Once Upon a Time
Sometimes, it seems impossible to express any feelings that do not come across as contrived, especially when you are seeking some artistic truth. I feel buried under such an unending cascade of pop clichés, and it feels like I will drown. Does the so-called age of communication signal the end of creativity? I will find it easier to express truthfulness if I try to remind myself how important it is to keep my searing thoughts of my individuality.
In front of me is a standard five’-by-seven’ snapshot photo in a silver frame of an older woman, in her seventies. The attention grabs her wise green eyes and a warm smile, with a smitch of red lipstick. Her name is Linda Bessie Burcane. She has an abundance of soft lavish gray hair, framed by her beautiful intelligent face. They passed the salt-and-pepper stage, and now they looked like salt only. She is sitting in the photo, and you cannot see her full outfit. A silk blouse or dress skillfully tailored. As usual women who were born in the beginning of the twenty’s century were trained in home economics aid, including cooking, baking, cleaning, hand making laundry, sewing, gardening, and many more other duties that they learn early from their mothers and grandmothers to take care of the betterment of their families. Little wrinkles in far corners of her eyes gave out her age. The photography saved the moment of happiness from the past into the future. Perhaps not only the photo is an indication to preserve the identity image of Linda Bessie, but to look into her honest clear eyes to see her depth, personality, emotions, and passion. In other words: to look into her soul.
Linda Bessie was born in 1922. She was the oldest sibling of six. Her father had his own shop with machinery to work with metal, and her mother was a pharmacist and worked in the Aptekar’s shop.
She was born in the twenties, at the beginning of the twentieth century. To be direct about the time: after World War I was over, after the Spanish influenza wiped out in big numbers both the military men and the civilian, and the new order of winners and losers created the post war atmosphere. These sweet babies of the twenties grew up to be eighteen and twenty just in time for the other global war, World War II.
Historians called World War I the ‘global conflict’ that started in 1914 and lasted till 1918. It was a harsh fight between two coalitions to obtain central power. The diplomatic tension between European great powers such as Germany, France, Great Britain, together with the Ottoman Empire. Other countries were also involved in separate ways: militarily, politically, and economically. The United States joined their allies in late 1917. In Russia, the Bolsheviks seized in the Russian October Revolution that had a final solution for the Russian monarchy and the entire Romanov family. Germany was on offensive, tired, and weak. Not to say that WWI was the deadliest war in history as nine million soldiers were gone, twenty-three million were wounded, and in addition five million civilians were dead due to military actions, hunger of the Great Depression, and deadly diseases. During the war accrued the ugly large-scale ethnic cleansing of indigenous people known as Armenian genocide. It had affected Greek and Assyrian Christians populations. Also, Jews had been killed in Kazaks’ pogroms.
I did not properly introduce myself. My name is Ella or Eli for short. Mama called me ‘Elochka.’ Daddy called me Shari, darling, or princess. I studied philology at the finest Eastern European university in the seventies, with a minor in history, before I enrolled in the library science graduate program. My academics included intensive world history courses and foreign languages. Traditionally, it taught Latin language within academic programs. Unfortunately for me, the program had changed and the course was canceled. The acquaintance of associations accumulated by textbook knowledge of facts, research of the geographical locations, and chronological data extended my educational horizon. The foreign literature courses added the unspeakable imagination from American, French, Russian, and German classic literature. I never knew how to cut short on reading the historic novels, and often the nerd in me drove to academic overachievements, simply by passionately following the recommended list of extracurricular books for reading assigned by my professors. For instance, the book “All Quiet on the Western Front” by Anna Maria Remarque. In 1926, Ernest Hemingway turned to the twenties and the Spanish epidemic in his brilliant book “The Sun Also Rises.” The book “Doctor Zhivago '' by Boris Posternak had been censored by the Soviet government black suits because they were afraid of the truth and tried for many years to keep it away from the masses.
Aftermath of the war left Germany on the offensive, weak and humiliated. Post-war instability contributed to the formation of national identities. The Paris Peace Conference of 1919 brought the signing of the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty limited the German military machine and Germans paid the burden of financial retributions.
