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

“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

“Never be afraid to raise your voice for honesty and truth and compassion against injustice and lying and greed. If people all over the world...would do this, it would change the earth.”
― William Faulkner

“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