Charlie

“Slavery! It sounds archaic and perhaps even silly, and this word, too, people dared pronounce only in their hidden thoughts. “Slavery — it sounds menacing and perhaps not altogether true,” writes Ināra Egle on John’s day 1989 in Padomju Jaunatne in connection with the unrest in Uzbekhia. “But there is no other name for the empire-generated voiding of human rights, the lack of will to live an ordinary life…” The life of the kolkhoznik resembled closely that of our forefathers, consisting of the ordeals of the serf, the only difference being electricity for lighting in place of burning splinters and death camps instead of the gallows, camps in which his life, for the time remaining to him, is utilized to “raise communism”. I wander. November”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“The key to the future of the world, is finding the optimistic stories and letting them be known.”
― Pete Seeger

“Home at last! After such a long absence. And again, I remembered that I no longer had a home. Now, when it was most needed. But”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“While waiting at the counter, in my mind I went through my relatives here in Rīga, who had not been touched either by the war, or the black storm of the new era, but my thoughts did not stop at any one as a close relative to whom I would want to go for a visit without misgivings, not even for an hour. I was warned by the many letters sent by those who had returned home that “such folk are ashamed of us”, “in their high positions, they fear being related to us.” The women released in Siberia had written: “they feel put upon if they have to make a bed for a lousy, released criminal who was arrested in 1941 at the age of two and exiled for life to Siberia”. “They feel uncomfortable seeing their utterly dissipated relatives.” All of us had been traumatized, and we had lost our very sense of human worth. It was better to keep an appropriate distance from relatives and from acquaintances, and not to burden them with oneself, one’s joy, or one’s sorrow. Around”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia