Stolen youth, stolen homeland

‘No testimony from this time must ever be forgotten,’ the great Lithuanian poet Tomas Venclova says in his afterword to Dalia Grinkeviciute’s memoir. The author was 14 in 1941, when the Soviets deported her with her mother and brother from their native Kaunas, Lithuania’s second largest city. In 1949, the women escaped from Siberia and went into hiding. Grinkeviciute began writing about her ordeal, but soon, facing another arrest, she buried the unfinished manuscript in a garden. More prisons and camps followed before she eventually returned home in 1956. Found in 1991 after her death, the memoir was published and became part of the school curriculum in Lithuania.

The book starts with an arduous journey through a country Grinkeviciute and her fellow deportees don’t see as theirs (the USSR annexed Lithuania in 1940, and mass deportations began shortly before the German invasion the following year). They are brought to Siberia and left on an island with no vegetation, where they have to build a fish processing factory — but first, a place for themselves to live.