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kirsty_reads's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
informative
inspiring
reflective
sad
medium-paced
4.0
This is a moving and harrowing read. I had previously only read about Soviet labour camps in fiction novels where the writing tends to set many Soviet camps in a similar vein to Nazi concentration camps. Whilst there may be truth in the comparison, this factual account highlighted the disregard for human life in a way I haven’t read before by showing that placing people in Arctic land where living conditions are impossible was another form of labour camps.
I would recommend researching the surrounding context of how this book was written as it is written from diary entries structurally it was difficult to follow in places. However, this is a natural reflection of the authors circumstances and these entries were found buried underground after her death.
There are archives and museums dedicated to retrieving and recording Eastern European accounts of Soviet labour camps. It is difficult to read and comprehend how these victims were released but into a system of continued oppression where their truths were never able to be spoken. Many wrote and buried their accounts perhaps hoping we could learn about them in the future or to provide them some form of closure they couldn’t otherwise achieve.
This is a period in history that doesn’t get the recognition it needs. I will be doing more to access the stories that have been found and shared to educate myself.
I would recommend researching the surrounding context of how this book was written as it is written from diary entries structurally it was difficult to follow in places. However, this is a natural reflection of the authors circumstances and these entries were found buried underground after her death.
There are archives and museums dedicated to retrieving and recording Eastern European accounts of Soviet labour camps. It is difficult to read and comprehend how these victims were released but into a system of continued oppression where their truths were never able to be spoken. Many wrote and buried their accounts perhaps hoping we could learn about them in the future or to provide them some form of closure they couldn’t otherwise achieve.
This is a period in history that doesn’t get the recognition it needs. I will be doing more to access the stories that have been found and shared to educate myself.
silverliningsandpages's review against another edition
5.0
Well, if you’re looking for a book about perseverance and fierce optimism, it is this survival memoir, which has been compared with the writing of Anne Frank and Primo Levi.
.
In 1941, teenager Dalia and her family are deported from Lithuania to a labour camp in Siberia. She is the strongest in her family and labours 16 hours a day. Aged 21, she escapes the Gulag and returns to her homeland. She keeps her memories on scraps of paper and buries them in a glass jar in the garden so that they are hidden from the KGB. They’re discovered in 1991, four years after her death.
.
“You have just taken your first step in the battle for life.”
This account is extraordinary in how immediate and vital the writing is. The conditions in which these poor people had to exist were deeply harrowing and they were utterly brutalised. The descriptions of this icy hell and bleak assistance are very vivid and the suffering relentless. And yet the hope and resilience of Dalia are remarkable:
“During the days that followed, a kind of tenacity began to take shape as part of my character. I became stubborn. I felt a growing desire to confront life, to grapple with it, to prevail. I was convinced of my survival.”
.
“We are all optimists after all. I’m also one of those who imagine themselves immune to death and prison”
.
“I feel myself getting stronger, more determined; my desire to live, to fight, to endure, intensifies.”
.
“I want to live, to live, to be alive, to return to life, damn it.”
.
.
I’m very glad I read this, but hugely relieved to finish it because the suffering depicted was relentless. Hugely compelling though and I’m counting all my blessings.
.
Thank you @peirenepress and @tandemcollectiveuk for sending me this for the IWD readalong with @the_wistful_reader (check her excellent review)
.
In 1941, teenager Dalia and her family are deported from Lithuania to a labour camp in Siberia. She is the strongest in her family and labours 16 hours a day. Aged 21, she escapes the Gulag and returns to her homeland. She keeps her memories on scraps of paper and buries them in a glass jar in the garden so that they are hidden from the KGB. They’re discovered in 1991, four years after her death.
.
“You have just taken your first step in the battle for life.”
This account is extraordinary in how immediate and vital the writing is. The conditions in which these poor people had to exist were deeply harrowing and they were utterly brutalised. The descriptions of this icy hell and bleak assistance are very vivid and the suffering relentless. And yet the hope and resilience of Dalia are remarkable:
“During the days that followed, a kind of tenacity began to take shape as part of my character. I became stubborn. I felt a growing desire to confront life, to grapple with it, to prevail. I was convinced of my survival.”
.
