Barbara Adamovna Slesarchuk was sixty years old when three men with a tape recorder came to her village in the Brest Region and asked her to tell them what had happened. She sat with them and she spoke, and what she said is set down in this book almost exactly as it left her mouth — in the local mixture of Byelorussian, Ukrainian, Russian and Polish that the authors could not bring themselves to smooth into standard prose. The Germans had driven her family from their house and were burning the village. She ran with four small children into a shed, and then behind a well, and then into a burning meadow, covering the children with goose-foot weed while the machine guns cut people down on both sides of her. "I didn't think to live," she says. "I didn't think to live. If only he doesn't see us, I thought, if only our skulls are knocked off just like that, if only we don't see our own death." Her two-year-old, Vasil, kept telling her they would not be killed. She lived; the children lived; the village did not. She ends her account by apologising. "There I've told you all my suffering. Maybe I said something I shouldn't? I'm illiterate. Excuse me..."
Nothing in this introduction, and nothing that could be written about this book, touches Barbara Slesarchuk or the truth of a word she said. Out of the Fire is a book of that kind of testimony, and it is one of the most important books Progress Publishers ever put into English. 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, tracking down survivors of the German policy of burning villages whole, with their inhabitants inside them, as a method of anti-partisan terror. They found their witnesses in 147 villages. They recorded, by their own count, "over three hundred direct witnesses of tragedies like Khatyn's" — Khatyn being the Byelorussian village burned with its people in March 1943 whose name the Soviet state later made the emblem of the whole catastrophe. Byelorussia (now Belarus) lost more than two hundred towns and over nine thousand villages destroyed in the war, "many hundreds of them wiped out together with the people living in them." This book is the recorded voice of the few who came, in the authors' unforgettable phrase, "out of the fire and from under the earth, in the most real and literal sense."
It must be said plainly and first, because everything else in this introduction is narrow beside it: this is authentic, irreplaceable anti-fascist documentation, and its testimonies are beyond criticism. They record one of the great crimes of the twentieth century in the words of the people it was done to — mothers who watched their children burn, children who lay among corpses for days, whole communities murdered in an afternoon because a partisan detachment had passed through the district a week before. The witnesses do not perform. They apologise for crying; they lose the thread; they fall silent, and the authors leave the silence on the page. What they describe is not in dispute among serious historians and was never in dispute: the German occupation of Byelorussia conducted a deliberate campaign of collective extermination against the rural population, and this book is among the fullest first-person records of it in any language. To read it is to be placed in the presence of the thing itself, and the reader owes the men who made it, and the people who spoke to them, an unqualified debt.
Get the dates right, because they matter to how the book should be read. The testimonies were gathered on tape in the early 1970s — the datelines run from "Barbarka, June 1970" onward — and the Russian original, Ya iz ognennoy derevni (I am from the burning village), appeared in 1975. The volume in your hands is the Progress Publishers English translation of 1980, made by Angelia Graf and Nina Belenkaya for export to the anglophone world. So the text is a mid-1970s work of oral history, offered to Western readers at the turn of the 1980s as evidence, addressed to "new generations, who themselves did not experience the horrors of the Second World War."
Who made it also matters, and it tells against the easy assumption that a Progress book is the work of an official institute. These were not apparatus functionaries. Ales Adamovich had been a teenage partisan in occupied Byelorussia himself; he became one of the most searching writers his republic produced and, a decade after this book, one of the more courageous liberal voices of the glasnost years. Yanka Bryl was a revered Byelorussian prose writer; Vladimir Kolesnik was a literary scholar. They approached the burned villages as writers and as countrymen of the dead, not as a commission executing a brief — and the difference shows on every page, in the refusal to tidy the grammar, in the patience with the digressions, in the decision to record the voice rather than summarise the fact.
That decision founded a method. The technique this book pioneered — the long-form documentary assembled entirely from tape-recorded first-person witness, the author present only to arrange and to listen — became one of the signal forms of late-Soviet and post-Soviet literature. Its direct heir is Svetlana Alexievich, who has named Adamovich as her teacher and who carried this exact method to the Nobel Prize. Out of the Fire stands near the head of that lineage. It is, quite apart from its documentary value, a landmark in the history of the form, and the English reader who wants to understand where the "novel of voices" came from should begin here.
