Occupation and Deportation Change Our Families Forever

The deeper we delve into Latvian history and heritage, the more there is to learn. For ourselves, and for the world at large.

While looking through the small library at our Latvian church in New York, we came across a book which brought that other exile, that of our relatives, into sharp focus. That was These Names Accuse—Nominal List of Latvians Deported to Soviet Russia, second edition, published in 1982 by The Latvian National Foundation, in Stockholm, Sweden.

The book is a recounting of the first Soviet deportations of 1940-1941, including the first mass deportation in 1941. The historical accounts and exhibits tell a horrific story, of fates far worse than Peters' aunt Erna, who was once flogged until her shoes ran full of her own blood. Her crime? Being suspected of stealing extra rations of sugar.

Peters opened the book to find his mother's family...

They were all there, Peters' grandmother Emma, uncle Osvalds and his wife Erna, their children (Peters' cousins) Janis, Gaida, and Vija, grandfather Janis, and aunt Laura. The Russians came knocking and gave them 15 minutes to pack. Laura recalls frantically throwing all the family pictures together, wrapped in a blanket. She still has those pictures, delicate pieces of paper that made it thousands of miles to Siberia and back.

Peters' uncle Osvalds was not home, but he went to the train depot voluntarily to be taken away with his family. Little could Osvalds suspect that the deportation "protocol" (»Appendix 1) stipulated that heads of households be separated from their families, ostensibly to keep the prisoners subdued, exiling the men to the harshest reaches of the Soviet gulags.

Happier times, 1940 (l-r, back) Peters' uncle Osvalds and Erna, their children (l-r, front) Peters' cousins Gaida, Janis, and Vija

As we've mentioned elsewhere, his wife, Erna, saw him from the the train, being led away elsewhere. "There's your father!"—Erna's words—are the only memory their daughter Vija had of him. Luckily, Peters' mother had been told not to go home that day, and so escaped her family's fate. Peters' parents were were "rescheduled" on a later deportation order.

Peters' grandparents perished early on. They lie buried in unmarked graves under an old (oak, I think it was) tree—perhaps it is still standing there, somewhere outside Krasnoyarsk. Even so, the family was lucky. They had been deported to more of a kolhoz/village, not a prison camp. In the beginning, Erna stole livestock feed to supplement their meager rations. As the years progressed, they made a life for themselves. Gaida learned dancing in school. Eventually, they built their own family log hut—Gaida still remembers the rhythm of sawing the trees with her brother Janis (now passed away). Gaida also fell in love and married.

Gaida's husband, Linards, had his own tale of survival. He had been deported in a cattle car packed with men. Most had already died before even reaching the end of the railroad line in Siberia. After a forced march to their labor camp above the Arctic Circle, he was the only one left alive of those who had shared that same cattle car. Sadly, he passed away one year before Peters' first trip to Latvia.

Except for Peters' grandparents, the family survived intact—a tribute to Erna's and Laura's fortitude and force of will—to return to Latvia after 15 years—but their home, Mordanga, now a kolhoz, remained off limits. Erna and Gaida were arrested and deported a second time, for 5 more years, spending a total of two decades in Siberia. Gaida's sister, Vija, raised Gaida's two sons, Arno and Maris.

Silvija's great-aunt was taken away in the same deportation. She, too, appears in the list of names:

We're hoping to find out more about her story when we visit Silvija's relatives and family friends. But such hopes are slowly dimming, as that generation that knew the most has almost all passed away. And it is increasingly difficult to get anyone to talk about Siberia—more and more it seems like some shame or curse better left forgotten. But if the story is not told, is that not worse? Now nearly two decades after Latvian independence, the Russian government still insists Latvia voluntarily and legally joined the Soviet Union, and brands anything anti-Soviet "anti-'anti-fascist'"—Nazism.

We contacted The Latvian National Foundation, and asked for their permission to share the story of These Names Accuse with you. Our sincere thanks to them, and to their founder, Andrejs Eglitis. Follow the "Preface" link below (or use the Table of Contents on top) to read the story and see the pictures for yourself. Some of the pictures (Appendices 9, 10, and 11 in particular) are graphic and disturbing; we suggest care in sharing with younger children. We have reproduced the complete contents of the book (text and appendices) and have begun work on scanning and converting the list itself.

One additional note on These Names Accuse: the book is the list of those Latvians deported in 1940 and 1941 by the Soviet Union, which the Latvian National Foundation received from the Swiss Red Cross based in Geneva, gathered after the Nazis repulsed the first Soviet invasion. Those materials specify names, family relations, and last known residence only.

The list likely also includes Latvian Jews deported by Stalin. One widely respected site, www.jewishgen.org», dedicated to the research of Jewish geneology, estimates a number in the thousands. Recent scholarship has estimated Stalin deported 5,000 Latvian Jews–proportionally suffering more than any other ethnic group. Deporation of the Jewish civic and political leaders left Latvia's Jewish community ill-equipped to organize when the Nazis and the Holocaust swept into the Baltics.As this is a record of Stalin's deportations during the first Soviet occupation, it does not include subsequent Nazi or Soviet deportations.

On a personal perspective... there are few who are unaware of the Holocaust. The Soviet army was generally hailed as "liberators" of the Jewish death camps in Germany—but what is virtually unknown is that Stalin's reign of terror spared no one, blind to race and creed. It was only after Peters read These Names Accuse and began researching more information that the truly horrific scale and indiscriminate nature of Stalin's genocide began to become apparent—along with a near total ignorance of it in the West. And Russia has done nothing to come to grips with or to even acknowledge that past, continuing to deny any wrongdoing. Siberia was far from a uniquely Latvian experience.

However, it would seem that Stalin did seem to have a particular vendetta for the Latvians—ordering all ethnic Latvians in the Soviet Union shot just for being Latvian. Perhaps Stalin had simply wanted to erase any memory that when insurgents captured Moscow in 1918, it was 10 batallions of Latvian infantry that guarded the Kremlin, that defeated and later executed the insurgents—contributing to the survival of Lenin and the Bolshevik revolution.

We suggest the following additional reading:

• Kolyma, the Land of Gold and Death, by Stanislaw J. Kowalski», not only a chilling and compelling first-hand story of the frozen wastelands of Siberia, but also superbly documented with facts and figures; and
   
• The Jamestown Foundation: the Gulag Collection», a collection of paintings by a gulag survivor, a link we've previously featured in one our mailers

also, in addition to books written by Latvians, the following book:

• Man Is Wolf to Man: Surviving the Gulag, by Janusz Bardach, Kathleen Gleeson» (listed on amazon.com)

Finally, for more insight into the role of Latvians "saving" Bolshevism, visit:

• 1918: Chaos in Russia and Germany's Last Offensive», part of an excellent site on world history. (In fairness, we should note that one would have found more Latvians in the ranks of the Mensheviks than the Bolsheviks.)