Out of the Fire

Between 1970 and 1973 three Byelorussian writers - Ales Adamovich, Yanka Bryl and Vladimir Kolesnik - travelled thirty-five districts of their republic with a tape recorder, looking for survivors of the German policy of burning villages whole, with the inhabitants inside them, as a method of anti-partisan terror. They found their witnesses in 147 villages and recorded more than three hundred of them. Out of the Fire is what they brought back.

It is among the fullest first-person records in any language of one of the great crimes of the twentieth century. Byelorussia lost more than two hundred towns and over nine thousand villages, many hundreds of them destroyed together with the people living in them. The witnesses here came, in the authors' unforgettable phrase, "out of the fire and from under the earth, in the most real and literal sense."

What gives the book its standing is a decision the authors took about language. The testimonies are set down almost exactly as they left the speakers' mouths, in the local mixture of Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish that the compilers could not bring themselves to smooth into standard prose. The witnesses do not perform. They apologise for crying, they lose the thread, they fall silent, and the silence is left on the page. One woman, who ran with four small children through a burning meadow while the machine guns cut people down on both sides of her, ends her account by apologising to the men who came to hear it: "There I've told you all my suffering. Maybe I said something I shouldn't? I'm illiterate. Excuse me..."

This is authentic anti-fascist documentation and the testimonies are beyond criticism. Progress Publishers put it into English in 1980, in Angelia Graf and Nina Belenkaya's translation, addressed to "new generations, who themselves did not experience the horrors of the Second World War."

New critical introduction by Dmitry Chasovennikov, which honours the voices and examines the frame the 1980 edition built around them.