Shadows on the Tundra E-Book

Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

• Herausgeber: Peirene Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

An extraordinary piece of international survival literature, joining the likes of Primo Levi and Anne Frank. In 1941, 14-year-old Dalia and her family are deported from their native Lithuania to a labour camp in Siberia. As the strongest member of her family she submits to twelve hours a day of manual labour. At the age of 21, she escapes the gulag and returns to Lithuania. She writes her memories on scraps of paper and buries them in the garden, fearing they might be discovered by the KGB. They are not found until 1991, four years after her death. This is the story Dalia buried. The immediacy of her writing bears witness not only to the suffering she endured but also the hope that sustained her. It is a Lithuanian tale that, like its author, beats the odds to survive. Why Peirene chose to publish this book: There is only one word to describe this book, extraordinary. It blew me away when I first read it in German translation. Dalia's account goes far beyond a memoir. This is an outstanding piece of literature which should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the Soviet repression. 'A distressing historic document and a literary work of great significance.' Neue Zürcher Zeitung 'An incredible force of language … the story of constant indignation.'JFrankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

Leseprobe

MEIKE ZIERVOGEL PEIRENE PRESS     

There is only one word to describe this book: extraordinary. It blew me away when I first read it in German translation. Dalia’s account goes far beyond a memoir. This is an outstanding piece of literature which should be read by anyone who wishes to understand the Soviet repression.

Contents

Title PageEpigraphMapIntroduction  Shadows on the Tundra  Afterword AuthorTranslatorCopyright

Introduction

On 14 June 1941 Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, a fourteen-year-old Lithuanian girl from Kaunas, was deported along with her mother and brother Juozas. After a journey lasting months and involving many stops, in August 1942 they – together with hundreds of other deportees – arrived on the island of Trofimovsk in the Arctic. Shortly before the onset of winter, they were forced to build a camp for themselves in exile.

Six years later, in 1948, Dalia was given leave to attend college in Yakutsk. Although Dalia’s mother was banned from accompanying her daughter, she nonetheless boarded the steamer unnoticed. However, during the journey their deception was discovered. The secret police confiscated Dalia’s papers and summarily sent her to the Khangalas coal mine, without letting her say goodbye to her mother. When production stopped at the mine, she was permitted to return to Yakutsk, where her mother was living. Knowing that she was close to death, Dalia’s mother wished to see her homeland again and to die in Lithuania.

In February 1949 both women fled illegally, without any papers, to Lithuania from Yakutia via Moscow. When the authorities issued a warrant for their arrest they were obliged to go into hiding with friends and relatives. Fearful of being discovered, the terminally ill mother and her daughter didn’t stay anywhere for long.

Such were the circumstances in which Dalia, by then twenty-two years old, under extreme pressure and suffering acute mental strain as a result of living a clandestine existence in hiding, began drafting her memoirs on loose sheets of paper as she moved from place to place. She recalled her initial years of exile as a fourteen- and fifteen-year-old, employing the present tense for her narrative. In the flow of recollections, however, times and places kept changing, often abruptly. Frequently she recounted events as if she were there, but sometimes we see her looking back at the past from her current hiding place. Her happy childhood in Kaunas and her nostalgia for that time are always present too. The memoirs end suddenly in 1942 or 1943.

Throughout the spring of 1950 her mother’s condition was desperate, and she died on 5 May 1950. Dalia dug a hole in the concrete floor of the cellar in her parents’ house in Perkūno alėja 60 in Kaunas, to give her mother a secret burial. Sensing that she was under observation, she stuffed her sheets of paper into a preserving jar and buried it in the garden. She entrusted her memoirs to the earth, and not a moment too soon, for in late May 1950 she was indeed arrested. Because she refused to cooperate she was sent back to Siberia, via countless prisons and camps in Kaunas, Vilnius, Moscow and Sverdlovsk.

It was not until 1956 that Dalia was permitted to return to Lithuania. She looked for the memoirs she had hidden in her parents’ garden, but failed to find them.

In Soviet Lithuania she worked as a doctor in a provincial hospital in Laukuva. The local authorities found the former deportee awkward and in 1974 she was banned from practising as a doctor. Dalia moved in with her close friend Aldona Šulskytė and started writing her memoirs again, this time in a shortened form. That version was disseminated underground and was copied and reproduced many times. By 1979 the memoirs had reached Moscow dissidents and later they made their way to the USA. But they only appeared in a magazine in Lithuania in 1988. Dalia had died of cancer the year before.

Then, in 1991, when Lithuania was free and independent once more, the preserving jar was discovered by chance when a peony was being moved in the garden. The papers were sent to the war museum in Kaunas, where they were conserved and copied. Both versions of Dalia’s memoirs appeared in 1997, under the title Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros (‘Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea’). Today the original manuscript of her memoirs from 1949–50 is in the National Museum in Vilnius and the text is compulsory reading in Lithuanian schools.

