Camps, the common thread binding together Latvians far from their homeland:
- those deported in Siberian settlement and Gulag forced labor camps,
- Latvia Legionnaires in POW camps
- refugees in Displaced Persons ("DP") camps
June 14, 1941 marked only the first of multiple mass deportations of the innocent. None were spared, men, women, children, infants taken away after a knocking on the door in the early morning hours.
For the conscripted Latvian Legion1, who had hoped to use the Germans to thwart the Russian return and to then drive the Germans out in a replay of Latvia's Brīvības Cīņas (War of Independence), the end of the war brought a fresh gauntlet of perils.
Fleeing the Soviet return meant sailing down the Baltic, typically Danzig (Gdansk), or across to Sweden. Both voyages were fraught with danger: Soviets bombarded and sank refugee transports, and many of the small boats attempting to cross the Baltic fell victim to its storms.
Nor was one safe in the hands of the West. Sweden extradited Legionnaires back to the USSR where they were shot or exiled to labor camps in the Gulag as traitors. In a POW camp in Belgium, guards shot Legionnaires for target practice. From our own family histories, a nurse poisoned Peters' godparents' daughter in the hospital because her father's, Atis', name was "Otto." Silvija's father—then a gangly teenager—had his throat slit at the hands of American GIs and was left to die because he answered his name was "Heinrick." Many write to us that their parents or grandparents were always reluctant to discuss their time in the DP camps. This was why, at least for our families—these are painful memories retold no more than once or twice, if ever.
Yet, Latvians under all of these circumstances took it upon themselves to preserve and nurture that which they were. They preserved their folk traditions, fashioning handicrafts—even an entire loom—out of scraps; they published daily newspapers, periodicals, and paperbacks of their literature; they ran their own medical facilities, schools, even universities.
We who "grew up" Latvian but born in another country will never truly know or understand the circumstances or voyage that brought us there or that scattered our families to the winds. We can only honor those before us, to portray those times through the stories they told and the memories held in the artifacts they created and saved for future generations.
- Keeping culture alive
- DP Refugees
- Deported to Siberia
- Latvian Legion POWs
1 | The Latvian Legion was formed in 1943, after the Holocaust in Eastern Europe. Not a single individual has been accused of a war crime while in service of the Legion. Some portion—300 per Nuremberg documents—of Arajs collaborators, who numbered 300-500 at the height of the Holocaust and on the order of 1,500 during later anti-partisan actions—did subsequently make it into the ranks of the Legion. Their presence is routinely used to denounce the whole—early estimates are 57,000, later ones as many as 100,000, at its peak. The Legion were not "convicted at Nuremburg" as Russia regularly accuses and even reputable scholars contend. Quite the opposite, they were stationed as as Allied guards. |