| Latvia: Year of Horror | Introduction |
Earth's juices were flowing into new shoots and buds. Spring's life strove to release its forces into summer's harvest.
Suddenly, in the spring of 1940, destruction opened its gates. The Latvian land was awash with poison. It was absorbed into the soil and saturated the air. Bloody vapours darkened the sun so that a newborn child would absorb it breast-feeding it with his mother's milk, a wife would lose the strength of her hands and her virtue, a man in his maturity would dry up and his honour and strength of spirit would become a rotten wood, unable to sprout or even support its own weight.
The hand of man wants to erect a monument to an extinguished life, and this life itself leaves footprints among the living. However, those who intend to destroy do so to the very end so that not even a stone will witness where and how great this destroyed life was. For where the roads of torture are washed with blood and ruins, not even one witness, whose blood was spilt, remains to testify.
Such has been the fate of the Latvian nation.
What form of depravity was able to hoard such poison and pour it over the Latvian land? Everyone attacking his victim from a hiding place is a villain. Anyone stabbing a living being in the back in the darkness of night must be called a murderer. However, there is no suitable name to describe the demonic power which left behind skeletons and ruins. Likewise, no name can be found for all that nightmarish existence which transends the limits of human conscience and understanding. For the horror, bloodlust and destruction which this atrocious power possessed, humanity had not sensed nor seen the like before. Martyrs and exiles are silent. The torture ends with death. The painful moans are heard in heaven, but the wrongs inflicted, the humiliation and shame, that cry from the mouths of the dead in their dark burial places will never be silenced. Their blood will forever yearn for retribution and earth itself, while hiding their remains, will not be silent, until justice, nature and God will have atoned for the pain, both spiritual and physical, suffered by the humiliated and disarmed Latvian nation in its hour of crisis and torment in 1940!
The ground opened up. It brought forth the victims with their undisguised horror and the depth of their hideous sufferings which the perpetrators of Latvia's year of horror had tried to hide. The lips of the dead are silent. They cannot move to speak of the abyss of inhumanity, beside which the Latvian nation stood, destined for annihilation.
The images and testimonies left by this sad era shall speak for themselves and the words spoken by them calling for justice shall never fade from the consciousness of the Latvian nation.
