S. V. PROZHOGINA Doctor of Philological Sciences TO MARK THE 55TH ANNIVERSARY OF THE BEGINNING OF THE NATIONAL LIBERATION WAR IN ALGERIA Why do they remember the War? Why do people remember wars for so long? Probably, mainly because, while experiencing the time of human suffering, they should no longer be allowed to experience the very suffering caused by the death of relatives and friends, the destruction of the space of life, the loss of freedom, and the reign of fear. The war is merciless. The war is terrible. And not only in the destruction of the familiar reality surrounding a person (the metaphor of this nightmare, as a clot of it, is in Picasso's "Guernica", and in the dissonances of Ravel's "Grand Waltz", and "March" from Shostakovich's VII Symphony-you can't write it better, you can't express it, you can't convey it...). - and in anticipation of fear, in the horror of silence after the wail of the siren (air alarm), fear for their lives and for the lives of loved ones who have gone to fight. Anyone who knows will understand. And anyone who remembers knows how merciless memory is. I still remember our war more than sixty years later, and therefore I understand those who do not stop bearing witness to its nightmare in one way or another, cannot forget about it, remembers what it was done in the name of. Maissa Bey (born 1950), an Algerian woman, also remembers her war for half a century. (But her War is not alien to me either: I lived in Algeria, which has just come out of this ordeal.) She saw the face of war when she was about seven. I really experienced all the suffering that fell to the lot of her family when I learned, already an adult, that her father was martyred. He, a secondary school teacher in a small town in southern Algeria, was captured by French soldiers, tortured into giving up the names and addresses of other "rebels" who were participating in the Algerian general strike, and then shot without trial, "while trying to escape", like other ... Read more