Our family was deported to Siberia in 1941. We lived and worked in the Savodsk chemical and forestry industry, district of Nizhne.Ingash, where there wer no less than 150 Lithuanian families.
There were many children in the taiga. The inhabitants of this childrens' "republic" were left to themselves: their mothers went to work many kilometers away and only returned home in the evening. Any absence from work was punished by taking away the bread ration and the highly liquid soap from them, which usually was distributed twice within twenty-four hours. This soup merely consisted of water mixed with some flour and a teaspoonful of vegetable oil. We called this "admixings". Apart from that it was impossible to complement or fill up once ration with anything else.
We lived in barracks made of wooden beams, which were meant for several families. Hunger and diseases were a constant companion of the exiles. The little ones and the most weak yet died in the very first winter. The others permanently were in bad health - a process of mere survival was going on.
The children looked like gnoms; they were warmly and firmly wrapped in their mothers' blankets and cloths and roamed through the settlement in search of warmth and the company of some playmates of their own age. One could often find them closely pressed towards each other, crushed together beside some cooled-off cast-iron saucepan. No matter what the children were talking about, the conversation always came back to the subject "food". The elder people told the children about the abundance of bread in Lithuania. These stories, although they were usually causing spasms, were the most interesting and most beloved fairy tales.
Thus, two years passed by. The number of children grew less and less. Some of them were taken to a children's home after the death of their mothers.
Nobody accompanied these children, whose faces were marked by fate, nobody prepared them for their way into the future as it should have been. The poor orphans dragged themselves to the next bread carriage, which came through the village twice a week, and then ran behind till Tinskaya station. The compassionate drivers sometimes allowed them to sit on their handcarts or sledgers (depending on the season) and took the exhausted and completely weakened children a couple of verst along. But they never permitted them to stay there for along time. In winter the children could easily freeze to death and in summer be killed by mosquitos, midges, horseflies and other bloodsucking insects. It was less dangerous to move along on one's own legs. Where they were sent further - nobody knows.
Of course, they had no school in the taiga either. A sheet of paper was valuable as gold and was usually kept for a letter to the father, about whose fate we only learned later. Lucky were those, who succeeded to get hold of a couple of old newspapers. One could write some text across, which could be read fairly well afterwards. In the evening, after work, they sat by the heated stove and the mothers taught their children read, write, do arithmetic and told them everything they remembered from the time when they had attended school themselves. During the day when the children were alone, they passed everything they had learned on to their friends. Soon the majority of the children recited poems of Lithuanian poets or retold in their own words the most popular works of the prose writers. But all this was hardly enough for a serious education.
My mother had a pedagogic training and had worked as a teacher before her deportation to Siberia. Thus, she decided to set about organizing a school.
In order to obtain the consent of the local authorities, she went to the district town. She made the 120 kms on foot within a period of three days only. At the district department of education they treated her with keen attention: !A school for exiles in the middle of the taiga? What do they need it for? They have no command of the Russian language! You have alreday worked as a teacher? Whre is your diploma?" Such questions and the like followed each other in rapid succession. And then Mum thought about how to convince the "harsh" authorities of her planned educational work in the best possible way. She explained to them, that also those children were supposed to attend school, whose's fathers were at war. In fact, there were two such families in the settlement and their children had not gone to school for more than two years already. This obviously had some decisive importance and mother received the permis-sion to open a school. And based on the approval of the authorities mother was no in a position to officially practise the teaching profession in her little taiga school.
Meanwhile she had walked back all the 120 kms from the district town to the settlement, loaded with school-books, exercise books, pencils and other teaching aids, as well as some office equipment. 12 days after having set out for this important mission, mother returned with a big, self-made sack full of objects and an old globe without stand.
In no time a red corner was organized. From the central camp zone they procured a chalk-board, a couple of long tables and benches. Due to the fact that the new school only disposed of one room and the children were of different ages and had had a differnet education before, it was decided to at least seat the firstgraders in a separate corner. The remaining pupils learned in common.
The school-books were written in Russian, which the children did not understand well, above all they did not know the Russian alphabet. For that reason the lessons always started with the primer. The subject matters concerning mathematics, geography and history had to be translated into the Latvian language. Such an unusual method of teaching and learning lead to unexpected results. For, after a short period of time, a new Latvian-Russian school language had developed, in which the pupils used to communicate, among them even children of Russian families. It took a lot of efforts and sense to put an end to this fusion of both languages.
In spite of all difficulties the school continued to work.
In 1944 I was assigned to go to Krasnoyarsk. More than one year later our family received the permission to reunite. Mother said good-bye to her pupils and, together with my sister, moved to where I lived.
In 1946 it was rumored in Siberia that a commission from Latvia had arrived in Krasnoyarsk, which dealt with the repatriation of Latvian children to their home territoiries. Soon I learned that the commission members from Latvia lodged at the hotel "Yenissey". I made their acquaintance, for I intended to receive lots of information on places situated inmy home country, and they also asked me many questions about the life and situation of the Letts in this region. I was familiar with the area and on that account they made me the proposal to assist them in their work. They had an official document with them saying that they were charged with the locating, collecting and sending away of parentless children back to Latvia.
A human purpose such as this, of course, received the consent of the Krasnoyarsk teachers and other people who did educational work. Upon the realization of this action they also considered the advantage that, after the departure of the Latvian orphans, other children could take their places in the children's homes, also those, whose parents had been killed at war.
In order to put the exact circumstances more precisely, the members of the commission visited a number of regions, where deportees from Latvia lived. On one of these trips I accompanied Valya Anderson to the district of Nizhne-Ingash. What we then saw in Vyerkhniy Tabagashet can, even today, only be recalled to one's mind with a shiver. The scrofulous children were already unable to move, there eyes and lips were covered with scrabs, they looked absent-minded, with a vacant expression. They did not even show the slightest curiosity at the sight of the arriving visitors. The majority of the children suffered from rachitis. Almost all parents asked the members of the commission to send their children home to Latvia - either to live there with their realtives or acquaintances or to take them at least to an orphanage.
Measures had to be taken uregently to rescue the Latvian children from this human miser.
And then the commission decided at its own risk to evacuate all children till the age of 16, whose mothers hade given their consent and were ready to bid them farewell.
The children concerned were put on a name list, which had to be confirmed by the Administration of State Security. Did they know that the commission had gone beyond its power authority by not exclusively sending orphans to Latvia? I think they were aware of this fact. However, they evidently took into account this "illegal procedure". My sister was in one of the waggons, too, and my mother accompanied her. Among the children were former pupils from the far-away school in the taiga.
After the arrival in Riga, the quarantine measures and the official delivery of the necessary papers to the relatives, mother was assigned to a job as a teacher at the Srudalinsk school. On her way she tried topass through rural areas, in order to avoid being exposed to the inquisitive looks of two many people. But her efforts were all in vain. In 1950 my mother and sister were arrested, and in the following served her sentences in the famous Leningrad "Crosses" prison (ill-famed prison in Leningrad, the ground plan of which forms a cross; translator's note), as well as in the prisons of Kirov and Krasnoyarsk. After half a year's detention they were deported to the village of Yartsevo, Krasnoyarsk region.
This tragic lot was shared by almost all members of the commission. Their heroic deed was judged as a crime. And many of the children who were already teenagers or had even grown up were also unable to escape from their second exile to Siberia.
Mum died in Krasnoyarsk in 1981. My sister lives in Salaspils.
"Krasnoyarsk worker", Febr.17, 1990