged
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Traumatized by the bombing of Dresden at the time he had been imprisoned, Pilgrim drifts through all events and history, sometimes deeply implicated, sometimes a witness. He is surrounded by Vonnegut's usual large cast of continuing characters (notably here the hack science fiction writer Kilgore Trout and the alien Tralfamadorians, who oversee his life and remind him constantly that there is no causation, no order, no motive to existence).
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Don't Quit Your Daytime Job, James
- By Keith on 11-20-15
By: Kurt Vonnegut
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The Last of the Doughboys
- The Forgotten Generation and Their Forgotten World War
- By: Richard Rubin
- Narrated by: Grover Gardner
- Length: 20 hrs and 8 mins
- Unabridged
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They were the final survivors of the millions who made up the American Expeditionary Forces, nineteenth-century men and women living in the twenty-first century. Self-reliant, humble, and stoic, they kept their stories to themselves for a lifetime, then shared them at the last possible moment so that they, and the war they won - the trauma that created our modern world - might at last be remembered. You will never forget them.
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Flawed But Worthwhile: History Buffs Should Get It
- By Jim on 01-12-14
By: Richard Rubin
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Roman's Journey
- An Extraordinary Odyssey of Holocaust Survival
- By: Roman Halter
- Narrated by: Robin Sachs
- Length: 8 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Roman Halter was a spirited, optimistic schoolboy in 1939 when he and his family gathered behind the curtains to watch the Volksdeutsche (German Polish) neighbors of their small town in western Poland greet the arrival of Hitler's armies with kisses and swastika flags. Within days, the family home had been seized, 12-year-old Roman had become a slave of the local SS chief, and, returning from an errand, he silently witnessed his Jewish classmates being bayoneted to death by soldiers at the edge of town. So began his remarkable six-year journey through some of the darkest caverns of Nazi Europe....
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Could not finish!!!!
- By Natalie Rohde on 02-23-16
By: Roman Halter
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The Secret Holocaust Diaries
- The Untold Story of Nonna Bannister
- By: Nonna Bannister, Denise George, Carolyn Tomlin
- Narrated by: Rebecca Gallagher
- Length: 7 hrs and 35 mins
- Unabridged
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For half a century, a terrible secret lay hidden, locked in a trunk in an attic... photos, official documents, and scraps of a diary written by a young girl. "The time has come when I must share my life story... some facts from the past that could make a contribution, however small it may be, to the history of mankind." The Secret Holocaust Diaries is a haunting eyewitness account of Nonna Lisowskaja Bannister, a remarkable Russian-American woman who saw and survived unspeakable evils as a young girl.
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I respect Nonna
- By Susan on 12-26-11
By: Nonna Bannister, and others
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We Band of Angels
- The Untold Story of the American Women Trapped on Bataan
- By: Elizabeth M. Norman
- Narrated by: Dina Pearlman
- Length: 11 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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We Band of Angelsis the story of women searching for adventure, caught up in the drama and danger of war. On the same day the Japanese Imperial Navy launched its surprise attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, it also struck American bases in the Far East, chief among them the Philippines. That raid led to the first major land battle for America in World War II and, in the end, to the largest defeat and surrender of American forces.
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A very moving tribute!
- By mark nelsen on 05-17-17
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The Sojourn
- By: Andrew Krivak
- Narrated by: Stefan Rudnicki
- Length: 5 hrs and 29 mins
- Unabridged
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The Sojourn is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd’s life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser’s army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy. A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming-of-age, and survival, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class.
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Interesting but somehow less than satisfying
- By Kathy on 03-13-13
By: Andrew Krivak
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Doctor Zhivago
- By: Boris Pasternak, Larissa Volokhonsky - translator, Richard Pevear - translator
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 23 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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In celebration of the 40th anniversary of its original publication, here is a new translation of the classic story of the life and loves of a poet/physician during the turmoil of the Russian Revolution. Taking his family from Moscow to what he hopes will be shelter in the Ural Mountains, Zhivago finds himself instead embroiled in the battle between the Whites and the Reds. Set against this backdrop of cruelty and strife is Zhivago’s love for the tender and beautiful Lara.
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Russian Philosophical Feast
- By Syd Young on 02-16-13
By: Boris Pasternak, and others