Commemorative candle. The Taimyr Region during the years of political repressions. Memoir
Born in 1929 into a Finnish family in the village of Syargi, Leningrad Region. Today she lives in the settlement of Potapovo.
... It happened in March 1942. Two men came into our house and said: „Get
eady – you are leaving. But you are not allowed to take mre than 30 kgs of
luggage with you.“ During our trip to Siberia we had to sell our clothes and
other belongings. They had taken us away from our native places unexpectedly,
loading us on vehicles and carrying us off. While we were still crossing Lake
Ladoga by motorcars, some German airplane approached the scene and started
bombarding us.
Our father Yegor Ivanovitch Karchu, born in 1905, did not manage to escape exile either, although he had fought against the Finns during the Finnish War in 1939. Nobody told us where they were going to take us and why. Finally we arrived in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, in the district of Kansk. Father fell ill during transport, but he survived.
Having reached Siberia everything appeared to be very quiet. There were no men, they had all been drafted to the front. They assigned us quite a nice house with a small lot of land; father and mother went to work and received foodstuffs in return. In the summer we were once again forced to leave the place; they took us further to the north. Mother was crying all the time, since they had to leave behing all the beautiful flowers which were growing in the garden and, apart from this, were not allowed to take along any belongings. In our place of residence were soldiers doing field exercise – they were kind enough as to yielding their sweaters to us.
We were immediately taken to the settlement of Potapovo in the Dudinka District. We were four family members – Mum, Dad, brother William and I. Our youngest brother died during transport to Siberia at the age of just one and-a-half years..
There were no more exiles in Potapovo at that time, except us. In former times merchant families like the Ivanovs as well as the Mirgunovs and Grishkos had lived in this place. In Potapovo father was working for the brickworks. The bricks were of high quality; they were carried downtown and delivered all over the Dudinka District. Mum was working for the Sovkhoz farm as a milkmaid. Father was a skilled carpenter, too.
In the winter I went to school. At the age of fourteen I began to work. I salted onions, which used to be stored in barrels; besides, I was also working for the brickworks and had different jobs on the State farm. Times were hard, all the same we were lucky things did not turn out worse – we were fortunate to live in exile together with our father. He knew, how things had to be done, how to cope with the situation – and this is why we managed to survive.
Recorded in the settlement of Potapovo in 1992.
William Jegorowitsch Karchu mit seiner
Ehefrau Lydia Koch, Potapowo 1960er Jahre