“We are all optimists after all. I’m also one of those who imagine themselves immune to death and prison”
.
“I feel myself getting stronger, more determined; my desire to live, to fight, to endure, intensifies.”
.
“I want to live, to live, to be alive, to return to life, damn it.”
.
.
I’m very glad I read this, but hugely relieved to finish it because the suffering depicted was relentless. Hugely compelling though and I’m counting all my blessings.
.
Thank you @peirenepress and @tandemcollectiveuk for sending me this for the IWD readalong with @the_wistful_reader (check her excellent review)
broughtyoubooks's review against another edition
5.0
Dalia's reflections on her time in the labour camp offer a startling clarity to the reader; most of the time her tone is matter-of-fact, without being blunt or abrasive. Those who show compassion or strength of character earn her admiration and gratefulness. She adds her own thoughts to camp-yard gossip, though often takes a 'such is life' approach to each small scandal (and most things in general) and is happy for those who gain something through their captors, as long as it is gained without detriment to others.
The outlook is dark for the majority of the novel, and understandably so, but the writing offers more clarity than the few other writers that I have read on war-time subjects.
The outlook is dark for the majority of the novel, and understandably so, but the writing offers more clarity than the few other writers that I have read on war-time subjects.
arirang's review against another edition
3.0
“I have a feeling I will never see Kaunus again,” my mother says to me. Her words cut me like a knife. The fight of your life has begun, Dalia. Secondary school, childhood, fun, games, theatre, girlfriends - everything is in the past. You’re a grown-up now. You’re fourteen. You have a mother to look after, a father to replace. You have just taken the first step on the battle for life.
Shadows on the Tundra is published by the excellent Peirene Press:
On 14 June 1941, 14 year old Dalia Grinkevičiūtė her mother and brother were deported from Lithuania as part of a Stalinist purge of the Lithunian intelligentsia. After a lengthy, and for many deadly, journey, in August 1942 they and hundreds of others reached their final destination, in the Laptev Sea in the Siberian Arctic Ocean, where they had to build their own Gulag work camp, largely employed to process fish caught from the freezing seas.
This book is Grinkevičiūtė’s own non-fictional memoir of period of her time there until October 1943, when the next harsh winter was about to begin.
The story of how the book came to be published would make a good novel in itself.
In 1948, unsuccessfully, and then again in 1949 Grinkevičiūtė escaped from exile with her mother and returned to their Lithuania homeland, to fulfil her dying mother’s wish.
While in hiding from the authorities in 1949-50, she wrote these memoirs and after her mother died in 1950, buried them in her family garden. She was arrested shortly after and only returned from prison in 1956, but was unable to find the buried manuscript.
In the mid 1970s Grinkevičiūtė wrote a more condensed version of her memoirs, which was circulated illicitly in Lithuania and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. She died in 1987.
In 1991, and after Lithuania gained independence, the original manuscript from 1950 was found, quite by accident, and in 1997 both version of her memoirs were published posthumously in the same volume.
This version, brought to the attention of Peirene by the German translator Vytene Mushick, is an English rendition of only the 1950 version as, per Muschick “They reflect Dalia’s experiences in exile more directly, emotionally and in greater detail than the later work.” The English translation is by Delija Valiakenas whose own parents fled on 1944 to escape the Russian occupation and emigrated to the US.
Shadows on the Tundra deserves to take its place alongside other classic accounts of the gulags (most obviously [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427731744s/17125.jpg|838042]) and indeed other "international survival literature" (the publisher's term) such as that by [a:Primo Levi|4187|Primo Levi|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1397346875p2/4187.jpg] and, given the age of the protagonist, [a:Anne Frank|3720|Anne Frank|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343271406p2/3720.jpg], althoug as the opening quote suggests Dalia's childhood ends the day the book starts.
Her tale is mainly told in the present tense, lending the recollections a more immediate air of lived experience and (deliberate) lack of later perspective (by contrast say with Primo Levi's reflections), although she does occasionally lapse into past tense reflection.
Although one reads these memoirs knowing that the author survived her experience, and (again providing a contrast to Levi’s guilt at surviving) Dalia is fiercely determined to survive, and takes a pride in this determination.
The Arctic setting of the book is ostensibly beautiful but the cold is literally deadly and the surroundings of the camp anything but pleasant:
Yet what splendour above. The Northern Lights are a magnificent web of colour. We are surrounded by grandeur: the immense tundra, as ruthless and infinite as the sea; the vast Lena estuary backed up with ice; the colossal 100-metre-pillar caves on the shores of Stolby; and the aurora borealis. Against a background of such majesty, we are the pitiful things here - starved and infested liked dogs, and nearly done in, rotting in our befouled an stinking ice caves.
Indeed the book is most powerful on how the exiles are so rapidly dehumanised, how distant their normal day-to-day live bakc in Lithuania rapidly becomes:
So here we are - creatures you used to think of themselves as human, who laughed, flirted and call friends to visit, who planned summer holidays after exhausting winters of work in the city, who fumed because the tailor had botched an order or a two-bedroom apartment seemed too small. All are silent. But they are no longer here. The people they used to be have long gone. They died on 14 June ... only three categories of people remain: the corpses, the soon-to-be corpses and the dying who might survive. These survivors will bear witness to the horrific trials they have undergone. But by then each will have become someone else.
Although for Dalia it is these very memories, however distant and painful, that give her the desire to survive:
I’m afraid of thoughts that sting and bite. Images from the past can be more painful than a branding iron. But they’ve also done me a favour. They’ve ignited a furious desire to live, to persevere, to engage in the struggle for life, even of what remains to be endured turns out to be a hundred times worse. I want to live, to live, to be alive, to return to life, damn it.
The exiles soon develop an economy of their own, one largely developed around stealing, often from each other but this is not universal, but more universally from the supplies of the command economy in which they are employed. In one of the relatively infrequent parts of the narration where Daria allows her older post-camp self to reflect, she recounts a time when she witnessed and commented on a particularly outrageous piece of pilfering, her fellow exile:looked at me as if I had lost my mind and said, ‘U gosudarstva karman shiroky, ne bespokoysa.’ - ‘The state’s pockets are deep, don’t worry about it.’
In time I came to realise that this was the thinking of most Soviet citizens. The only difference between them was what they took. But everyone pilfered, stole, helped themselves to whatever they could get their hands on.
Another theme that runs underneath the surface of the narration is nationalism. The whole point of the exile of the intelligensia of the satellite Soviet states was to take-away national identity, but in practice it had the opposite effect and Dalia doesn't censor (indeed at times seems proud) of the nationalistic feelings she has in response:
It is here ... that I learned how to hate. And i thirsted for revenge against everyone and everything that demeans and brutalises other human beings.
Overall a powerful and necessary account, although certainly not a pleasant read. And while the history perhaps justifies the presentation of the original manuscript, the large cast of fellow exiles can be rather hard to follow (including emotionally) at times. It would also have been interesting to publish the 1970s version of the memoir, as in the original Lithuanian version, alongside the 1950s original, partly as a shorter account might have been more focused and partly to see how time and maturity had changed the way the author presented the events.
3.5 stars
Shadows on the Tundra is published by the excellent Peirene Press:
Peirene Press takes its name from a Greek nymph who turned into a water spring. The poets of Corinth discovered the Peirene source and, for centuries, they drank this water to receive inspiration.The idea of metamorphosis fits the art of translation beautifully. To turn a foreign book into an enjoyable English read involves careful attention to detail.Shadows on the Tundra is the second in their 2018 Home in Exile series ("How to find a home within oneself when the outside home no longer exists.") after [b:Soviet Milk|37554380|Soviet Milk|Nora Ikstena|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1513603629s/37554380.jpg|47304124].
Peirene specializes in contemporary European novellas and short novels in English translation. All our books are best-sellers and/or award-winners in their own countries. We only publish books of less than 200 pages that can be read in the same time it takes to watch a film.
We curate our international fiction according to themes. Each year Peirene publishes a new series – three books that belong together in terms of style and/or content.
On 14 June 1941, 14 year old Dalia Grinkevičiūtė her mother and brother were deported from Lithuania as part of a Stalinist purge of the Lithunian intelligentsia. After a lengthy, and for many deadly, journey, in August 1942 they and hundreds of others reached their final destination, in the Laptev Sea in the Siberian Arctic Ocean, where they had to build their own Gulag work camp, largely employed to process fish caught from the freezing seas.
