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If everybody was asked, "What is childhood?" they would each say something of their own. For me childhood is mama and candies....
During the war I not only didn't taste any candies I didn't even see any. I ate my first candy a few years after the war... About three years after... I was already a big girl. Ten years old.

I could never understand how anybody could not want chocolate candy. How? It's impossible.

The war is my history book. My solitude... I missed the time of childhood, it fell out of my life. I'm a man without a childhood. Instead of a childhood, I have the war.

I'd forgotten I had this signed copy.

(Am I doing the least festive reading today?)

Books I'm hoping to get to this weekend.
Alexievich
Shepherd
Ditlevsen

Although given how full on this week has been, it might just be 😴😴😴💤

Just wow! I'm really not surprised this has won awards I thought it was fantastic and so powerful. Unchildlike stories from children growing up during the second world war. Heartbreaking what people went though, I can't even begin to understand 😥
#ReadingEurope2020 #Belarus 🇧🇾 (28th country) #Murder2020 (book 21)

Another audiobook for me. This one was recollections and histories of children during ww2. Specifically in Russia and areas under Russian rule. Some stories were very short, others longer. Some more terrible then others, in terms of things witnessed. Though they were told by older folks, they were memories of childhood.

Absolutely horrifying, this book is a compilation of many interviews Alexievich conducted of children of WWII. I love this style of telling the story, but through the memories of children what is said and inferred is heartbreaking. However, I don‘t know of a single WWII book that would make one more compassionate to those who are present day refugees than reading the terror of living through war and the lasting impact of it on past children.