After 123 years, Poland re-emerged as an independent country. The Kingdoms of territorial Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes, later renamed Yugoslavia. The country of Czechoslovakia, combined the Kingdom of Bohemia with parts of the Kingdom of Hungary, became a new nation. The union of all Romanian-speaking people under a single state led to a formation of a new country called Romania. Romania gained Bessarabia from the Russians. Russia became the Soviet Union and on a positive side, lost Finland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Latvia, which became independent countries. The Ottoman Empire was soon replaced by Turkey. A completely new country got on the European map, named Bulgaria. Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan established as independent states in the Caucasus region to the south. For the first time in history, monarchies were replaced by the cornerstone of democracy: the election rights of their own governments.
Countless citizens saw the change in culture and blamed the war for taking away the pre-war order. Scholars and writers, such as Drieu la Rochelle stressed the fact that gender roles changed after the war. Discussions pertaining to women's role during post-war debates often split the view of women into three categories—the “modern woman,” the “mother,” and the “single woman” (Roberts). These categories broke up the view of women by the roles they took on, the jobs they did, and the way they acted. These categories also came to encompass the views of gender roles in relation to before and after the war. The “mother” category relates back to the role of women before the Great War, the woman who stayed at home and took care of the household while the husband was off at work. The “modern woman” relates to how many women ratio to men were established after the war, what working jobs that meant for men were now available to women, engaging in sexual pleasures, and often doing things at a fast pace. The “single woman” was the middle ground between the other two that were quite different from one another. The “single woman” came to represent the women who would never be able to marry because there were not enough men for every woman to marry.
They went to fight,
Shoulder by shoulder,
One by one.
Sons, husbands, and brothers,
Somebody’s loved once –
For the all of the best times to come,
For other people, and for us.
Some will come home with honors,
Others with purple hearts.
Unluckiest, will give away their hearts,
In fights.
(Tomshinsky@2024)
The babies who were born to mothers in ninety-twenty up to be twenty in ninety-forty. The boys in their twenties became soldiers of another horrible World War II. The post-war uncertainty contributed to the outbreak of World War II in September of 1939. Germany was humiliated in many ways after WWI. They blamed Marxists and Jews for everything bad, both economically and politically.
Meanwhile, Linda Bessie’s parents extended the family. They could not afford to live in Riga, the capital of Latvia. They settled in a smaller place, close to Jelgava and Krustpils in Zemgale county. Bessie has two sisters, two years apart, Hannah Molly aka Malka, and Sarah Rosa. After many years of trying, happy parents welcomed the first boy named Benjamin. Later, young parents had two more children, a boy, and a girl. In these years, having six children was not an unusual thing. It was a joke that stated that there were no TV sets to occupy their free time, and there was not anything else to do after dark. Also, there were not any computers and cellular phones yet, so people read books, attended local theaters, and bought literary magazines with the current romance novels.
Interestingly, it is common that Jews were giving two names to their children, and many orthodox Jews still do. I do not know if it is common knowledge, but I heard that in a way, this is connected to superstition beliefs. For instance, if the child was very sick, parents would stop calling him or her by their first name. They would use the other given name to get out of bad luck, and to change the pass of bad fortune.
Linda Bessie was very smart and focused on her education. She attended a private Catholic school in Riga and had a room at Milstein’s to live with one of the many of her cousins. Hanna Molly went to a trade vocational school, also in Riga. Sarah Rosa studied at home at a Hebrew all-girls school and was helping her mother with scrubbing the pots and pans and babysitting the youngsters. Bessie was the teachers’ favorite student because she always came prepared and was consistent in homework excellence. She was exceptionally good in mathematics and sciences. An ‘A+’ on her math homework assignments was a repetitive pride, but in her art classes she needed to be helped with proportions and techniques. Her school friend was a son of the Premier Minister of Latvia (1938-1942), Karlis Ulmanis. Karlis Ulmanis junior helped her with art in exchange for help in math. Later in life, when Ulmanis became one of the ministers in Latvian administration, he never forgot his friendship.
