Charlie

“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

“Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
There's a battle outside ragin'.
It'll soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'.”
― Bob Dylan , Chronicles, Volume One

“All at once, I felt the homeland as so very much mine, so close, so warm, so dear. Was it really necessary to be away for so long in order to truly understand how dear one’s homeland is? However,”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“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