Witness literature is an important and significant factor in the historical memory formation. Third-person witness narratives are well-known, and 1-person fictional descriptions are equally well-known. However, first-person factual narrative evidence is of particular interest. They represent the initial reflection narratives of personal experience. In addition, this reflexive narration contains the meaningful being picture dynamics, including changes in the content of this picture. The article contains the results of a value-normative analysis of little-known sources of witness literature, which presents the experience of the repressive practices in the USSR in 1920-1980. Generalization of the analysis results allows us to speak about two cycles of radical performance of the semantic picture of the world. In turn, each such cycle includes two phases. The first phase is associated with strangeness of familiar experience and the liminality of new experience. The second phase expresses the subsequent reaggregation of a new understanding of social life. These dynamics are very close to the dynamics of the conceptual narration of war experiences. The main differences are related to the greater emphasis on victimization, different attitudes towards actors and the reasons for victimization. Over the years, witness literature has become an important material for the socio-cultural engineering of building ideas about the sad events of the past – their oblivion (as meaningful unoblivion) in order to prevent their repetition in the present and in the future. A simple hush-up of such circumstances forms the enduring trauma of public consciousness, its «neuroticism», the inability to distance oneself from the past, to live confidently on, causing obsessive associations, or even repetitions, it becomes a source of internal and external conflicts. Constructive oblivion provides not suppression and deletion, but a systematic comprehension of historical experience.