This translation is based on those memoirs written in 1949–50. They reflect Dalia’s experiences in exile more directly, emotionally and in greater detail than the later work.

The story of the manuscript mirrors the story of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė. Here sheets of paper have assumed a character of their own – unfaltering, steadfast and strong. Here something so fragile has become an indestructible legacy.

A note in the archive concerning the manuscript reads: ‘A total of 229 loose sheets. Recovered from the ground on 22 April 1991 (in Kaunas, Perkūno alėja 60). Written in pencil, ink on plain paper.’

Having had the privilege of meeting Dalia Grinkevičiūtė during the summer holidays at my aunt’s house in Laukuva, I made it my mission to ensure that her very personal yet timeless experiences should become accessible in other languages. I am so happy that Meike Ziervogel of Peirene Press has discovered this special book and that English-speaking readers will now be able to read it in this new translation by Delija Valiukenas.

VYTENĖ MUSCHICKtranslator of the German edition of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė’s book, Aber der Himmel – grandios

Dalia Grinkevičiŭtė as a student in Omsk, 1955.

Shadows on the Tundra

I’m touching something. It feels like cold iron. I’m lying on my back… How beautiful… the sunlight… and the shadow.

I am aware that a phase of my life has come to an end, a line drawn underneath it. Another is beginning, uncertain and ominous. Twenty-four people lie nearby. Asleep? Who knows? Each of them has their own thoughts. Each is leaving behind a life that ended yesterday. Each has a family, relatives, friends. They’re all saying goodbye to their loved ones. Suddenly, the train jolts. Something falls from the upper bunk. No one is asleep now. Silence. I dress hurriedly – I have to say goodbye to Kaunas. We are all at the windows. Everything is in the past now, gone for ever. One more jolt and the train lurches forward. I can see the steeples of the Carmelite church gleaming in the sun. It’s half past four. Kaunas is asleep. A train with sixty-three covered wagons glides silently into the vast unknown. Fifteen hundred Lithuanians are heading towards an uncertain future. Our eyes fill with tears. The children cry as if they understand – they stare silently at the receding city and the approaching fields. Look, children, have a good look and fix this image, this moment, in your memory for ever. I wonder how many pairs of eyes are taking in their native city for the last time…

‘I have a feeling I will never see Kaunas again,’ my mother says to me. Her words cut me like a knife. The fight of your life has begun, Dalia. Secondary school, childhood, fun, games, theatre, girlfriends – everything is in the past. You’re a grown-up now. You’re fourteen. You have a mother to look after, a father to replace. You have just taken your first step in the battle for life.

A tunnel. The train is moving at full speed now. The Nemunas. Petrašiūnai. Where’s Dad? Goodbye.

Vilnius. We’re at the freight station. Someone is shouting to a relative, a railway worker; he’s asking him to tell his mother, to say goodbye, to advise her to pack warm things. To hell with warm things. Advise her to run, to hide. Vilnius recedes. People line the tracks, watching, as though we’re being carried off to die. They raise their hands in blessing over us. The Poles are a pious people. Are we really being transported to our deaths?

Hell, no, not on your life. We will not die, we will not give the Devil the satisfaction. And damn the elements. We will live, we will survive. We will fight and we will triumph – hear that?

Naujoji Vilnia. Trains filled with men are lined up at the station. I walk the length of the sealed wagons and enquire about Dad.

No, no, no. The answer is always the same: we’re from Vilnius.

We are herded back into our train. The wagons are bolted shut and we begin to move. I had the opportunity to run away back at the station, and I did want to. There were piles of logs nearby, but I remembered that I had a mother who was helpless waiting for me on the train. I was fourteen going on twenty.

‘Border, border. We are approaching the border.’ The last of Lithuania – the last of her forests, her trees, her flowers.

There’s a crack in the door about five centimetres wide. I breathe in the smell of Lithuania’s fields. I don’t ever want to forget it. Someone starts to sing in one of the wagons – ‘How Beautiful Thou Art, Beloved Land of Our Fathers’. Soon the entire train joins in.

Now we are flying across the fields of Belarus. No visa required… Orsha, Minsk, Smolensk. I am thirsty. It is hot and they don’t give us much water.

At a station we all slip under the wagons to relieve ourselves. No one feels the least bit embarrassed. When the train next to us pulls out, the view is captivating. In the stations of Belarus we see passenger trains, mostly going to Lithuania. And why not? There will be lots of room soon. Bon voyage to the locusts!

Kirov. We pull in to the station in parade formation: the train from Kaunas is flanked on one side by the train from Riga, on the other by the train from Tallinn. Greetings, Baltic states! Conversations strike up between trains.