The rescue is the whole book, so let the witnesses have this section to themselves. What lifts Out of the Fire above even the honourable category of atrocity documentation is the authors' fidelity to the particular human being in front of them. They tell us that Barbara Slesarchuk "speaks at times almost exactly like a teller of fairytales, in a sing-song voice, with repetitions that don't seem superfluous." They notice a woman who warns them, before she begins, "Don't be afraid if I cry out in pain; I have rheumatism." They record the retired collective farmer whose nine-year-old son survived a mass shooting because "My mother, when she was shot down, fell on top of him and covered him a bit," and who then "lay in a haystack for so many days... Without drinking or eating," until the partisans found him. The book is built out of hundreds of such fragments, each one exact, each one a person.
Around the voices the authors set the emptied places, and here their gift as writers does something the bare transcript could not. They reach a village that no longer exists by crossing a lake in a small boat, and find only "a forest, already full-grown, with a little monument to the inhabitants of an entire village by the roadside." They pass "dead villages where not a soul was left— only a few old trees, still black and scorched, the forlorn sweep of a well and grassgrown streets." Below the new collective farm and its light-filled library where the survivors now speak into the tape recorder, they write, "in the depths of the people's life, in all its generative simplicity, bleed the wounds of memory, for which there is no cure." The landscape passages are not decoration. They are the measure of the absence — the exact acreage of quiet where a community used to be — and they are why the book reads as literature and not only as evidence.
The authors state their purpose exactly, and they meet it. They saw their task, they write, "to lie in preserving the unbearable incandescence of human pain, bewilderment and rage, which are present not only in the words, but also in the voice, eyes and face of the narrators." The people gathered in these pages, they say, came "to bear witness, question, judge, and tell about what it is fearful to know and dangerous to forget." That is the achievement, and it is complete. When Ganna Gribovskaya of the martyred village of Latygovo says, "Nobody even knows that we went through the same torments as in Khatyn. It's good that you came, because I myself... I can't even tell about it—I'm crying...", she names the exact thing the book exists to defeat: the erasure of the small and the unmemorialised, the villages that had no monument and no witness. Against that erasure the book is a permanent act of rescue. Nothing that follows qualifies it.
There is a single critical observation to make, and its object is not the testimonies, not the witnesses, and not the authors' honesty. It concerns the frame the Soviet state placed around this memory in 1980 — what the edition is permitted to treat as the fate of the Byelorussian village, and what it is not.
The book opens, before any witness speaks, with an unsigned editorial preface in the official voice — the voice of "the incorruptible memory," of "the people's memory," of the trial that "did not end at Nuremberg" but "continues in their memory." That preface establishes a category and applies it in one direction only. The category is the deliberate murder of a peaceful rural community — the burning of "villages that were burnt down and destroyed together with their inhabitants." It is the truest category imaginable for what the Germans did, and the book documents it without flinching or exception. But it is turned outward at the invader alone, and the reader is left with the impression that the destruction of the Byelorussian peasantry as a subject begins and ends with the Wehrmacht and the Einsatzgruppen.
It does not. The same peasantry, in many of the same districts, had passed through a decade of its own before the Germans came — a decade the state that published this book made unspeakable. The eastern regions of Byelorussia had lived through forced collectivisation at the turn of the 1930s: the compulsory herding of peasants into the kolkhoz (collective farm), the campaign of "dekulakisation" that destroyed the kulak (well-to-do peasant) as a class by deportation and worse, the requisitions, and the deportations north and east carried out by the NKVD (the Soviet political police). The western regions — Brest, Grodno, much of where these very witnesses lived — were Polish until September 1939, then Sovietised at speed between 1939 and 1941, with their own wave of deportations of "class enemies," settlers and Poles into the interior. The rural catastrophe of Byelorussia has two chapters, not one. This book, by the terms of its 1980 frame, may tell only the second.
The first is not wholly invisible in these pages, and that is the remarkable thing — it surfaces, unbidden, in the witnesses' own words, only never to be examined. When Barbara Slesarchuk tries to reason out why the Germans marked her family for death, she reaches for the recent past: "Maybe they'd figured we were in the collective farm in nineteen forty. 'Communist!...' they'd said against us." The western Byelorussian village she is from was collectivised in 1940, in the brief window of Soviet rule between the two occupations, and the fact sits in her testimony as a plain and unelaborated part of her world. The authors record it faithfully, as they record everything. But the frame around the book cannot pick it up, because to follow that thread — to ask what the collective farm of 1940 had meant to these villages, or what the 1930s had meant to the villages a hundred kilometres east — would be to open the second chapter, and the second chapter was closed.