This book is Grinkevičiūtė’s own non-fictional memoir of period of her time there until October 1943, when the next harsh winter was about to begin.
The story of how the book came to be published would make a good novel in itself.
In 1948, unsuccessfully, and then again in 1949 Grinkevičiūtė escaped from exile with her mother and returned to their Lithuania homeland, to fulfil her dying mother’s wish.
While in hiding from the authorities in 1949-50, she wrote these memoirs and after her mother died in 1950, buried them in her family garden. She was arrested shortly after and only returned from prison in 1956, but was unable to find the buried manuscript.
In the mid 1970s Grinkevičiūtė wrote a more condensed version of her memoirs, which was circulated illicitly in Lithuania and elsewhere in the Soviet Union. She died in 1987.
In 1991, and after Lithuania gained independence, the original manuscript from 1950 was found, quite by accident, and in 1997 both version of her memoirs were published posthumously in the same volume.
This version, brought to the attention of Peirene by the German translator Vytene Mushick, is an English rendition of only the 1950 version as, per Muschick “They reflect Dalia’s experiences in exile more directly, emotionally and in greater detail than the later work.” The English translation is by Delija Valiakenas whose own parents fled on 1944 to escape the Russian occupation and emigrated to the US.
Shadows on the Tundra deserves to take its place alongside other classic accounts of the gulags (most obviously [b:One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|17125|One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich|Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1427731744s/17125.jpg|838042]) and indeed other "international survival literature" (the publisher's term) such as that by [a:Primo Levi|4187|Primo Levi|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1397346875p2/4187.jpg] and, given the age of the protagonist, [a:Anne Frank|3720|Anne Frank|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1343271406p2/3720.jpg], althoug as the opening quote suggests Dalia's childhood ends the day the book starts.
Her tale is mainly told in the present tense, lending the recollections a more immediate air of lived experience and (deliberate) lack of later perspective (by contrast say with Primo Levi's reflections), although she does occasionally lapse into past tense reflection.
Although one reads these memoirs knowing that the author survived her experience, and (again providing a contrast to Levi’s guilt at surviving) Dalia is fiercely determined to survive, and takes a pride in this determination.
The Arctic setting of the book is ostensibly beautiful but the cold is literally deadly and the surroundings of the camp anything but pleasant:
Yet what splendour above. The Northern Lights are a magnificent web of colour. We are surrounded by grandeur: the immense tundra, as ruthless and infinite as the sea; the vast Lena estuary backed up with ice; the colossal 100-metre-pillar caves on the shores of Stolby; and the aurora borealis. Against a background of such majesty, we are the pitiful things here - starved and infested liked dogs, and nearly done in, rotting in our befouled an stinking ice caves.
Indeed the book is most powerful on how the exiles are so rapidly dehumanised, how distant their normal day-to-day live bakc in Lithuania rapidly becomes:
So here we are - creatures you used to think of themselves as human, who laughed, flirted and call friends to visit, who planned summer holidays after exhausting winters of work in the city, who fumed because the tailor had botched an order or a two-bedroom apartment seemed too small. All are silent. But they are no longer here. The people they used to be have long gone. They died on 14 June ... only three categories of people remain: the corpses, the soon-to-be corpses and the dying who might survive. These survivors will bear witness to the horrific trials they have undergone. But by then each will have become someone else.
Although for Dalia it is these very memories, however distant and painful, that give her the desire to survive:
I’m afraid of thoughts that sting and bite. Images from the past can be more painful than a branding iron. But they’ve also done me a favour. They’ve ignited a furious desire to live, to persevere, to engage in the struggle for life, even of what remains to be endured turns out to be a hundred times worse. I want to live, to live, to be alive, to return to life, damn it.
The exiles soon develop an economy of their own, one largely developed around stealing, often from each other but this is not universal, but more universally from the supplies of the command economy in which they are employed. In one of the relatively infrequent parts of the narration where Daria allows her older post-camp self to reflect, she recounts a time when she witnessed and commented on a particularly outrageous piece of pilfering, her fellow exile:looked at me as if I had lost my mind and said, ‘U gosudarstva karman shiroky, ne bespokoysa.’ - ‘The state’s pockets are deep, don’t worry about it.’
