But back then we hid, we didn’t even wear our medals. Men wore them, but not women

When I put on a dress for the first time, I flooded myself with tears. I didn’t recognize myself in the mirror. We had spent four years in trousers. There was no one I could tell that I had been wounded, that I had a concussion. Try telling it, and who will give you a job then, who will marry you? We were silent as fish. We never acknowledged to anybody that we had been at the front. We just kept in touch among ourselves, wrote letters. It was later that they began to honor us, thirty years later … to invite us to meetings … But back then we hid, we didn’t even wear our medals. Men wore them, but not women. Men were victors, heroes, wooers, the war was theirs, but we were looked at with quite different eyes. Quite different … I’ll tell you, they robbed us of the victory.

S. Alexievich, tr. R. Pevear and L. Volkhonsky, The unwomanly face of war (1985), Kindle loc 2,123