None of this is a criticism of the witnesses, who tell the truth they were asked for, or of the authors, who were recording a real and specific crime and had no obligation to record a different one. It is an observation about what a Soviet edition of 1980 could frame as the murder of a peaceful Byelorussian village and what it could not. The point is sharpened, not softened, by the book's own method. The recording of testimony was, at that moment, the one licensed way to grieve the Byelorussian countryside — provided the testimony concerned the Germans. Testimony about the other decade existed too, and had been taken, and could not be printed in Moscow. This series has documented the omission from the other side, in the sibling volumes on Soviet rural policy: the Progress editions of Sholokhov's own public prose (At the Bidding of the Heart, 1973) and of Yakimenko's study of him carry roughly 104,000 words about the writer of collectivisation and never once print the words famine or starvation in connection with 1932–33; the volume on The Peoples of the North (1975) renders the forced collectivisation of the Siberian herders as the over-zeal of local officials and passes over the wartime deportation of whole nations in total silence. The same state that made this book made those, and the same line runs through all of them.
The contemporary reply is worth stating precisely, because for once the anti-Stalinist tradition holds a witness of exactly the book's own type. In June 1945 — while the events these villagers describe were only two and three years old — Fourth International, the theoretical journal of the American Trotskyists, printed a long interview with a Soviet citizen who had left the USSR: a man broadly loyal to the regime, who thought the Soviet Union socialist and defended much of it. Asked about the countryside, he gave the plain recorded testimony that the Moscow edition of this book, thirty-five years later, still could not: "The kolkhozes (collective farms) were imposed almost exclusively by force, according to plans laid down by members of the Party" (Fourth International, vol. VI no. 6, June 1945). One kind of tape-recorded peasant testimony reached print in the West in 1945. The other kind — the kind this book so magnificently preserves — could reach print in Moscow in 1980. Neither state of affairs was an accident, and the gap between them is the whole of the point.
There is one further piece of documented context the honest reader should have, and it must be set down carefully, as historical record and not as any claim about the authors or the dead.
In 1969 the Soviet state opened, on the site of the burned village of Khatyn, a vast national memorial complex, and made Khatyn the official emblem of Nazi atrocity for the entire USSR. The choice was in one sense unimpeachable: Khatyn stood for the more than six hundred Byelorussian villages burned with their people, and this book is in part the testimony that memorial could not carry in words. But historians of Soviet memory have long noted a second effect, whatever the intent behind the choice. The name Khatyn is a near-homonym, in Russian and in English transliteration, of Katyn — the forest near Smolensk where, in the spring of 1940, the NKVD shot some 22,000 captured Polish officers and members of the Polish elite. The Soviet government denied the Katyn massacre for half a century, blamed it on the Germans, and admitted Soviet responsibility only in 1990. The scholarly literature widely observes that the prominence given to Khatyn from 1969 onward had the effect — again, whatever was intended — of crowding its near-twin out of public awareness: the burned village that the state wished remembered stood, by an accident of sound, directly in front of the massacre it wished forgotten.
This is offered as documented context, attributed to the historical record, and for one reason only: so that the reader holds the whole shape of the memory-politics into which this book was released in 1980. It diminishes Khatyn's dead not at all. Their village was burned, their testimony is true, and their memorial is deserved. That the same syllables also served to obscure a Soviet crime of the same years is a fact about the state, not about them — and it belongs beside the framing silence already described as part of the single question this introduction raises: not what the book says, which is true, but what the edition around it was not allowed to let the truth stand next to.
Read Out of the Fire for the voices, and trust them without reservation. They are the reason the book exists and the reason it will outlast the state that printed it. Barbara Slesarchuk and Ganna Gribovskaya and the collective farmer whose son survived under his shot grandmother's body are telling the plain truth about the worst thing that ever happened to them, and the three writers who found them and let them speak performed a service to human memory that no criticism can reach. As anti-fascist testimony the book is complete, irreplaceable, and beyond argument; as literature it founded a form that later reached the Nobel Prize; as a record of what the German occupation did to the Byelorussian countryside it has few equals in any language.
Read the frame around the voices for something else — for the one thing a 1980 Moscow edition could not let these witnesses say. The murder of the peaceful Byelorussian village is the truest subject in the world, and this book turns it in a single direction. The same villages, the same peasants, the same category of the annihilated rural community had a second history that the state that published this book had spent decades unspeaking, and that surfaces here only in a survivor's unelaborated aside about the collective farm of 1940. The witnesses withheld nothing. The edition did. Honour the first, and understand the second, and the book will give you both the truth it carries and the truth it was built to carry around.