Kaunas, Lithuania, 1923. This is my Mom.
* * * * *
On the back of the photo, Joy wrote:
Dearest [Irene's Mom],
This is you!
This photo is historical. It was with me in Siberia in my photo album. It endured all of our sufferings along the shores of the Laptev Sea. It was there for all 17 years of the deportation. Then the photo returned with me to Lithuania in 1958, and now it is in America! 1991.
3 comments:
The postwar deportations under Stalin are almost unknown and apparently count for about as many dead as those who died for political reasons in WWII (a good many, of course, were simply sent to the front and allowed to be slaughtered as penal troops, etc.).
It puts a human face on something I knew just a little about.
As I say, I'm forever learning something here.
PS Your Mom was like me, a blonde baby (I had the most gorgeous ash blond hair, if I do say so myself) who went brunette as she got older.
Here is a good, seven-part, introduction.
See also here.
(Bloodlands is excellent.)
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