Irena Blekys

Thoughts on the 50th Anniversary of the Deportations

Irena Blekys is a member of the Board of Directors of the Lithuanian-American Community Inc., and an officer of the LAC, Inc., Washington State Chapter. This article appeared in the TULPĖ TIMES, Vol. 19, No. 2, May, 1999 — the Washington Chapter publication.

This year marks the 50th anniversary of the largest deportation of Baltic people to Siberia. By a conservative estimate, 200,000 to 456,000 Balts were forcibly removed from their homelands in 1949.

This deportation coincided with the height of the partisan warfare going on in Lithuania, and the peak of collectivization of the countryside. When Lithuania was reoccupied by the Soviets, the massive deportations started on June 14 and 15th of 1941, and then interrupted by the German invasion, started up again in 1945 and continued each year up to 1952. By then about nine percent of the native population of the Baltics had been deported.

The Soviets were firmly entrenched in the larger towns of Lithuania and were waging a battle to break the resistance of the countryside. Each territorial unit was given a quota of people to be deported, and each local commission of communist party members, KGB, and Soviets prepared a list.

To keep people in terror, deportations were unannounced and carried out on one or two consecutive days. If people on the list were away from home that day, then their neighbors could very likely be seized to take their place so that the quota would be filled. While there were increasing numbers of Lithuanians being executed between 1945 and 1949 for struggling against the Soviets, the number beginning to side with the Soviets was also rising. For instance, the ranks of communist youth, ‘komjaunuoliai’, increased from 3,800 in 1945 to 34,000 by 1950. Some deportees faced their own neighbors who were helping to round up those to be forcibly removed. Most of the deportees were not expected to live; so, those who were enforcing the deportation orders took their possessions.

Deportation was a highly efficient process for torturing people to death. It required little active effort on the part of those responsible. If you survived the mental trauma of being taken away and seeing family members separated and herded into cattle cars to travel to unknown destinations, then the years of inhuman work loads with little food or adequate clothing could be ensured of killing you. Survivors who wrote memoirs of their experience describe vast expanses littered with the graves and bones of Lithuanian deportees from the snowy Urals to the Arctic shore, from Kamchatka to the Altai mountain gorges, across Kazakhstan steppes and the Baikal taiga, to the banks of the Lena and Yenisey rivers.

Today the internment camps no longer exist. There is no Auschwitz where tours can be given to show the inhumanity of the Soviet Gulag. The fences and watchtowers have been dismantled and only the survivors who have returned to gather the bones of their family members or to erect memorials for those left behind on this road of Golgotha can find these places of internment. No visual reminders exist except for those few who have attempted to exorcise their ghosts by painting. (A moving series of paintings of the Gulag experience can be found on the web at www.jamestown.org/getman.)

So it is hard to remind people of the Baltics and the world of the moral debt we owe to those who were repressed. Likewise the imagination of the West has resisted rather than welcomed the stories of Soviet genocide since we all were complicit so long with a system that had offered salvation through class struggle. But what remain are the stories, the poems, and the songs of deportation. That is our history and our literature of the 20th century. It deserves to be translated and passed on to all who pride themselves as Lithuanians.