GalleryWhy They Returned
The vicissitudes of the Second World War took Jan Hegmanis to Australia, where he worked on a sugar plantation and then at a Ford factory warehouse in Sydney.
In 1955 many of the Latvians living in Australia began to receive letters from home. Jan Hegmanis grew anxious to hear from his family. He wrote to his wife's relatives.
His wife answered, begging him to come home. She told him about life there and gave him news of their son, already in secondary school. Hegmanis eagerly searched for information about Latvia.
The Soviet newspapers and magazines he managed to lay hands on made him realise that everything in the anti-Soviet émigré press was a pack of lies. He firmly resolved to go back to Latvia. Not long ago his dream came true.
"You may live wherever you wish and work at whatever suits you," Hegmanis was told when he was given his Soviet passport.
"That was a pleasant surprise to me, for we had been told quite the opposite," says Hegmanis. "Tremendous changes have taken place in Latvia. And what is most wonderful, to my mind, is that there is no problem at all about finding the work you want."
Jan Muizneik returned to Latvia from West Germany in 1959. In Bielefeld, where he lived, Jan had heard the wildest tales about Soviet Latvia. The country was said to be starving and poverty-stricken and the majority of the Latvian population living in forced labour camps.
Rumour among the emigrants had it that anyone who returned home was immediately put into a labour camp. As to the letters from relatives, their praise of life in Soviet Latvia, it was said, was because they were afraid to write anything else.
"It's hard to recognise Riga after so many years," says Muizneik. "Now it is a large, modern city with lovely streets, parks and gardens and big shops where you can get whatever you want. I haven't been back long, so it still seems like a wonderful dream after what I went through in Germany. Only now do I understand what shocking lies my former bosses in West Germany spread about Soviet Latvia."
as part of the series "THE FIFTEEN SOVIET SOCIALIST REPUBLICS OF TODAY AND TOMMORROW."
We do not endorse the Soviet account of historical events or their circumstances contained therein as factual.
