The exile experience

Soviets, Nazis, Soviets again

Another world war came only a generation after the utter devastation of WWI.

Cold statistics grimly remind Latvians in the post-WWII Displaced Persons camps of even more losses suffered in the past. We're doubt mourning Latvian losses in the first World War, still in living memory, served any constructive purpose unless to evoke Nietzsche's „ Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. “1

REMEMBER! Latvia's inhabitants

A destroyed factory in Alaži, 1921.

Latvian butter exports rise steadily following global recession as Latvia transforms from an industrial economy to a post-WWI agrarian economy.

Peters' mother recalled, as a child, being in her brothers' apartment in Rīga and being told to stay inside as shots rang out in the streets. She would have just turned eight years old less than a month before the Bolsheviks captured Rīga in January 3–4, 1919. Little could she imagine that less than a generation later, over the span of a few years, she would get married, live through another Bolshevik invasion, lose her family to Siberian deportation, be saved by a Nazi German invasion, and ultimately flee her home and homeland ahead of Bolshevik re-invasion. That half her first decade of marriage would be spent as a refugee. Least of all, imagining life anywhere but Latvia.

Soviet occupy Rīga, June 1940.

The Red Army invaded in June 1940 while the world was focused on the fall of Paris to Hitler. There was no possibility of resistance. Tens of thousands of Red Army were already stationed in Latvia under an extorted mutual protection agreement. Culminating their first year of brutal occupation, the Soviets deported↗ more than 15,4002 — men, women, children —  in June, 1941. Families were broken up as men were separated from the women and children. Our own families were not immune. Peters' parents narrowly escaped deportation as the rest of his mother's family was taken away. His grandfather died the first winter in Siberia, 4,000 km (2,500 miles) from home. His grandmother died in 1947. The rest made it back after 15 years, with some re-arrested and deported for 5 more years. Silvija's aunt Helena's husband was accused of being a spy and killed; she, too, was deported for 15 years, and thankfully taken in by her cousin on her return.

Latvian partisans stand guard at the Freedom Monument following Nazi "liberation." Liberation quickly turned into another brutal occupation.

Latvia was still reeling from the impact of the mass deportation when the Nazi Germans invaded a week later. Initially hailed as liberating Latvia after a year of brutal Soviet occupation, the Germans brought their own horrors: the Holocaust↗, for which the Nazis found local collaborators, and conscription of all able-bodied men into "foreign" Waffen-SS combat units ("Latvian Legion") on the Eastern Front. By the end of the war, the Nazis had conscripted all men born after 1905. Dueling Soviet and Nazi occupations each pressed at least 100,000 Latvians into combat. Regardless of whose army they fought in their cause was neither Nazism or Bolshevism, their united hope was to somehow restore Latvia's independence when the war ended. Latvian Waffen-SS and Red Army units facing each other on the battlefield refused to engage. Astoundingly, some historians have dubbed this a Latvian "civil war" within the World War.

When word began to circulate of Nazi atrocities in the wake of the German occupation, Silvija's grandparents dispatched her father, then a teen, to warn a family friend. Crossing fields strewn with bodies, he arrived at her apartment only to find the Nazis had already been there and beheaded her.

Latvians flee with their essential belongings as the Red Army returns.

Fighting past the bitter end

As the Red Army advanced, Latvians fearing a second Soviet occupation fled their homes. Making their escape even possible was that Latvian Legionnaires and German Wehrmacht held out to the very end↗ of the war in Courland. Latvians escaped across the treacherous Baltic to Sweden. Many more evacuated down the Baltic to Nazi-occupied Poland. Legionnaires protected thousands who made the perilous land journey westward through occupied territory. Some historians attack Latvians for being Nazis simply because they escaped the Soviets to Nazi Germany, as did Peters' and Silvija's parents. War was raging. Circumstances, not allegiances, dictated destinations. There were no "good" choices.

Legionnaire forces were split. Latvians who held out in Courland even dared to declare independence, petitioning Western Powers for support, fighting on for another week after Nazi Germany's capitulation. The others, who retreated back to the streets of Berlin and ruins overlooking the Reich Chancellery Garden, resisted the Red Army advance until they could surrender to the Western Allies. The Russians tortured and killed captured Latvians. War diaries speak of coming upon the bodies of their comrades who had been skinned alive. Legionnaires were forced to make the ultimate choice — to die rather than surrender.

Latvians left behind in the Soviet-occupied Latvian S.S.R.↗ become second-class citizens in their own homeland and were subjected to another multiple-times larger mass deportation, 42,300, in 1949. Those who survived the 1941 deportation returned in the mid-1950's, some to be re-arrested and deported a second time, while many of those deported in 1949 were barred from ever returning home even after their sentences expired.