De Una Batalla Perdida

I am not alone on this platform... Voices surround me, hundreds of voices, they are always with me. Since I was a child. She lived in a town. We children liked to play in the street, but in the afternoons we were attracted, like magnets, to the benches next to the houses, or jatas, as they say in our land, where the exhausted women gathered. None of them had a husband, father or brothers; I don't remember that there were men in the village after the war: during the Second World War, in Belarus, on the front and in partisan operations, one in four Belarusians perished. Our childhood world after the war was a world of women.