Two by two, we queue to collect lunch for our group. Somewhere behind me I see my history teacher. Suddenly – silence. Then a blast from the radio. War! War!

We glance at each other before hurrying back to our wagons with lunch and newspapers.

There is joy on the trains from the three Baltic capitals. Can we be turning round? Going home? But why would we? The front is already behind us. We’re also anxious. What is happening in Lithuania? Is there much devastation? Have any relatives been killed during the bombing? Our journey goes on. And on and on. Day five, day ten. We don’t eat everything we have; we give some bread to the local children with their outstretched hands and ravenous eyes, pleading in Russian, ‘Khleba, tyotenki…’ – ‘Bread, aunties…’ It was a refrain we started to hear as soon as we crossed the border and left Lithuania.

The Urals. Greetings, Mother Asia… Tired, dirty, pale, we sleep on top of each other. We have only one question and are interested in only one topic of conversation: where are they taking us? We had thought the Urals, but we’ve already passed them. Andriukaitis, formerly a merchant, and a practical man, is drying his ration of bread and trying to convince the rest of us that we’ll be buying it from him soon. A salesman by nature, he plies his trade even here: buying, selling, swindling. ‘You’ll be living in mud huts and lynching each other,’ he says, as he chews, his mouth full. As if that possibility applied only to us and not to him too.

Every serving of millet porridge that we get, he’s the only one to eat it. He says, ‘So don’t eat it, see if I care. You’ll regret it soon enough.’ There are whole buckets of the stuff. We pour it down the hole onto the tracks. But the wheeler-dealer Andriukaitis had spoken the truth, for we often remembered that porridge, and not that long afterwards either.

Day fifteen, day twenty. My head feels heavy, I am weak. Finally! We reach the finishing line. At each station, between three and five wagons are uncoupled. Western Siberia. Troschin Station. The doors to the covered wagons are slid open. ‘Vygruzhaytes bystreye!’ – ‘Out! At the double!’ No matter how often I hear the expression in later years – variously embellished with Russian swear words – my blood freezes. Where are we? What fate awaits us?

We are in a public square sitting next to our belongings and being sorted by destination. Stalin’s ‘disciples’ sidle up to the clusters of deportees and rummage through their possessions. It is pouring. Claps of thunder. Mothers cover their children, but everyone gets soaked.

Four hours later, the process comes to an end. An announcement is made: ‘Tak vot, vy budete zhit v sveklo-sovkhoze.’ – ‘Right, you people will be living on a collective beetroot farm.’

The nineteenth and twentieth wagons (with fifty deportees in all) are bound for the collective farm. Whenever roll call was taken on the train I found it unsettling to be addressed by number. I feel the same discomfort now when the Chekist, a guard from the secret police, shouts, ‘Number seventeen!’ Number seventeen? It takes several minutes to register, then I feel the blood rush to my face, my heart pound. Number seventeen from wagon nineteen – that is who I am! I’m glad Dad isn’t with us to hear it. It’s like being in chains. Each of us is called in turn. The swarthy Chekist with the steely eyes gives me a look that feels worse than a blow. It is the look of a slave merchant, assessing my muscles, calculating the amount of work that he can squeeze out of me. For the first time in my life, I feel like an object. No one seems to care that I’m not in school, studying as I should be. I stand, haggard and ashen. I harbour the slave’s terrible hatred and resentment. Turning my head, I notice Mother. She is standing a short distance away, watching me with an expression of pain. She is the first to react and immediately lowers her eyes, but I can see the tears on her cheeks. Her daughter and her son, their parents’ pride and joy, being sized up like work animals. We understood each other. It was an uncomfortable moment for both of us and we’ve never talked about it since.

We are housed in two huge barracks and work eighteen hours a day in the fields. No one complains, though it is hard at first. Our faces grow sunburned, our hands rough and calloused. We are paid almost nothing. Our supervisors never pass up an opportunity to taunt us; in their view, we’re criminals. The Ukrainians, who are also deportees, are warm-hearted. We don’t speak a word of Russian but somehow muddle through. We feed ourselves by bartering. Winter arrives. The barracks are as cold as outhouses. People move – some are resettled in Troitsky, others in Biysk, and the Ukrainians are resettled with other Ukrainians.

We all believe that we’ll be going home soon. No one thinks otherwise. The climate here is good, especially for people with tuberculosis. My friend Irena B., who’s my age, was being treated for a collapsed lung in Lithuania, but here she has filled out like a sweet bun. The winter is cold but dry. It doesn’t linger. Spring is on the way and we will be planting vegetable gardens soon.

Dalia’s mother Pranė Grinkevičienė (1898–1950) in Kaunas.