Aunt Austra’s story [Ian Hart’s text].
[The Harts and Inese and husband travelled in Russia in 1968, and met Austra Lācis, Erna’s sister in Leningrad.]
In 1941, when the Soviet Union occupied Latvia, they found it necessary to take action against all those who could be considered dangerous: known patriots, army officers, people in political positions. These days the ex-patriot Latvians remember June 14th as the day of the first of a series of mass deportations.
On June 14th, 1941, she was at home with her three children, the youngest six months old, when the Russians called. Her husband was the mayor of the town and had been an officer in the national guard, and this evening, quite by chance, he was away. They took her and the children, giving them just enough time to pack a few belongings before they put them onto the trucks. She telephoned to her sister who was living a few miles away and got what she could together. The truck got bogged and the delay gave the sister enough time to arrive by bicycle and see her in the truck. She picked a few flowers from beside the road and handed the through the bars, They were treasured for years.
After this they were loaded into railway cattle trucks which were boarded up and a hole left in the floor to be used as a communal toilet. They were given nothing to eat for the six day journey — across Siberia, to a place somewhere near Lake Baikal, They arrived, starving. They were given a spade and told to dig. “You are here to work,” they were told. “When you die there will be plenty to replace you.”
Soon after they arrived they were “asked” to sign two papers. One stated that they had come to Siberia as “voluntary workers”; the other stated that they willingly signed over 700 of their 900 roubles to the state towards a national loan. (This was their annual “wage” — 900 old roubles — worth one tenth of their value in new roubles. In this decade, Kruschev officially repudiated this “loan” and it was never returned.) Those who refused to sign were awoken at regular intervals for as many nights as it took them to break down.
It was continually stressed that they would never return, that they were to die here. “Remember who you are!” they were told.
At no time in the whole of the 16 years she was there was there ever any pretence of feeding them. Her staple diet was nettles, boiled with salt, which was available. Flour cost 1,000 (old) roubles per kilo and, consequently was unobtainable. A month’s wage bought two buckets of potatoes, which worked out at three thin slices per person per day. If they caught a rat or any other rodent they had meat in their soup.
The children went to school in a village several kilometres away, on foot, so that when it snowed the school was cut off. After a year the clothes they had were rags. The youngest child developed a rash which spread over her face and eye lids and they feared for her sight, and when the rash disappeared she came out in huge, blue cysts all over her body. There was no medical attention and no medicine. When people died, from overwork, from starvation or from punishment, or when they were suddenly sent away, their children were either looked after by others, or died.
Her saddest memory is coming home after dark to see her children waiting for her. She had no food to give them, so she could only put them to bed. It makes her sad to remember that they never complained.
Her job was minding calves in the spring, which involved her wading through swamps, often up to her waist in the water and mud. She worked from before dawn until after dark. One night coming home from work she saw a dog carrying something. She chased the dog and found it had a calf’s head. She took it from the dog and several families had meat for a week. Another time some cattle died and were dumped in the forest. They found the carcasses and had meat again for months.
After five years, somebody decided that it was inhuman to treat children this way, so it was announced that the children were to be taken home. Someone had sent her 1,000 roubles, but all she could buy for it were some old army blankets which she made into some trousers and a coat for the boy and a skirt and coat for the eldest girl. She took the padding out of some pillows and made blouses for the girls from the material. The youngest child at least had some clothes to wear.
While the children were waiting for the train, a Russian woman going past was so overcome by the sight of the thin, shivering little girl that she took off her daughter’s coat and gave it to her. Another Russian woman went into her house and brought them a pot of boiled potatoes, telling them to keep the pot between them for warmth and to eat the potatoes on the journey.
When they reached Latvia they were put into orphanages, though later on, relatives were notified, or found out somehow and claimed many of the children. Any relatives who claimed the children were paid 50 (old) roubles per month for their board and the children had to work accordingly. It was many years before she re-established contact with her children and found that they were still alive.
After the children had gone they were told: Don’t think that this is the thin end of the wedge. Just because the children have gone, don’t imagine that you are next. You will never see them again.
For those who showed any resistance there were two favourite punishments. The first was marching. They were simply marched to death. Often this was done to the men just to remind them of where they were. She remembers the sight of a gang marching up and being allowed to sit down on a grass bank for a rest. When they left the ground was black: not a single stalk of grass remained.
