OZ BABY BOOMERS: BOOMERAMA

We hear on the farmer’s radio that the war with Japan has ended. The whole world is at peace, but my nerves are on edge because I have just discovered that Corporal Antons Prikulis has stolen my shaving implements.

He is a man of my height and a couple of years older. I have never fought with my fists before but this time I can’t control myself and challenge him. The fight ends with him having a bleeding nose and bruised face, laying flat on the ground. The spectators enjoyed the fight but I did not. I don’t like fighting and am not proud of my victory.

I felt sick all day but I am better now. Beautiful evening after the thunderstorm. Clear air. I think tomorrow I will have to help the farmer again.

I feel great. I have a good appetite again. After lunch I work for the farmer. Holy poverty! For the whole afternoon's work I received two spoonfuls of mashed potatoes, small glass of boiled milk and one small slice of bread! But I am only a POW. What else can I ask for? In my own country, I am certain, the farmer would give you at least a full stomach for that work. I could eat 10 times what was given to me today.

Today is Sunday and I sleep till lunchtime. Mighty good soup. Thick with broad beans and calf meat. Also receive 600 grams of bread and a small tin of sardines. I finish the lot and for the first time in many months feel fully satisfied.

Early in the morning I went to the nearby town of Esens to look for work, but nobody needed me. I bought some cigarettes with the last of my money and sold them for a small profit. Our idiotic acting company commander made us perform some field exercises. It was raining and we all got soaking wet.

Today at 4am Japan accepted unconditional surrender. Peace. Today is my potato-peeling day. Good job. At least the time goes quickly. It is more than a year since I left home. Who knows how long before we can return there. We all firmly believe that the time will come when we all will be able to return home and resume our normal lives in an independent Latvia.

For the first time in four months I ate breakfast. That means we now have three meals a day. I still feel hungry most of the time but there is no more hunger pain like we felt at Fallingbostel.

No one in his right mind would return there while the Stalin’s terror rules the country.

Days go quickly now. We hear rumours that we soon will be able to leave Ostfriesland for formal Displaced Persons Camps. It’s a pity that Latvia is not free from the Bolshevik invaders. Our food is improving all the time. I am often satisfied and have a full stomach.

We hear that there are many thousands of Latvian refugees in DP Camps all over the Western part of Germany — all waiting for the Bolsheviks to leave our country. No one in his right mind would return there while the Stalin’s terror rules the country.

While we were on the farm at the Ostfriesland, I had no idea that another, much greater deportation of innocent people was being carried out by the Stalinists. That was followed by the even bigger deportations in 1949. Stalin’s aim to deport all the citizens of the Baltic States fell short when he died in 1953. But all those individuals and family groups whose names were on the deportation lists at the time of outbreak of war between Hitler and Stalin in 1940, plus many more, found their way to almost certain death in the permafrost of Siberia.

As autumn creeps up on us we start to feel the lack of warm clothing. Our pants and shirts are falling apart. I have no more paper left and have to stop writing.

More and more information filtered through about Latvians, Estonians and Lithuanians living in DP camps in Western German towns and cities. Then the first Latvian civilian visitors appeared in our area, searching for relatives. The message was that there were no guards nor any restrictions to us leaving this area, if only we had somewhere to go.

Newspapers that we occasionally saw still sung glory to Stalin and his fellow murderers but some doubts were starting to be raised about his actions. The Allied military were puzzled about why there was such resistance by the forced labourers and POWs to go home. They couldn’t believe that all of them were traitors and Nazi supporters and spies, as painted by the Soviet authorities. When many chose suicide rather than forced repatriation, more doubts are raised about Stalin’s goodwill and kindness.

Everybody talked about the horrors unleashed by British Cabinet Minister Harold Macmillan when the 70,000 or so Cossaks and White Russians were forcefully transported over to the Russian authorities in Austria, only to be executed by the NKVD as soon the British had left.

The tide was slowly turning. Stalin’s actions in forcefully removing legitimate governments in more and more European countries and replacing them with his own puppet governments was leaving a bad taste in the mouths of many Western leaders. The war had been started to free oppressed nations from Hitler’s claws. It had achieved almost the opposite. Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Rumania, part of Austria, part Germany, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia were under Bolshevik rule, and there suspicions that the rest of Europe could follow.

As time went by it become more and more evident to us that the vast masses of Western Europeans, and even more so the Americans, had little or no knowledge about the true face of the Bolsheviks, the regime they had so ardently supported during the war years. The Western press had pointed a very rosy picture of Stalin and his henchmen. Little did they know that their admired and adored darling, Stalin, had murdered several millions of his own kin before Hitler murdered his first Jew. They could not comprehend why people like ourselves would not want to return to our homeland while the Bolsheviks were there.

To make things worse for us, since the end of the war we had been kept together with the French, Belgian, Dutch and Norwegian volunteers who had fought against the Western Allies and their own nationals. We were all regarded traitors to our homelands and, as such, deserving of punishment.

The fact that our homeland had been occupied at the beginning of the war by the Soviets, that during a year of occupation a wave of terror had been unleashed, with hundreds of thousands of innocent people being murdered or sent to Siberia, was unknown to the average Westerner.

The Western military administrators of post-war Western Europe could only see that for some reason we had no wish to return home and that reason could well be that we had done something wrong there and were afraid to face up to it. They could not understand that we sided with our centuries-old adversaries, the Germans, against their friends and allies, the Bolsheviks.

The truth only slowly filtered through. We didn’t start the war. We didn’t invade Russia or Germany. We didn’t ask the Bolsheviks, nor the Hitlerites, to liberate us from anything. We were the victims of Stalin’s and Hitler’s crimes. Through no fault of our own we had lost our homeland and our loved ones. And those left behind in our homeland are still suffering under the Soviet yoke.

The Bolsheviks fully exploited the West’s ignorance and put a lot of pressure on the Western Occupation Forces in Germany to forcefully repatriate all Soviet citizens — in whose numbers they wrongfully included also the citizens of the Baltic States.

The Westerners couldn’t understand why even the Russian forced labourers, ex-concentration camp inmates, ex-servicemen and even large numbers of their military officers didn’t want to return to their “workers paradise”. How could the Westerners know that those Soviet citizens who had been in contact with Western-style life were “contaminated” in the eyes of Bolshevik officialdom and therefore untrustworthy?

Their own mistreated and starved population could get wrong ideas. For decades they had been told that living in the Soviet Union was far better than anywhere else in the world. Tto keep the myth of the superiority of the Soviet system alive the local population had to be “protected” from the homecomers from the West.

The trainloads of repatriated Soviet citizens were directed in the shortest possible way to the destination, where they could not do any harm to the system — Gulag Archipelago, to sweat out the “wrong” ideas. Many prominent military officers who had been decorated for bravery at the Front, such as Solzenitsin and Kopelev, all found themselves in the Gulag camps after the war.

In the meantime, Stalin’s behaviour in Europe after the war gradually opened the eyes of the Western leaders. In a short space of time, half of Europe was under his control. He was dismantling industry in Germany, not only in the Soviet Zone but also on the Western side. The West started to learn not to trust Stalin and his mates, but it was too late for those millions of once-free Europeans forced to live under the heavy shadow of Bolshevism.