In 1941, Lithuania was a nation of 2.2 million citizens located on the Baltic Sea between Poland and the Soviet Union. It was an extremely dangerous place to live as Irana and her family quickly learned.
The Soviets had occupied Lithuania and established a repressive totalitarian regime. Stalin`s cruel directive to his occupying forces was "There will be a Lithuania, but without Lithuanians!" Two thousand "political activists" were arrested, twelve thousand "enemies of the people" were imprisoned, and seventeen thousand Lithuanians were deported to Siberia where they experienced inhumane treatment in forced labor camps.
Thirteen year-old Irana and her mother were arrested on June 15, 1941, put into a railroad car, and deported to a gulag located in a forested mountain area of southern Siberia. During their first winter in Siberia, Irana`s mother died from exposure to the extreme cold. Later, Irana learned that the Soviets had executed her father because he was an officer in the Lithuanian Army.
On June 22, 1941, the German Army invaded Lithuania and quickly drove the Soviet Army out of the country. At first, some Lithuanians had welcomed the Germans as "liberators" for freeing them from the repressive Soviet regime, and some even joined the Germans in fighting the Red Army. However, the Germans had not come to free the Lithuanians; they had come to seize men, supplies, and materiel to strengthen their forces for their invasion of the Soviet Union.
During the spring of 1942, Irana and a group of girls and women prisoners were transferred to a gulag at the mouth of the Lena River on the Arctic Ocean. Irana had traveled 6,000 miles by train during her captivity. The group was assigned the task of unloading US war materiel and food from small Russian boats that ferried cargo from American ships anchored in deep water to the port. Long hours and physically demanding work in the extreme cold led to exhaustion; diseases were rampant, prisoners were malnourished, physical abuse was widespread, and many prisoners succumbed. Stalin`s plan was to work the prisoners to death. He had some, but not complete, success.
The women did not give up. At the risk of their lives, they stole food, clothing, and supplies to improve their living quarters. After working a twelve hour day, these girls and women constructed a "sod" hut out of pieces of driftwood, turf, and whatever else they could steal or scrounge. Their hut was 30 feet x 20 feet x 10 feet high, stood on bare ground, and housed a work group of forty. They built bunks out of driftwood and used blocks of ice for windows during winter when the floor of the hut was frozen solid. An oil drum with a piece of rope for a wick and driftwood for fuel was all they had to keep the temperature of their hut a few degrees above freezing. Water vapor from the women`s breathing condensed and froze on their bunks, affixing their hair to the wooden surface on which they slept.
Beyond surviving the inhumane physical conditions of the gulag, the women had to fight depression and keep their minds active to maintain their sanity. Many of these women prisoners were well-educated and they taught subjects ranging from reading to physics to the other members of their work gang. They discussed the books that they had read, and the movies they had seen before they were sent to the gulag. This camaraderie helped to keep one another alive and optimistic until the war ended and the gulags were closed.
Irana spent six years at the coastal gulag on the shore of the Arctic Ocean before she escaped in 1949. The Soviets would not allow Irana and other former prisoners to return home because Lithuanian partisans were effectively fighting the Soviets that had reoccupied their country. At the end of World War II, Stalin had attempted to deport or kill all Lithuanians, and populate their country with docile Russian communists. It didn`t work! Stalin died in 1953, and four years later Khrushchev closed the gulags. Irana returned home in 1958 after spending 17 years in gulags and escaping from the Soviet Union.
