Voices of import

By the age of eight Vaira Vike-Freiberga had learnt that life was both ‘very strange and very unfair’. Her baby sister had died from pneumonia the previous year because of the harsh conditions of life in a refugee camp in Germany (this was late 1944 and her family had fled their native Latvia for fear of the communists). Her mother soon had another child but when Vaira went to see her new brother in hospital she observed the young woman in the next-door bed turning her face to the wall against her wailing baby, product of a gang-rape by Russian soldiers.

The nurses had given this unwanted baby girl the same name as Vaira’s much-mourned sister. Vaira was struck by the paradox, she tells Lyse Doucet in the first of a new series of interviews with women who have achieved remarkable things, Her Story Made History, on Radio 4 (produced by Ben Carter).