Charlie

“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

“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

“To here in Siberia, we were brought without tickets, stuffed into cattle cars like livestock. We were given water and at two-day intervals, warm food. We came here in convoys of one hundred cars in each, and the journey lasted three weeks. From the thirty people in my barred car, twelve remained in cemeteries in Siberia. On my return sixteen years later, I rode as the ghost of a human being, who has waded through the black abyss of suffering, in the hope of a rebirth into a human being. My”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia