Testimonianze:
"Lawyer Ignas Urbaitis [...] wrote letters to his wife Elena Urbaitienė [...].
Urbaitis, like all prisoners of concentration camps, was allowed to write only two letters per year. These letters should be in Russian because all letters were read by the censors. Thus, prisoners avoided writing about their sufferings directly because of the censorship.
The survivors of the Gulags and deportations can speak openly now. A former deportee Janė Meškauskaitė says that she and her family was kidnapped by the NKVD one night because her father was member of a political party in the pre-war Lithuania. Her family was put on a train and dropped off at a remote village in the Tomsk region many days later.
They were among the most fortunate deportees, as Russian farmers from Kazakhstan who were exiled in the early 1930s for being too wealthy inhabited the village. They understood her family's plight and welcomed them into the community. Nevertheless, food was scarce.
«My father once bought some meat from a local crook. He and a friend hid in the woods to cook and eat it so that thugs wouldn't steal it. They found out later that they were eating a friend of theirs who had just died», said Meškauskaitė.
Bread was also strictly rationed. «People in our village were allotted 300 grams of flour a day. Once the flourmill broke down so we were simply given whole grains. People were so hungry that they would just eat them uncooked. Of course, most had bad teeth and couldn't chew them so they would end up undigested in the latrines. Many people would go and collect them, wash them, and make porridge», she said.
Vytautas Stašaitis was a son of an air force major in independent Lithuania before the war. The family's spacious house was commandeered by Soviet troops in 1945. His family was exiled to Siberia but he managed to go underground as part of the resistance movement.
Shortly thereafter a supposed friend lured him into a trap [...]. His friend gave him up and he was mercilessly beaten during his interrogation.
«I wanted to hang myself in my cell but they prevented me. They gave me 10 years of forced labor for sedition and shipped me to Krasnoyarsk to cut trees. They marched us for six days with barely any food and water. Those who couldn't keep up were shot. When we got to the labor camp they clothed us in the uniforms of dead soldiers. They still had bullet holes and blood stains», Stašaitis said adding that political prisoners were forced to live together with aggressive Russian criminals who were sentenced for murder and robbery.
Life in Stalin-era labor camps was a dehumanizing experience. The diet allocated to prisoners was less than that required for survival. «As inmates we were chained in pairs. Once my partner and I thought a wolf was attacking us. It turned out to be a guard dog that had broken loose from its chain. We killed it with our axes and buried it in the snow. We returned many times to cook and eat it. Those were some of the best meals of my life», he said.
Life was not easy for those who survived and returned to Lithuania. Meškauskaitė returned to Lithuania in 1958. «We were placed in an impossible situation. The government required us to register with the local municipality or face renewed deportation. In order to register, we needed an employer, but no one had courage to give work to former deportees. I lived and worked illegally for many years with the help of my relatives», she said".
La situazione di oggi:
"Now former political prisoners, deportees and partisans receive an additional pension, which Lithuanian State finances can afford. Russia, which officially proclaimed inheritance of all international rights and obligations of the USSR, shows no will to pay compensation to them. The Russian State has never said a word asking for forgiveness for the Soviet terror in the occupied Baltic States. However, it was done by Russian dissidents.
Russian Duma MP Sergei Kovalev did it in the Lithuanian Parliament in June, 2000. By the way, it is symbolic that in 1974-1975, Kovalev was jailed in the Vilnius KGB prison, which is the Museum of Genocide Victims now, for cooperation with the underground magazine The Chronicle of the Lithuanian Catholic Church.
Kovalev said in his address to the Lithuanian Parliament, «It is not true that nations do not commit crimes. The Germans and we should understand it. If we don't understand our guilt, we can't expect victory over cannibalistic ideologies. We went to demonstrations in the 1930s supporting mass killings. We are guilty, our Western neighbors. It is my nation that occupied the Baltic Countries. Please, forgive us».
Felix Krasavin, a former Soviet-time political prisoner now living in Israel, spoke to the forum of some 5,000 former Lithuanian political prisoners and deportees at the Vilnius Sports Arena in June, 2000. «Soviet fascism killed many more people than its German brother. The lies of Soviet fascism were much bigger than those of German fascism», he said".
In conclusione:
"During the nearly five decades of occupation, the Soviets killed or deported hundreds of thousands Lithuanian, Latvian and Estonian men, women and children. However, this was only a fraction of the tens of millions of people in the USSR and Central Europe whom communists subjected to the midnight knock on the door, arrest, intentionally created famine and starvation, torture, slave labor, or execution.
Nicolas Werth, French historian and one of the authors of Livre noir du communisme (The Black Book of Communism), say the communists killed at least 100 million people in the world [...].
Virtually no one has been called to account for what was done. The West has chosen to forget these horrors. Nothing of these horrors is taught at schools there. There is no grand museum in Washington DC, dedicated to those whose lives were destroyed by the communists.
No Communist Party bosses in Russia have ever been made to pay for their transgressions. Not one labor camp commandant has been forced to answer for his inhumanity. There is no talk of reparations. The Kremlin objects whenever anyone raises questions about the injustice of the past.
The great crimes of Soviet communism are mostly just remembered in the hearts and souls of the victims.
Lithuanians are considering the Soviet terror corresponded to genocide. Most of those deported were doomed, a third of them to a speedy death and the rest to a life of misery in Siberia. One only had to be an honest Lithuanian citizen to face deportation. A lot of work has to be done to clarify the world opinion".