Sometimes, no matter how hard Bessie’s parents worked, it was not enough money to pay for school. She was embarrassed to take an I.O.U. (I send you) notes to the accounting office. As a minority at school, Linda did not attend the morning prayers. Life was not easy both economically and politically.
What happened to the Weimar Republic? The Weimar Republic 0f 1919 to 1933, the period after WWI was exhausted in distressed circumstances of survivalism, until the rise of Nazi Germany. Geographically, the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania were situated on the border between Germany and the Soviet Union. Latvia, which was situated on the Daugava River, had been wanted by Hitler and considered to be an easy target by Germany. Before World War II, Joachim von Ribbentrop played the key role in brokering for Hitler. The signing of the Non-Aggression Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact in Moscow on August 23, 1939, was the crowning achievement of Ribbentrop's career. He flew to Moscow, where over the course of a thirteen-hour visit, Ribbentrop signed both the Non-Aggression Pact and the secret protocols, which partitioned much of Eastern Europe between the Soviets and the Germans. As the historic data tells the story, Ribbentrop had expected to see only the Soviet Foreign Commissar Vyacheslav Molotov at the meeting and was most surprised to be holding talks with Joseph Stalin himself. During his trip to Moscow, Ribbentrop's talks with Stalin and Molotov proceeded very cordially and efficiently, with the exception of the question of Latvia, which Hitler had instructed Ribbentrop to try to claim for Germany. Also Ribbentrop instructed to claim the Daugava as the future boundary between the Greater Germanic Reich and the Soviet Union, but had also been ordered to grant extensive concessions to Stalin. When Stalin claimed Latvia for the Soviet Union, Ribbentrop was forced to telephone Berlin for permission from Hitler to concede Latvia to the Soviets.
Meanwhile, Latvia had a democratic election and by the will of the people entered the Soviet Union. Estonia and Lithuania did the same. It only gave Latvians some time before the Nazi Germany occupied the Baltics states, as the first frontier in World War II between Germany and the Soviet Union.
In September of 1939 Germany attacked Poland, marched through Europe, dominated the collaborating governments, and on June 22 of 1940 Latvia had been occupied. There is a well-known Russian song that documented this moment in history. In translation it says, ‘on the twenty-second of June, Kiev had been bombed, and this how started the war.’
The girls, the older siblings, lived in Riga. Their parents had full hands with work and family responsibilities, with their brother Benjamin and two toddlers, the youngest siblings. Ben was everything the girls wanted in a beloved brother, who turned nine years old before the war escalated.
After Latvia entered the Soviet Union, not every Latvian citizen was happy with the new politics and changes that came with the new régime. For example, the Aizsargi played a decisive role in the May 15, 1934, fascistic coup in Latvia, and they became the primary armed support for anti-communist racist extremists. The Aizsargi were the main disseminators of chauvinistic attitudes and mouthpieces of bourgeois nationalism. In 1940, the Aizsargi was a volunteer paramilitary organization and the military reserve force that had about sixty thousand people: men, women, and youth. During the occupation by the German fascist collaborators from locals, predominated by former Aizsargi, actively cooperated with the occupiers, and participated in the slaughter of Bolshevik patriots and genocide of the Jews, upon the establishment of the German fascist "new order." From the first years, after the German occupiers were driven into the Latvian Republic territory, past Aizsargi participated in armed bands, which attacked and murdered Bolshevik and partisan activists, Komsomol youth, ‘kolhoz’ (agricultural farms) workers, and willingly participated in extermination of in Jewish population (E. Žagars)
June 21, 1941: “Germany invades the Soviet Union. Ghettos are established in large cities in Latvia, and German Einsatzgruppen are used to massacre Latvian Jews; a pro-Nazi Latvian paramilitary group called Aizsargi aids Germans in the massacre.”
Nazi propaganda certainly did seek to blame Jews and so-called Jewish Bolshevism for the brutal Soviet occupation of the Baltic States. However, conflicting to Latvians who “needed little encouragement” to kill their neighbors, reports back to Berlin entered into the Nuremberg trial records fomenting anti-Semitism.