The second, most terrible punishment was “sending North”. This was tantamount to execution as only 2% of those sent survived. In the summer the men were employed carting logs through the swamps, up to their necks in the water, attacked by the huge arctic mosquitoes which could kill men in their weakened condition. A friend of hers was sent North for stealing two handfuls of grain for her children, for two years, one for each handful. She was lucky: she got a job working in the kitchen, so she did not starve. In the evenings she and the other women collected the bodies of those who had died in the last 24 hours, loaded them onto a cart and hauled them out into the woods where they were dumped. All that remained of the previous night’s bodies were the bones — the wolves had finished them off.
At the time of the 1941 purges a class of children (aged 9-10 years) had been heard singing an “old” national song (I would rather sacrifice my head than my country, etc.). The whole class was deported to Siberia. They were marched to death. It was the normal practice to shoot anyone who dropped from exhaustion, so these columns of marchers were a pitiful sight — everyone helping everyone else to keep on his feet until the very last moment.
In 1956 they were released and sent home. The one suit of clothes she owned had fifty patches in it.
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She now is home again, a free Soviet citizen, presumably grateful for all that communism has done for her. She lives with her eldest daughter and son-in-law and their three children in a two-room flat. You can touch the roof with your hand.
When she retired she went to the pensions office with her slip of paper to say that she had worked in Siberia for sixteen years. They would not accept it. She had to keep travelling into Riga for months, to hire a lawyer who sent a letter to Head Office for her. Letters went back and forth and after months of nervous and physical energy she got her pension. “Why didn’t you come straight to us, rather than hiring a lawyer?” they asked.
She gets 50 roubles per month on her pension and earns another 60 roubles, working in a plant nursery.
The impressions she gave us of Riga today confirmed and added to what we had been told by the other Latvians. Communism, she says, might be very good for the Russians, but it has bled all the other republics dry. All the top posts are held by Russians who keep a separate community with their own shop and entertainment, yet Russian is the official lingua franca. Very few Latvians are any better off than they were before the war, most are far worse off. The people who are satisfied with the new order had no shoes before the “revolution” and now they have two pairs.
Fish is unavailable as is fresh meat and milk products and until five years ago it was only possible to buy black bread. There is no traditional baking any more (there are no ingredients, even if one remembers how). There is no tradition left at all.
There is no sense of responsibility for anything, as no-one owns anything. A man goes out to fix a tractor and if you follow him you can collect a whole box of tools. The next time there are no tools and the tractor does not get fixed. Nobody will raise a hand to do a repair in a block of apartments — the attitude is: when it falls down the government will give us a new one. And the buildings do fall down — every day. Drunkenness is a terrible problem and she told us the same story about the wives going to the factories to meet their husbands.
But what else do these people have? What did they do before to amuse themselves? Is it any wonder that people take the opportunity to study in spite of the lack of reward? To give themselves something. More than often they hide their qualifications and work in a factory, denying that they ever had an education.
But she is not so depressed about the children as the other Latvian was. They have eyes, she says. Her two eldest children remember Siberia.
She was not worried about talking to us or being seen talking to us. What has she to lose? She has lost everything already and there is very little more they could do to her (though today in Riga there is a minister of religion who has twice recently been sent to Siberia for being outspoken). Inese looked at her aunt and kept seeing her mother — the clothes did not fit, neither did her shoes or her false teeth and she looked twenty years older than her sister in Australia.
We took her to the railway station to get a ticket. She queued at the window and handed over a ten rouble note for her ticket which cost 8.75. “I have no change!” screamed the woman across the counter and snatched back the ticket. So she had to go and change her note and queue again for the ticket.
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Extract from: The Struggle of the Latvian Nation in the Great Patriotic War, 1941-1945.
(Published in Latvia, 1964)
[Our translation]. p.38.
[The official Soviet explanation and justification for the deportations.]
“When it became imminent in 1941 (the threat of German invasion) it became necessary to send all known counter-revolutionaries (police, mayors, partisans, etc.) and their families out of the country. To a certain extent this was justified. Unfortunately it was never explained fully to the people and they never really understood the reasons for the mass-deportations. Unfortunately some mistakes were made — some deported were innocent and many active anti-Soviets remained free. Not having been adequately explained, the West has used the deportations as anti-Soviet propaganda… During the occupation, German Fascists and Latvian bourgeois nationalists made wide use of these few mistakes in their anti-Soviet propaganda, thus slowing down the partisan and anti-Fascist activities in Latvia during the War… We must take into account that the dispossessed exploiters were still in the country, hoping to re-establish their power; whereas in older republics the exploiters had been liquidated and the people were politically and morally united. Because of the widespread, petit-bourgeois layer who were a consequence of the twenty years of injection of nationalist propaganda… all these factors had their effect on the political war.”
The twenty years are the years of independence of Latvia as a state between the wars. The only time the Latvians ever talk about.