Modalità, condizioni e tempi della deportazione:
"What did typical deportation look like? The Soviet security police, the NKVD, broke into an apartment or a house and arrested all the family members. The NKVD marched them onto the back of a truck. In the railway station, as far as the eye could see, there were men and women clutching suitcases and bundles of hastily gathered clothing, the elderly and the disabled searching for places to sit and mothers holding their children, all surrounded by the Red Army soldiers brandishing weapons.
Usually, the men were put on separate trains. They were transported to prisons and the Gulags (concentration camps) while females, kids and the elderly were deported to live in God-forsaken settlements in Siberia.
In the cattle cars the passengers were given hardly any food except a little water and some inedible soup. There was scarcely any air to breathe as everyone was jammed together and the cars had only a few small windows covered with bars. A hole in the floor served as toilet. Some of the people, especially the infants, became sick immediately and died. The bodies of those who died on the journey were left on the side of the tracks.
After one month the train reached some Siberian centre, for example, Novosibirsk. In this case, scores of wagons were transferred onto enormous barges. The deportees were sent up the River Ob to some remote settlement to live in a bug infested hut".
Il lavoro:
"The Soviets immediately put their prisoners to work. They marched women and teenage girls into the forest to cut trees. They worked in deep snow, even as temperatures plunged to minus 45 degrees Celsius. Prisoners cut up trees and later lived in huts made from tree branches. Sometimes it was so cold they awoke frozen to the ground.
Some deportees collapsed while the guards pushed the others along to another day of work. The collapsed prisoners were then left for dead somewhere behind in the wilderness.
In exchange for their efforts, prisoners received a small amount of stale bread. They were working for food. A full day of hard work was equal to 500 grams of bread. Phisically weaker prisoners could only earn 100 grams of bread.
Working prisoners shared their meager rations with those who could not work, the little children, the old and the infirm. Much of the time they had virtually nothing to eat and everyone suffered from constant hunger. Their bodies were swollen and covered with boils caused by malnutrition. Their skin was inflamed by mosquito bites.
The youngest children were affected the most by the harsh conditions and almost all of them were sick. Many of them died from starvation and disease. The elderly followed the children. Those who remained could only struggle to dig graves in the frozen earth".
La fine tardiva dell'orrore:
"In 1956 Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev decided that deportees should be released. In the late 1950s the survivors started to return to Lithuania.
There is an old and cynical saying that one death is a tragedy, but a thousand are just a front-page headline. Deaths of thousands of deportees began to make headlines only in the late 1980s [...]".