Summers in Latvia are seasonal: include June, July, and August. School is over. People take vacations. In Riga, many go to the beloved silky, yellow-sanded beaches of Jurmala, at the Baltic beaches. Astronomically, the summer solstice falls on twenty-first or twenty-second of June, which is the reason Latvian obtain the ancient in origins the most celebrated tradition of the Ligo Day or Jani Diena. This is the shortest night of the year, and the daylight never crosses the night for twenty-four hours. In a way, this is a pagan festivity of celebrating mother-nature, by singing songs, jumping over fires, and drinking young beer, etc. How was June of 1941 different?
A hundred years ago, the babies, who were born in the nineteen twenties at the end of World War I, grew up to be eighteen and twenty at the beginning of World War II. They were somebody’s parents or grandparents. Now, when the war started, over the night, they became soldiers. Majority of youth joined the Red Army and went on to fight on the side of the Soviet Union against Nazi German occupation. Some were evacuated in the no-war zone of Uzbekistan, Ural, and Siberia on military mandate visas. Others were running away to save their life, going away as far as they could from the military front operations. Also, there were local people who collaborated with the occupants. Some people did not go anywhere and stayed, obviously for varied reasons.
Bessie, Molly, and Rosa were out of school. Like everybody else, they did not have a lot of time. The city of Riga was under attacks: bombs and killings intensified. Their uncle and aunt bundled up their household valuables and were in a hurry to leave the town with their three children and their three nieces. The way out of Riga was through train transportation, to go in one direction, to the east.
I am myself of Latvia ancestry. My heritage has an extensive line connected to the land, the family name has been recorded in the books, and in the cemetery stones. I was many times at Riga’s train station, especially in the summertime going out to ‘dacha,’ the summer house at the Baltic seashore. From my parents, their friends, and our relatives, I heard that it was a panic situation as hundreds of people wanted to leave town. Germans bombed the train station and wanted to cut off vital transportation. It was said that the giant light candelabra shivered from side to side and fell on the crowd of people’s heads. Besides, everywhere else was structural damage, debris, and even dead bodies. Sometimes, I looked at the ceiling and for a while tried to imagine how it happened.
My generation was born after World War II, at the time of peace. Me and my brother were fenced by our parents’ love and care. Parents' lives have a generational gap in comparison to the lives of their offsprings. No secret that people who suffered from wartime difficulties never share the circumstances with their children, because they did not want them to know the horror and sadness of ugly wars. They naturally desire their best in raising children with a happy, optimistic future, with joy and care, that they did not have due to the dreadfulness of wars. Sometimes, parents have secrets. Without secrets, we would not have parents.
The story I will share, I learned from my aunt Molly. I was about nineteen, a student at the university. As I remember correctly, I had been reading a lot to get ready for my exams at the end of the semester. I was close to graduation. It was a quiet weekend when my aunt Molly came to visit us. She loved the beach and tanning. I offered to go with her to guide my aunt throughout the untraditional pine tree forest’s way to the wild beach, in Kalngale, Latvia. As I recall the water was as warm as it gets on a typical Latvian summer day. The water was clear, the feet were reachable to the bottom of the Baltic Sea at all times. The sky was blue and clear of any clouds. The sand was clean and silky. We stretched our bikini bodies on the beach towel with amusement and pleasure to rest, to enjoy, and to tan. Aunt Molly got comfortable with her swimming suit bra to avoid the tanning lines on her slim body. As I recall, there were just a few more people on the beach in the distance. She was tanning. I was reading. Molly started to talk. Her memories took her back to the summer of 1941. She had the need to share her story with a trusted person. I was young, a polite listener, and trusted. I strongly believe that in life we must take a disciplinary approach towards everything we do and be extra sensitive towards the notion of time. Our stay here on Earth is quite brief. And this is the reason that I want to go back to this day and recall the story that my auntie Molly told me about her own teenager’s memory, one generation ago. Besides, her story of three young girls’ experiences of another sweltering summer day of 1940, included the story of my mother and her two younger sisters and how they survived WWII and stayed alive.
