“The first mass arrests were executed June 14-15, 1941, and continued
until war started between Soviet Russia and Germany on June 22. The
people had from half to one hour to pack the allowed household articles…
The deportees came from all walks of life and represented all ages, no
excluding infants, pregnant women, the sick or the very old. According
to data collected by the Lithuanian Red Cross, 34,260 person were
deported during the ‘black days of June’…
“The arrested were taken from their homes to railroad stations and
loaded into freight cars, 50-60 persons to a car, although. . .
instructions specified only 25 persons . . . Men were separated from
their wives and in many instances children from their mothers. The
people, locked in the cars lacking air, without food and water, had to
wait several days until all the arrested were entrained. The long
journey into the depths of Russia killed many of the weal and sick.
Lithuanian deportees were transported to northern Russia, western and
eastern Siberia, Kazakhstan, and the Soviet Far East. Most of the
deportees were confined in forced labor camps.
“The same scheme of mass deportation… was resumed during the second
Soviet occupation from 1944….”
From Encyclopedia Lituanica
It is estimated that by 1953, one in five Lithuanians had been deported
- a total of about 4000,000.
Introduction
The following article appeared in 1979 in the second volume of the
Russian publication Pamiat ( Memory ). Material for this publication is
collected by Russian dissidents in the Soviet Union and later sent to
the West.
All we know about the author of this article, Dalia Grinkevicius, a
former physician in the Village of Laukuva, is what she herself has told
us in the article, and what the publication supplies in its
introduction. We have not been able to find her name in Lithuanian
underground publications.
Although in recent years there has been no small number of testimonials
by witnesses about the suffering of Lithuanian exiled to Siberia, this
brief article by Dalia Grinkevicius probably surpasses all others in
detail and horror.
On June 14th, 1941, my father, Juozas Grinkevicius, was arrested. He
had worked in the Lithuanian State Bank until 1940, when he had become a
high-school mathematics teacher. He was arrested because he had
belonged to the Lithuanian Nationalist Party until 1940.
That same night they also arrested my mother, my seventeen-year-old
brother and me. I was fourteen years old. They told us that we were
being exiled for life to Siberia. My father was sent to the Sverdlovsk
District - the Gari Concentration Camp. By special judgment of the
court, he was sentenced to ten years’ hard labor; on October 10, 1948,
he died from the unbearable work and starvation. In his last letter he
wrote to us, “I am dying of hunger.”
In 1942, the rest of our family, along with four hundred other women and
children, all exiled from Lithuania, were brought to an uninhabited
island in northern Yakutia inside the Arctic Circle at the point where
the Lena River flows into the Laptev Sea. This island bore no trace of
man: no houses, no burrows, no tents - just the eternally frozen tundra,
with a small board hammered into the ground to tell us that this island
was called Trofimovsk. The guards ordered us to unload boards and
bricks out of the barge. Then the steamboat pulling the barge hurried
off, because the Arctic winter was near.
We were left on this
uninhabited island without any roof over our heads, without warm
clothes, without food. The few men and older boys who were still more
or less capable of working and who wanted to build barracks for us, were
all seized and sent to nearby islands to catch fish for the state. Then
we, the women and children, hurriedly began to build barracks. We laid
down a row of bricks and covered it with a layer of moss which we had
pulled with our bare hands from the permafrost. The barracks had no
roofs, just plank ceilings through which the blizzards would blow so
much snow that people lying on their bunks turned completely white. A
space 50 cm wide was allotted for each person - a big ice grave! The
ceilings were ice, the walls were ice, the floor was ice. There was no
firewood because no trees grew in the tundra - no bushes, not even any
grass, just a thin layer of moss on the permafrost.
When the Arctic night set in, people began to die, one after another,
from hunger, scurvy and cold. At the beginning almost all of them could
have been saved. About 120-15- km. away, on the islands of Tumata,
Bobrovsk and Sasylach there were native Evenk fishing co-operatives.
They had extra supplies of fish and enough dog sleds. They wanted to
bring all of us to their tents and the burrows they had dug in the
ground for the winter. But our guards would not let them do that and so
condemned us to death.
“…Deportations from the Baltic states had been planned in Moscow while
the countries were still free but already designated a subjects to be
occupied…. Preparation for mass deportation, called ‘purging of
Lithuania’, was initiated soon after the illegal incorporation of
Lithuania into the Soviet Union on August 3, 1940…
