‘That Was How We Lived’: Remembering Childhood and Adolescence in Kursk Oblast during the Great Patriotic War, 1941–1943

Abstract

Abstract This article examines how noncombatants who lived in the Central Black Earth Region of the Soviet Union during the Soviet-German War (1941–45) remembered their experience of combat and Axis occupation seventy years after the last shots were fired. Based on interviews with over a dozen individuals who were children and adolescents during the war, this study finds that despite an overwhelming and annually celebrated official narrative of the war, the interviewees discuss the war from only their own horizon of observation. With a focus on themes common to all the interviewees (family, childhood, and labor), this essay stresses the fact that while modern warfare is a national (or international) phenomenon, it is always experienced locally by combatants and noncombatants alike. Such an examination highlights the complexity of the experience of warfare and how this complexity is demonstrated in how personal memory of the event diverges from official memory.