Bessie, Molly, and Rosa found themselves on a train. Girls were dressed in light summer dresses, without any valuables which could help them in exchange for food to survive. The war was young, the soldiers from the defense Soviet army were good to civilians, especially to the young shy girls who did not speak any Russian language. There were buckets of soups available for them to eat. The train was taking our teenage girls far away from the border, over the unknown unfamiliar territory of the Soviet Union, over the plains and rivers deep in Russia.
Bessie was the older sibling. As an older sister, she became responsible for her younger sisters. A teenager herself, she became a trusted caretaker and a focused adult, with a rational goal to move east and look for their parents. The girls’ goal was to find mom and dad and reunite the family. Molly was business oriented by nature. Somehow, she was able to pull out astonishes that only she could. It is not unusual for the middle sibling, who is equally good at obtaining and giving orders to others. Molly was opinionable and flexible at the same time. And then it was Rosa. She was the youngest in this vibrant union of three: kind and soft, agreeable, and completely dependable on her older sister’s aim. People say that siblings have better surviving skills because they have experience in physical combat and psychological welfare.
Remember, the girls started the journey together with their aunts and uncle’s family. Because of the last name, I understood that it was the family of the girls’ father. Maria and Moses were cousins by blood. It sounds strange, but not unusual among Jewish families in these years. They had three children: two boys and a girl. The Soviet army recruited their oldest son, right on the spot as soon as they crossed the border. It turned out to be one of the territorial legal prudential war regulations in Soviet Russia. They stayed closed. They eat together. It was a new country for them, where people were speaking a different language, and they became refugees from a foreign country of Latvia, occupied by a common nazi enemy.
As usual it takes about twelve hours by train to get from Riga to the area nearby Moscow. Military trains had the green light priority; and civilian wagons with refugees and evacuees had multiple stops, due to the military activities. The soldiers joked, smiled, and talked to the pretty girls: they shared food and even chocolates. Girls made small talk among the refugees. They looked for people from Latvia and asked questions about their parents if somebody would see them and know something about them. The word was that everybody from the Latvian refugee groups had been moving east, away from mass murdering and the battles of the front.
In the beginning of the war, German troops had significant advancements in military preparedness. On the other hand, Russians did not have enough military generals due to paranoid Joseph Stalin’s actions of distrust of the strong influential leaders close to his surroundings. It was not enough ammunition. The buttle fields were covered by the bodies of the young men in their twenties. It was these boys who were born in the twenties of the nineteenth twentieth century, after World War I, to become heroic soldiers of World War II. The brave and proud heroes were giving it all for the homeland and their leader, Joseph Stalin. The next line of soldiers, literally, were picking up the ruffles from the previous dead soldiers. If the trees could talk, they would cry to be killed on the Kursk-Kazan’s roads.
Next stop was Volga River. By this time, the sisters were separated from their relatives. The locals who had extra rooms accommodated them to refugees in exchange for labor and help in their households. Beneficially, the émigré had a roof over their heads, food, and clean water. The best host got the youngest from the sisters. Rosa regularly got an abundance of home cooked meals, daily tea from a samovar, and even the famous Russian pierogi. The argument was simple: to kneel, pray, and say grace to Jesus Christ.
In 1942, the battles of the front got closer, and the girls found themselves nearby Stalingrad. Sisters worked at the apple arcade where they picked sweet-and-sour green apples. They could eat as many as they wanted, but the abundance of fruit did not make the stomach happy. They were always hungry and wanted bread. During the war, the bread ration was limited by daily portions. As usual, Bessie and Rosa could not wait and would finish their small daily portion right away. On the other hand, Molly had a different personality. She would be more reserved. At night, when the girls were sleeping, she would pull out her bread stash from under the pillow and gobble it down, by driving the sisters nuts with envy.
