Press release, 14 June 2014
A moment from the solemn commemoration of the Day of Mourning and Hope and the Day of Occupation and Genocide. Photo by Olga Posaškova, Office of the Seimas
Your Excellency President of the Republic of Lithuania, Prime Minister, Chairman of the Supreme Council – Reconstituent Seimas of the Republic of Lithuania, dear fellow Members of Parliament, Members of Government, Signatories to the 11 March Act of Independence of Lithuania, Excellencies Ambassadors, distinguished guests,
Lithuania annually commemorates and rekindles the memories of 14 June 1941. This day marks the beginning of mass deportations and cruel genocide.
On 14 June 1941, under orders from Moscow, mass arrests and deportation to Siberia began simultaneously in all the three Baltic States: Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia. People were relentlessly transported eastwards in overcrowded railway cattle cars. Most of them were not going to come back. Overcrowded trucks carried teachers, students, lawyers, civil servants, doctors, farmers and their families, babies and the elderly who could barely walk, from cities, towns and villages. In railway stations, men were separated from their families and placed into separate cattle cars.
Innocent, unaware of the reasons for deportation, they all went to the cattle cars not knowing that they were destined for death, unaware that they were hugging their relatives for the last time.
I invite you to observe a minute of silence in honour of the dead and tortured to death in deportation.
Thank you.
In preparation for this speech, I flipped through many a book of memories from the exile in an attempt to feel what it must have felt for them, to feel their suffering and endless love for their homeland, and their hope to survive and return home, to their homeland.
I want to quote the memories of Dalia Grinkevičiūtė from her book “Lithuanians by the Laptev Sea.”
“(…) It took us about three months to get to the North. First, we travelled in crowded cattle cars, with no room to sit down or change the position of the body. Later, we went by the Angara River in barges, and in trucks through uninhabited forests from the Angara to the Lena River. Later barges took us by the Lena River directly to the North, farther and farther up North. We were already about 800 kilometres north of the Arctic Circle.
Forests and bushes thinned and disappeared, we could see no more settlements along the shore. Where was this taking us? Even the river banks were no longer visible; water surrounded us as far as the eye could see...
The Lena River estuary. The Laptev Sea. The icy breath of the ocean.
Finally we stopped. An uninhabited island stood before us. There was nothing. No human trace, neither a house nor a yurt, neither trees, shrubs, nor grass. We were in a dire permafrost region with tundra vegetation consisting of barely a thin layer of moss... “
“(...) The wife of a printing house worker died in our barrack and her dead body lied in the barrack for several full days. When Matulis died, his wife kept this in secret for a week and slept near the corpse to receive his ration of bread. However, she soon died of starvation. Marcinkevičius, a 70-year-old man, feeling impending death, implored with me to bury him so that dogs and white foxes would not trample his bones...“
“(...) Starving children used to scrape snow from icy windows with their hands and eat it. Children died one after another. Corpse carriers would often find bags with dead children’s skeletons on the snow at the door leading to the children’s barrack. No one knew the number of children’s corpses in the bags...”
These and other memories are part and parcel of our nation’s history we have no right to forget...
This was a meticulously drafted plan of moral defeat and massacre of the nation at work. Labour camps and prisons were packed with people in pain and despair from torture and starvation.
The survivors can still hear the rumble of the cattle cars; their hearts are still in horror and despair over the loss of their loved ones and over the crippled destinies. Today, members of our families who have gone through all the atrocities of deportation still cannot forget the terrible poverty, debilitating labour and inhumane living conditions, fierce physical and mental abuse, and the days marked by the omen of imminent death...
During the past 73 years, a number of new generations have grown up in Lithuania, but the tragic events of June 1941 have kept our hearts in distress.
Apart from the tragedy of 14 June 1941, our country had other tragedies to endure. Our nation was under attack for decades. In many ways, our foes sought to rewrite history, to erase and destroy our nation’s historical memory, and deny the repression and genocide imposed by the occupant authorities, but they failed.
Lithuania’s people managed to resist repression, deportation, massacre and imprisonment. The love for their homeland, faith, hope, and resistance to the current situation inspired them to resist and fight.
It is now up to us to pass on the experience of our parents and grandparents to future generations, so that young people stand on their dignity in support for the cause of Lithuania’s Freedom and Independence.
