Suddenly, a Criminal Quotes

“Liels cilvēks kļūst nevis ar saviem 18 vai 20 gadiem, bet ar savu degsmi, ar mīlestību pret dabu, darbu, cilvēkiem. Nemirstīgs cilvēks kļūst, kad viņš savu darbu un mīlestību māk pacelt pāri savam cilvēkmūžam.”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“This was a leavetaking from near and dear ones, with whom I had spent sitxeen years, suffered away together. We had sorrowed together, been joyful together, worked together, and celebrated together. We had argued, had altercations, gossiped, lied about one another, but on important occasions — through joy, sorrow, tragedy — always been one solid, self-sacrificing family. I had helped the others the least, but been helped the most. I owed an enormous debt to every one of these guests, but it was impossible to put my gratitude into words. The language of tears was also already too trite and shallow. The Latvians did not expect anything in return for their love. They saw me off to the homeland as their sister.”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“Is it possible for a person, after such a childhood and adolescence, with a damaged body and soul, ever to feel completely free and happy — at all?”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“Here “laws” were made up on the spot, by those with “power and subterfuge”.”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“To here in Siberia, we were brought without tickets, stuffed into cattle cars like livestock. We were given water and at two-day intervals, warm food. We came here in convoys of one hundred cars in each, and the journey lasted three weeks. From the thirty people in my barred car, twelve remained in cemeteries in Siberia. On my return sixteen years later, I rode as the ghost of a human being, who has waded through the black abyss of suffering, in the hope of a rebirth into a human being. My”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“All at once, I felt the homeland as so very much mine, so close, so warm, so dear. Was it really necessary to be away for so long in order to truly understand how dear one’s homeland is? However,”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“The train continued on its way to Rīga. I could not peel my eyes from the window. On some hillock, an old friend from long-gone days rushed towards me: the grey rock. A sight for sore eyes after stone-less Siberia. Beside the large one, two smaller ones. One more. Another one. Now, this is the homeland! Homeland, in which my near and dear long-unseen rocks are greeting me. In Siberia, we felt the lack of rocks keenly, that is why they touched me so deeply now. The Latvian has grown up so symbiotically with the rock, just as he has with his land and his sky. I remembered a scene Pumpurs had described, about some refugee who had embraced the rock in the forest meadow of his home with both arms, pressed his forehead against its cold forehead, stopped suffering, and started being joyful. The land is the same. What had changed were the circumstances and people who also called it their own. A”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“Home at last! After such a long absence. And again, I remembered that I no longer had a home. Now, when it was most needed. But”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“While waiting at the counter, in my mind I went through my relatives here in Rīga, who had not been touched either by the war, or the black storm of the new era, but my thoughts did not stop at any one as a close relative to whom I would want to go for a visit without misgivings, not even for an hour. I was warned by the many letters sent by those who had returned home that “such folk are ashamed of us”, “in their high positions, they fear being related to us.” The women released in Siberia had written: “they feel put upon if they have to make a bed for a lousy, released criminal who was arrested in 1941 at the age of two and exiled for life to Siberia”. “They feel uncomfortable seeing their utterly dissipated relatives.” All of us had been traumatized, and we had lost our very sense of human worth. It was better to keep an appropriate distance from relatives and from acquaintances, and not to burden them with oneself, one’s joy, or one’s sorrow. Around”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia

“Slavery! It sounds archaic and perhaps even silly, and this word, too, people dared pronounce only in their hidden thoughts. “Slavery — it sounds menacing and perhaps not altogether true,” writes Ināra Egle on John’s day 1989 in Padomju Jaunatne in connection with the unrest in Uzbekhia. “But there is no other name for the empire-generated voiding of human rights, the lack of will to live an ordinary life…” The life of the kolkhoznik resembled closely that of our forefathers, consisting of the ordeals of the serf, the only difference being electricity for lighting in place of burning splinters and death camps instead of the gallows, camps in which his life, for the time remaining to him, is utilized to “raise communism”. I wander. November”
― Melānija Vanaga, Suddenly, a Criminal: Sixteen Years in Siberia