In time I came to realise that this was the thinking of most Soviet citizens. The only difference between them was what they took. But everyone pilfered, stole, helped themselves to whatever they could get their hands on.
Another theme that runs underneath the surface of the narration is nationalism. The whole point of the exile of the intelligensia of the satellite Soviet states was to take-away national identity, but in practice it had the opposite effect and Dalia doesn't censor (indeed at times seems proud) of the nationalistic feelings she has in response:
It is here ... that I learned how to hate. And i thirsted for revenge against everyone and everything that demeans and brutalises other human beings.
Overall a powerful and necessary account, although certainly not a pleasant read. And while the history perhaps justifies the presentation of the original manuscript, the large cast of fellow exiles can be rather hard to follow (including emotionally) at times. It would also have been interesting to publish the 1970s version of the memoir, as in the original Lithuanian version, alongside the 1950s original, partly as a shorter account might have been more focused and partly to see how time and maturity had changed the way the author presented the events.
3.5 stars
triin's review against another edition
5.0
I’m the first to write a review of this book!
It’s devastating. I can’t remember reading anything as horrible before. I didn’t want to read it but couldn’t stop and finished 200 pages in 24 hours.
It’s devastating. I can’t remember reading anything as horrible before. I didn’t want to read it but couldn’t stop and finished 200 pages in 24 hours.
jackielaw's review against another edition
4.0
Shadows on the Tundra, by Dalia Grinkevičiutė (translated by Delija Valiukenas), is a memoir of the young author’s deportation, along with her mother and seventeen year old brother, from their comfortable home in Kaunas, the then capital of Lithuania, to a Gulag in Siberia. At the time Dalia was fourteen years old but to earn food for her family was required to work sixteen hour days of gruelling manual labour alongside adults. The memoir was written following her escape aged twenty-two, the pages buried in the garden of her Kaunas home before she was arrested and deported again. The papers were discovered quite by chance many years later, after Lithuania had once again attained independence. They were published in 1997, four years after the author’s death. They provide an account of life during Dalia’s terrible journey and her first year in the Gulag. The memoir has an immediacy often lost when writers rely on long held memories. It is a devastating depiction of the dehumanising of a people.
On June 14, 1941 at three o’clock in the morning, following orders from Moscow, mass arrests and deportations began simultaneously in all of the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Juozas Grinkevičius, the head of the Lithuanian Bank’s currency commission and a mathematics teacher at the gymnasium, was taken to a concentration camp in the northern Urals where he died from starvation in October 1943. The extermination of his family had also been planned.
This book, his daughter Dalia’s account of her experiences, opens in June 1941 after she has been placed in one of sixty-three covered wagons being pulled by a train leaving Kaunas. Fifteen hundred Lithuanians are heading into an uncertain future.
“Secondary school, childhood, fun, games, theatre, girlfriends – everything is in the past. You’re a grown-up now. You’re fourteen. You have a mother to look after, a father to replace. You have just taken your first step in the battle for life.”
The train journey lasts for weeks. At stops along the way carriages are uncoupled as some of the deportees are bound for collective farms. Dalia’s worth is assessed as one would an animal. She is housed in a barracks and put to work in the fields alongside deported Ukrainians. Their supervisors treat them as criminals.
The next stage of Dahlia’s journey again starts by train but this time they are packed in so tightly they can only stand. Illness and lice now plague them. When finally unloaded they sleep in a stable, or perhaps it is a club hall – five thousand filthy, unwashed people, grateful to be able to stretch out and relax exhausted legs. They are near a river and a rumour circulates that they are to be transported to America. Dalia wants to believe this, it offers hope, but in her heart she cannot.
Housed in wooden sheds and selling their few possessions for food they sing songs from their homeland and gather wood from nearby forests to burn for heat. Soon they are moved onto barges and taken down the Angara River before being unloaded onto a beach. From there lorries transport them the three hundred kilometres to the Lena River. By now leaders have emerged within the group and they are learning of each other’s histories.
After a two week wait, the Lithuanians are once again loaded unto barges. They are being fed but there are still regular deaths. Those who had felt superior in their former lives try to give themselves airs and graces. Dalia understands that any influence they may have had, any ability to offer favours, has been stripped away.