Tanks were getting closer to Stalingrad, more military forces concentrated in the area nearby the city for the battle called by historians, the Battle for Stalingrad. It was a military mandate to evacuate all military industries and their families to the far east, across the plains and Euro-Asian mountains to Ural and Siberia. Once again, our orphan girls were running away. By this time, the clever girls learn to understand and speak basic Russian phrases, to have an effective communication with people. The way out to the safety west to evacuation was by train transportation, and people concentrated at the train station. Suddenly, a young woman approached the girls. She introduced herself as Rita Makarova, the wife of the army sergeant. She had a military visa to board the train, and she needed help with her belongings. Rita had two children: a crying baby boy in her hands and a scared toddler boy who held down to her skirt. Makarova offered to take one of the girls as a housekeeper and another girl as a babysitter. What about the third sibling? Rita’s baby boy had meningitis, and the conductor refused to let her on the train with a sick baby out of precaution to spread the decontaminated disease to masses on the overcrowded train. Stressed and terrified, Rita left the sick baby at the train station, and offered the third sister a replacement place on her evacuation visa.
There is a well-known fact in the history of World War II. There were three vital trains to get out of Stalingrad [now, now known as Volgograd.] The first and the third trains both were bombed badly: fire and smoke, pillows in flower cases with goose feathers flying in the air, and body parts were everywhere. Meantime, the second train, with Rita’s entourage, successfully crossed the bridge across the Volga River and disappeared in the wilderness of the Russian woods. It was simple luck or God’s will, you decide. I do not know the answer.
Ural Mountains in Russia stretch north-to-south for over 1,250 miles (2,000 kilometers) from Arctic Ocean to the Kazakhstan border. The ancient name of the mountains was called “Stone Belt,” that separated the space between the East European and West Siberian plains. Meantime, Rita, and the girls were taken away to the destination place of the evacuation safety zone. On the train were professional workers and administration from Tula’s industrial complex that evacuated their plant in deep safety zone to assist the military operations in preparing military gun machines for soldiers. It was not difficult for the girls to obtain new jobs as everybody was working for the homeland victory, for the front. Bessie, as the oldest one, had the best job, as she always was great with math, she got the office job in accounting, The two other girls worked at the carpenter’s conveyer belt transporter line to manufacture the wood part of the ruffles. Rosa, the youngest of the sisters, was only past her sweet fifteen birthday and had a tough time keeping on with adults. The job required concentration as she worked on the electrical saw to cut the wood in certain dimensions and measurements. One day, when she did not get enough sleep, she got out of focus and cut off the tip of her pinky with the electrical saw.
Bassie had another story. As the older sister, she became by necessity the mother figure to her siblings. She had a better job and better pay. She made sure that her sisters had Russian boots for the snow, mittens to keep their hands warm, and enough food to eat. She worried so much about her sisters that she got her own hands frozen from the cold Siberian winters. Maybe this was the reason that she suffered the arthritis pain in her hands in her later years. Health issues were especially important in the evacuation territories. The Russian government made sure that everyone got vaccination against tuberculosis. Bessie attended the local market and tried to add better food such as potatoes, eggs, and garlic to sustain a healthy lifestyle. She worried so much that one day she got extremely sick with high fiber. It was another war time illness – typhus. Bessie was transferred to the hospital. In the hospital, the nurses cut her beautiful hair. The high fiber made her slim body look like a skeleton. She fought for her life. Cold, then hot; her body did not want to give up. The sisters went back to the local market for garlic to help Bessie for faster recovery. By early spring, she got better, started to eat, and put on some weight. Her hair slowly started to grow back. Her work manager was waiting for her to recover. Her co-workers visited Bessie at the hospital. They passed a food package with bread, milk, and boiling eggs for nutritional healing.
The girls were young and wanted to keep up with our youth at the factory. They wanted to party and dance like other people of their age, but they did not have shoes. They borrowed the shoes and wore them in order of the sibling's age to attend the dances with boys. After fun weekends, it was difficult for the young bodies to wake up early in time from the beauty sleep to catch the train to the factory. Well, they learned the discipline early in life, as during the war time, workers lived under the military law. If a factory worker at the military plant was twenty minutes late, it would be a military trial for betraying the country’s homeland security. Growing up with these restrictions from early working years, the young ladies learn their sticked working discipline for life. People like my mother and her sisters were never late for work in their life. They knew the value of coming better early to work than late.
