Last Witnesses
...On the morning of the twenty-second June, 1941, on one of the streets in Brest, lay a dead little dirl with small unplaited pigtails and her doll. Many people remembered this girl. They remembered her forever.
What is dearer to us that our children? What is dearer to any nation?
To any mother? To any father? But who counts how many children are killed by war, which kills them twice? It kills those that been born. And it kills those that could, that ought to have come into this world. In "Requiem" by the Byelorussian poet Anatoli Vertinsky a children's choir is heard across the field where the dead soldiers lay - the unborn children scream and cry over every common grave. Is a child going through the horrors of war still a child? Who gives him back his childhood? Once Dostoevsky posed the problem of general happiness in relation to the suffering of a single child. Yet there were thousands like this during the years 1941 to 1945...
