Wide Eyes by Marija Platace Futchs Fine

Author:Marija Platace Futchs Fine [Fine, Marija Platace Futchs]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781514436998
Publisher: Xlibris US
Published: 2016-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Bloom, bloom, oh rye ear

With nine branches

My brothers are building a barn

With nine compartments

Make what you make, my brothers

But build me a room

With three doors

Sun rises through one

And sets through another

I walk through the third

Myrrh wreath on my head

Solomeja

While Helēna, Leonora, and Kazimirs struggled to rebuild their lives after repatriating to Soviet Latvia, my mother remained in Germany along with sixty thousand other survivors of the German concentration camps.

They represented a tiny fraction of the total number of displaced persons, or twelve million. DP camps were in Germany, Austria, Italy, and other countries. One camp was even set up in North America, in Guanajuato, Mexico.5 The lives of millions of refugees went on for the better part of a decade in these holding centers.

My mother and I were among the 83,111 Baltics in British DP camps. Estonians were the smallest Baltic group, with 13,059, or fifteen percent. Lithuanians numbered 23,555, or twenty-three percent. The Latvians, the largest group, numbered 45,497, representing nearly fifty-seven percent of the overall total.6

Allied forces placed us into improvised shelters that ran the gamut, from former barracks, to summer camps for children, airports, hotels, castles, hospitals, private homes, and even partly destroyed structures. There were thousands of facilities, which Allies tried to name assembly centers. They wanted to avoid the hated term of camps associated with the despised concentration camps from which many of the survivors had come and were now refugees. But in the end, the term camp stuck.

Rendsburg DP Camp

My mother chose to stay in a German DP camp for the next eighteen months, reasons for which I can only form tentative explanations. Those reasons did not even come up in the standard exit interrogations she had with the Soviets at the time she decided to return to Latvia.

Health professionals who observed the behavior of women who—like my mother—lost a child in concentration camps, made some observations about their behavior and how they overcame their loss. Some case workers found that these women exhibited defeminization, a decline in the maternal instinct and an unconcern for their bodies. One UNRRA worker wrote,7

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