The exile experience

Soviet mass deportations

The Soviet executed a number of mass deportations during and after WWII. The first was conducted June 14, 1941. The victims were gathered in more than 50 assembly points and carted away in more than 600 railway carriages—many nothing but cattle cars with a hole in a corner for bodily functions.

Deportees at the Ogre↗ (pronounced AWE-greh) railway station being packed off to Siberia, June 19411

Farming families were particularly hard-hit, as were former members of the National Guard (Aizsargi) and anyone who had been a member of any sort of political organization. Scouts and guides were deported as "anti-Soviet elements." Landowners and merchants were also targeted.

Entire families were carted away—of the approximately 15,000 ripped away from their homes that day—a fraction of the 35,000 lost during the first Soviet occupation—more than 5,000 were women, more than 3,000, children. Families were torn apart as the men were deported separately to labor camps deep in the GULAG. Our families were among these. Nor was this the first such deportation—a tool dating back to the Tsarist Empire and to be used again after the war.

Mass Deportation of June 14, 19412

Instructions on how to carry out mass deportations were prepared in the autumn of 1939 for the newly-annexed regions of western Ukraine by the head of the Ukrainian SSR NKVD (later known as KGB), General Ivan Serov. They were approved in Moscow and later used in the Baltic States as well. As the USSR Commissar for State Security, Serov signed the orders on 21 January 1941.

In the night between 13 and 14 June, about 15,500 Latvian residents—among them 2400 children younger than ten—were arrested without a court order to be deported to distant regions in the Soviet Union. Targeted were mainly families who had members in leading positions in state and local governments, economy and culture.

People to be deported were awakened in the night and given less than one hour to prepare for the journey. They were allowed to take with them only what they could carry, and everything left behind was confiscated by the state. The unfortunate were herded into already prepared cattle or freight railroad cars, in which they spent weeks and months. Many died on the way, especially infants, the sick, and the elderly. Men, totaling some 8,250, were separated from their families, arrested, and sent to GULAG hard labor camps. Women and children were taken to so-called "administrative settlements" as family members of "enemies of the people"

No word of these events was mentioned in Latvia's Soviet-censored newspapers. Loved ones had no way of knowing what had become of those deported. None of the institutions, including the militia, provided information or help. Scattered along the railroad tracks were farewell notes written by the deported to their families—few of them ever reached their intended recipients.

Conditions in the hard labor camps were inhumane. The inmates lost their identities, and were terrorized by the guards and criminal prisoners. Food rations were meager, and did not replace the calories expended through work. People grew weak, and were crippled by diarrhea, scurvy, and other illnesses. Winters were marked by unbearable cold, and many did not survive the first one. Only a small part of those deported in 1941 later returned to Latvia. The families in forced settlement had to fend for themselves in harsh conditions; the death rate among the very young and the elderly was likewise high.

These Names Accuse records those taken in the first mass deportation, here, the Ķulle family

On the morning of June 14, 1941, at 7:00, the Russians arrived at the family’s door and ordered them to pack within fifteen minutes. Listed above are the family members swept up that day: Peters’ grandmother Emma; his grandfather Jānis; his aunt Laura; uncle Osvalds and his wife Erna and their children—Peters’ cousins Jānis, Gaida, and Vija.

Peters' maternal grandparents, Jānis and Emma

Laura recalls her frantic rush through the house, gathering every family photograph she could find and bundling them into a blanket. Those fragile papers endured the long journey to Siberia and, remarkably, survived to make their way home again.

Although Osvalds was not at home when the NKVD arrived, he went to the train depot voluntarily, unwilling to let his family face deportation alone. What he did not know was that the official deportation “protocol” ( These Names Accuse, Appendix 1 ) required heads of households to be forcibly separated from their families — a tactic justified as a means of keeping prisoners compliant but one which also condemned the men to the harshest corners of the Soviet Gulag.

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

Erna caught only a brief glimpse of her husband from the deportation train—guards leading him away. “There’s your father!” she said to little Vija. Those three words became Vija’s only memory of him. Peters’ mother escaped the sweep entirely only because she had been warned not to return home that day. A week later, the Nazi invasion halted further Soviet transports; in fact, Peters’ parents were already slated for a later deportation wave.

Peters’ grandparents were not on the official list, yet insisted on going with the family rather than remain behind with no one left. They could not know that their daughter Irma and her husband Jānis had slipped through the net, or that within days Germany would invade. His grandfather died that November, in 1941; his grandmother sometime in 1947. Both rest in unmarked graves beneath a tree somewhere outside Krasnoyarsk.

In a grim sense, the family was considered “lucky.” Their destination was a kolhoz—a collective-farm village—rather than a prison-camp complex. During the first years, Erna stole livestock feed to supplement their shrinking rations. When accused of stealing sugar, she was beaten so brutally that her shoes filled with her own blood.

Over time, the family managed to carve out a life. Gaida learned to dance at school, only to be expelled once teachers discovered she was the child of deportees. Eventually they built their own log hut; Gaida still remembers the steady rhythm of sawing trees with her brother Jānis (now passed away) as they prepared the timber. In time, Gaida grew up, fell in love, and married—carrying with her both the scars and the resilience shaped by those years in Siberia.

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.

Most of 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 Māris.

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

Twenty-seven years after launching our web site, the generations that can speak to deportation and life in Siberia are passing away, their accounts transitioning from living memory into family lore. We are fortunate that Peters' cousin's Gaida's experiences have been enshrined in a documentary.

Gaida was featured along with three other women who were taken away to Siberia and survived to return. Below, the news report of the documentary (in Latvian, our subtitles in English).