Forests and lesser vegetation are replaced by tundra. Dalia is disembarked where the riverbank is steep and a cold wind blows down from the mouth of the Lena. The people find just a few tents and wooden structures alongside piles of bricks. It is now August 1942 and they have reached their destination – Trofimovsk Island in the Arctic. They must build their own accommodation on this previously uninhabited outpost if they are to survive. They wear only the clothes they brought from Kaunas.
The Soviets have decreed that a fish processing plant will be built and worked by these exiled people. The Lithuanians and then Finnish prisoners are racing against time before the onset of a frozen, blizzard filled winter. In Trofimovsk the sun sets in November and does not rise again until February.
Inadequate brick and timber shelters are built, each housing too many people. Those who can work, including Dalia, are sent each day to walk for miles into the tundra and search for logs carried down from the upper reaches of the Lena river. These must be chopped out of the ice, tied into rope harnesses and dragged to Trofimovsk to be used to heat the apartments and offices of the supervisors. The prisoners do not have the right to take any of this wood. It is the only source of fuel. Dalia sneaks out and steals it, at great risk.
Dalia describes the terrible pain – from illness and wounds caused by the rope harnesses – as she helps drag the logs up the steep and frozen shores of Trofimovsk Island. The workers have no strength or energy. Their feet are wrapped in frozen sacks tied together with ropes. They suffer from exhaustion, scurvy, frostbite, gangrene and starvation. Hundreds die.
The Trofimovsk superiors live in warm houses built from logs. They dress in furs, eat bread, butter, sugar and canned goods sent to the Soviet Union by the allies from America. They regard the Finns and Lithuanians as sub species, observing their: lice ridden, rag covered bodies; the damp and filth of their shelters; the pails overflowing with shit from diarrhea. The dead are piled up and left for the wild animals – around three hundred that first winter. Food is withheld from the living to force them to work until they drop. Any possessions the prisoners have managed to retain are taken by the supervisors for a pittance – gold watches for a bag of flour or tinned food that may then be stolen by the other starving people.
Those who somehow survive that first, terrible winter are offered small respite when a doctor arrives at the Gulag and demands that the supervisors allow the workers to eat the fish and other provisions that were always available – the supervisors would have preferred the barrelled fish to rot. Baths are constructed and clothing disinfected.
As the river starts to thaw the workers are sent to other islands to catch and process fresh fish – the working factory envisaged. Dalia lives in a basic yurt but after the horrors of the winter even the pain caused by dipping damaged hands into frozen water and then salting fish is tolerable because she can now steal enough to eat. Unlike the theft of the wood to burn at Trofimovsk, pilfering of fish is tolerated. The work they are doing is pointless anyway. In a country where payment is made per unit and corruption a way of life, the barrels leak and fresh fish mixed with putrid meaning produce rots and will eventually be dumped in the sea.
Dalia describes the main camp supervisor as a psychopath. It is hard to understand how such treatment of other human beings could be allowed to occur, although at a lesser level brings to mind the actions of our current government towards refugees and the homeless.
This is a striking and searing depiction of survival in horrific circumstances. A disturbingly evocative yet vital read.
On June 14, 1941 at three o’clock in the morning, following orders from Moscow, mass arrests and deportations began simultaneously in all of the Baltic states—Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia. Juozas Grinkevičius, the head of the Lithuanian Bank’s currency commission and a mathematics teacher at the gymnasium, was taken to a concentration camp in the northern Urals where he died from starvation in October 1943. The extermination of his family had also been planned.
This book, his daughter Dalia’s account of her experiences, opens in June 1941 after she has been placed in one of sixty-three covered wagons being pulled by a train leaving Kaunas. Fifteen hundred Lithuanians are heading into an uncertain future.
“Secondary school, childhood, fun, games, theatre, girlfriends – everything is in the past. You’re a grown-up now. You’re fourteen. You have a mother to look after, a father to replace. You have just taken your first step in the battle for life.”
The train journey lasts for weeks. At stops along the way carriages are uncoupled as some of the deportees are bound for collective farms. Dalia’s worth is assessed as one would an animal. She is housed in a barracks and put to work in the fields alongside deported Ukrainians. Their supervisors treat them as criminals.
