Siberian Exile by Julija Sukys

Author:Julija Sukys [Sukys, Julija]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BIO026000 Biography & Autobiography / Personal Memoirs
ISBN: 978-1-4962-0314-4
Publisher: UNP - Nebraska
Published: 2017-08-09T04:00:00+00:00

21

For two weeks, the exiles’ train rolled past shabby settlements and across scrubland until it crossed the Ural Mountains, the gateway to Siberia. From their second-story perches, the teenagers marveled at the trains bursting with soldiers and munitions that moved past them as their locomotive stopped to give way. They helped Father Joseph up to a window so he could ask a passing Russian worker what was happening. Voina (war) was the answer.

Nazi Germany had invaded the Soviet Union and, with it, Lithuania. The Luftwaffe had bombed the latter’s capital, Vilnius, and the Wehrmacht had taken the country. From deep inside the car’s throng, a woman shouted for joy at the news.

“We’re saved,” said Ona, helping the priest set his feet back down on the car’s floor. “The army will need every train, and they’ll dump us out on the tundra. We’ll walk home.”

But the train didn’t stop. It pushed farther and farther east and then suddenly dipped south, until it finally came to a halt.

The high window framed the windblown steppes of the Altai, a region suffering through a third consecutive year of drought. Livestock milled in the distance. Skinny as fence posts, what looked to be goats revealed themselves, upon closer inspection, to be malnourished cows. With no timber to burn, the people who lived off this land made fuel by mixing together manure and straw and tamping them down.

The village of Kupina was a collection of mud huts located a little over halfway between Kaunas and Tomsk. It was peopled with Ukrainians exiled to one of thousands of special settlements starting in 1932, when Stalin deported three hundred thousand people from Ukraine to Siberia and then systematically starved the millions left behind to death.

Authorities moved exiles around Siberia, from settlement to settlement, depending on what work was to be done and on the whims of the regime. Some deportees speculated that these transfers were intended to heighten their sense of insecurity. Those taken to the Far North, near the Arctic Circle, landed on wild terrain without shelter or building materials. Though it was still midsummer, cold winds blew. New arrivals huddled under upturned boats and inside tents made of American flour sacks while they waited for lumber to arrive. Farther south along the shore, others built makeshift barracks of logs pulled from rivers. They sealed the gaps between them with mud, fashioned bricks for clay ovens by hand, and improvised thatched roofs by laying birch bark on manure. Where there were hills, exiles burrowed and created turf houses.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.