The Unwomanly Face of War

In the most terrible war of the 20th century, a woman had to become a soldier. She didn’t only save lives—bandaging the wounded—she also shot from a “sniper rifle,” bombed, blew up bridges, went on reconnaissance, and captured prisoners. The woman killed.

She killed the enemy that had fallen upon her land—with unprecedented brutality, upon her home, and upon her children. “This is not a woman’s fate—to kill,” one of the heroines will say, fitting into those words all the horror and the harsh necessity of what had happened. Another will write on the walls of a fallen Reichstag: “I, Sofya Kuncewicz, came to Berlin to kill war.”

It was the greatest sacrifice they offered on the altar of Victory. And an immortal feat whose full depth we come to understand over the years of peaceful life.