After the victory in 1945, girls like any evacuee, contacted the Red Cross organization and continued to look for their parents. Their goal was to return to native Latvia and reunite with their family. After the war, rumors started to spread about horrors at the German occupied territories and stories of the concentration camps for Jews at the eastern European countries, but it was hoped to find family members alive as they did not receive any official documents of their death. In 1946, the Latvian government was ready to return from the evacuation zone back to the free country now. As they were situated in Ural too, Mollie made an important trip to the city of Chelyabinsk. The girls did not have any passports, but by some luck Bassie had saved in her pockets a pre-war public transportation prepaid card issued in Latvia at pre-war time. Mollie showed the ticket card and filled out the documents with a petition to return to native country of origin. Molle was always a businessperson and that is how I will always remember my auntie. When the right time came and the entry visas were received, the sisters were ready to go home to look for their family. The new community loved the blue-eyed girls with Latvian accents. When the time was right, the documents arrived with an official Latvian government’s permission to return home and to reentry the homeland of Latvia. The management of the factory asked the girls to stay in their adopted new home. The argument was that here they have good stable jobs, friends, and why to leave the life built on security behind, as Latvia after the Nazi occupation was all in ruins and devastation. “Stay with us, we will find you nice guys from locals to marry you!” But the mind was already set up on returning home and reunited with family, lost in the war time. The factory workers after the warm good-byes gifted the girls with a get-away food package for the road.
When the sisters came back to Riga, they could see with their own eyes the after-war destruction, and the resilience of people who were full of enthusiasm to be alive and build their personal lives from the humbling beginning of nothing more than youth enthusiasm. The real estate in after-war Riga consisted of commune rooms in empty apartments’, often belonging to desisted people. Deliberation made nazi run in a hurry, and many collaborators of the nazi soldiers followed them leaving the living quarters to new people who came in town along with the glorious victory. The sisters were lucky to reunite with their aunt and uncle. They provided them with a room to live in and a big table to eat together. Three sisters and their cousin, Frances, were young, attractive, and spent their weekends at the dancing youth parties with young men who also were seeking female attention for companionships and matting.
Rosa, the youngest of the sisters, met a young nineteen-year-old blond, tall boy from Moscow, and asked my mom, her older sister, for permission to marry him. He was three years younger, a foreigner in Latvia that was smithed by Rosa’s sophistication. To have a little chance to be accepted by my mom, he was coming with thick books to show how intelligent, clever, and serious he was to be engaged to the love of his life. My auntie Rosa is still alive and lives in Brooklyn, New York. My mother was the second one to leave the Lachplesha Street’s haven. One day, my tall and handsome father came with a group of friends to the apartment and his heart and soul found the green-eyed Bessie, and the rest is history. My mother had twenty-nine years of happiness, she had two children, and three grandchildren. She was ninety-one when she passed away. Molly married the third one. She dated a lot. The boy she fell in love with was with someone else. She married the brown-eyed fast legged dancer. She passed away at the age of ninety-seven.
The unsaid question is about the family reunion. The only family they found alive was their aunt and uncle. But this is a different story for a different time. From the local people, our sisters found out that their father and brother Ben were at the train station to leave and waited for their mother to follow them with the two small toddlers and a knot of fabric with food and necessities for the road. The last train came and left, and my mother’s father and my future grandfather left the train station and returned home to join his wife and children. He returned to the family to be gone from Earth forever and ever. There are no graves, no tombs of them. Where do innocent people go when they leave behind the living and loving ones? I hope it is heaven.
In silent flame of fire,
The memorials will remind us,
Of the good and bad times.
There are two words,
Bigger than life:
Freedom and Life itself.
Freedom and good life –
For them, for past, for all on Earth,
For now, for us, for future lives!
(Tomshinsky@2024)
Jorge Luis Borges
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