The next stage of Dahlia’s journey again starts by train but this time they are packed in so tightly they can only stand. Illness and lice now plague them. When finally unloaded they sleep in a stable, or perhaps it is a club hall – five thousand filthy, unwashed people, grateful to be able to stretch out and relax exhausted legs. They are near a river and a rumour circulates that they are to be transported to America. Dalia wants to believe this, it offers hope, but in her heart she cannot.
Housed in wooden sheds and selling their few possessions for food they sing songs from their homeland and gather wood from nearby forests to burn for heat. Soon they are moved onto barges and taken down the Angara River before being unloaded onto a beach. From there lorries transport them the three hundred kilometres to the Lena River. By now leaders have emerged within the group and they are learning of each other’s histories.
After a two week wait, the Lithuanians are once again loaded unto barges. They are being fed but there are still regular deaths. Those who had felt superior in their former lives try to give themselves airs and graces. Dalia understands that any influence they may have had, any ability to offer favours, has been stripped away.
Forests and lesser vegetation are replaced by tundra. Dalia is disembarked where the riverbank is steep and a cold wind blows down from the mouth of the Lena. The people find just a few tents and wooden structures alongside piles of bricks. It is now August 1942 and they have reached their destination – Trofimovsk Island in the Arctic. They must build their own accommodation on this previously uninhabited outpost if they are to survive. They wear only the clothes they brought from Kaunas.
The Soviets have decreed that a fish processing plant will be built and worked by these exiled people. The Lithuanians and then Finnish prisoners are racing against time before the onset of a frozen, blizzard filled winter. In Trofimovsk the sun sets in November and does not rise again until February.
Inadequate brick and timber shelters are built, each housing too many people. Those who can work, including Dalia, are sent each day to walk for miles into the tundra and search for logs carried down from the upper reaches of the Lena river. These must be chopped out of the ice, tied into rope harnesses and dragged to Trofimovsk to be used to heat the apartments and offices of the supervisors. The prisoners do not have the right to take any of this wood. It is the only source of fuel. Dalia sneaks out and steals it, at great risk.
Dalia describes the terrible pain – from illness and wounds caused by the rope harnesses – as she helps drag the logs up the steep and frozen shores of Trofimovsk Island. The workers have no strength or energy. Their feet are wrapped in frozen sacks tied together with ropes. They suffer from exhaustion, scurvy, frostbite, gangrene and starvation. Hundreds die.
The Trofimovsk superiors live in warm houses built from logs. They dress in furs, eat bread, butter, sugar and canned goods sent to the Soviet Union by the allies from America. They regard the Finns and Lithuanians as sub species, observing their: lice ridden, rag covered bodies; the damp and filth of their shelters; the pails overflowing with shit from diarrhea. The dead are piled up and left for the wild animals – around three hundred that first winter. Food is withheld from the living to force them to work until they drop. Any possessions the prisoners have managed to retain are taken by the supervisors for a pittance – gold watches for a bag of flour or tinned food that may then be stolen by the other starving people.
Those who somehow survive that first, terrible winter are offered small respite when a doctor arrives at the Gulag and demands that the supervisors allow the workers to eat the fish and other provisions that were always available – the supervisors would have preferred the barrelled fish to rot. Baths are constructed and clothing disinfected.
As the river starts to thaw the workers are sent to other islands to catch and process fresh fish – the working factory envisaged. Dalia lives in a basic yurt but after the horrors of the winter even the pain caused by dipping damaged hands into frozen water and then salting fish is tolerable because she can now steal enough to eat. Unlike the theft of the wood to burn at Trofimovsk, pilfering of fish is tolerated. The work they are doing is pointless anyway. In a country where payment is made per unit and corruption a way of life, the barrels leak and fresh fish mixed with putrid meaning produce rots and will eventually be dumped in the sea.
Dalia describes the main camp supervisor as a psychopath. It is hard to understand how such treatment of other human beings could be allowed to occur, although at a lesser level brings to mind the actions of our current government towards refugees and the homeless.
This is a striking and searing depiction of survival in horrific circumstances. A disturbingly evocative yet vital read.