Charlie

“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

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

“But tis strange: And oftentimes, to win us to our harm, the Instruments of Darkness tell us truths, win us with honest trifles, to betray's in deepest consequence.”
― William Shakespeare, Macbeth