My Russian Family

by Lilia Sariecheva

  Their ordeal strongly affected their lives. When Ivan was about 30 years of age, he had several surgeries and half of his lungs removed, but they could not cure him. He married a slender attractive girl and somewhere around 1964 they had a child named Boris. It is believed that Ivan lived until 1985. Little information exists concerning his family or how he died.

  Galena eventually moved into a state-run orphanage where she was well cared for. This would be around 1947, about the same time Ottar died. She finished school in the orphanage and they provided her with job training as a plasterer/painter in construction. She worked hard and eventually married a Russian military man named Vyacheslav about 1960 and they had a son Sergey in 1961. They shared love and a good life until he transferred back to Russia where his parents lived. Galena’s mother-in-law was a shrew who complained about her son’s wife continuously: she was not good enough, she was not educated enough, she possessed no social background. Resentment may have been part of her problem because even back then Moscow treated the 14 other republics of the USSR better than the Republic of Russia. It involved the availability and quality of food, building supplies, consumer goods, etc. This was a policy (a propaganda ploy) that the Kremlin utilized to show the world how good life was in countries under their control.

  Finally, Galena reluctantly returned to Latvia with their small child. She told her husband Vyacheslav to follow her if he loved her. Although he loved her very much, his mother was a stronger force and he never saw his wife again. They divorced and Galena married a Latvian man named Rihard. She died about 1992. Her son and his stepfather remained close and kept Galena’s memory alive. The widower Rihard was an excellent man. The son Sergey continued the line with a marriage and a son named Andre.

  Cousin Galena at her son’s wedding, 1980s.

  Shurra never married or even dated and finally eight years later, in 1953, her friend Misha located her. It had been a long hard search. At the war’s end Misha faced some difficult decisions. He wanted to go to Latvia. This involved crossing borders from Poland into Kaliningrad, then into Lithuania, and finally into Latvia and once there to find the Ottar’s farm near Tukums. All these borders were Russian controlled and required papers. It was general knowledge that Stalin’s paranoia led him to believe that all German prisoners-of-war were potential western spies, and the Red Power sent all these ex-prisoners to the Gulag Archipelago—there were millions of them. Misha had no papers and any attempt to get papers or to cross a border would result in his arrest and imprisonment.

  Europe had literally millions of displaced persons on the move after the war. All this confusion made it easier to survive without papers. Many people had things that needed doing, but they had no money to pay for the work so it was typical to work illegally for board and room with no questions asked. After Stalin’s death in 1953, a sea change occurred and travel for Misha became much simpler.

  Only God and Misha knew how he survived for eight years or how he eventually obtained new legal papers. Did these papers have his correct name? My mom changed her name in the 1930s, as she did not want the last name of an aristocrat. Did her sisters and her mother with the same problem change their names also? Some evidence suggests they assumed the same last name that Mareika took, but nothing is clear on this. Every answer yields more unanswerable questions. The unspoken rule was, don’t ask, don’t tell, and don’t know too much in the Soviet Union or you will invite troubles.

  The couple who had never kissed, immediately married. They had a son Vassily in 1954 and shared many happy years in Ottar’s old house. I remember two visits to this house, once in 1962 with my mom and again several years later by myself when I was 17. Ottar had originally owned two houses on a small plot of land. One was on a small hill and this was the one he kept and later willed to Shurra. The other house was confiscated and converted into apartments for Russians living in Latvia. There was enough open land for all of these people to have a kitchen garden as was the custom.

  Shurra’s family continued to live in this house until the 1970s when the government moved them out to make way for a new state housing project. Their new home was an apartment in a high-rise apartment tower. Neither of them was educated beyond the 7th grade, as was typical for that time and place. Misha worked with his hands in a factory. Shurra wanted their son to stay in Latvia near them, so she sent him to a Latvian school to learn the language. She was worried about him being a Russian in the Latvian school so she accepted a “cleaning position during school hours” at that school so she could be near him. Shurra and Misha’s health care and retirement pension came from the state and so they made a good life. When their son Vassily became a young man, he graduated from an engineering school in Riga, the capital of Latvia. He married a girl named Alla and from this blessed union came both a boy Mikhail in 1982 and a girl Irena in 1986.

  Shurra always had a strong belief that someone must survive to keep the bloodline going and somehow all three of the St. Petersburg victims managed to accomplish that goal. Surprisingly, the amazing Shurra did not die until 2004 at 77 years of age and her faithful husband Misha passed away in 2007 at the age of 89.

  One might argue that there was little difference between Hitler’s concentrations camps and Stalin’s Gulag. However, the former was political, short-lived and offered only a small chance of survival. The Gulag was more economical and there was always the likelihood of parole or outliving the terms of the sentence. Although, for those who died in them, any difference was immaterial.

  There is one last witness’s note for posterity that I must record. Many of the inhabitants of St. Petersburg were on trains bound for various places for various reasons, both during and after the siege. Whenever my mother Mareika heard that some would be passing through, she and other people gathered food and clothing and headed for the train station to show their support with gifts for these long-suffering, unhealthy, and underweight survivors who had endured so much. Moreover, she entertained the faint hope that she might meet her sisters or brother or even someone who knew of them. Of course, this never happened.

  Mom told me of an incident that occurred while she was on one of these mercy errands with Manya and other girls from her village. She had given away all that she had brought and was just standing and watching with her friends. Near them were some passengers, including a family with a mother wearing a long rich-looking fur coat. A man and a woman approached them and the woman cried out, “That is a nice coat you have. I would like to have it! Do you want to trade it for this sack of flour?” She pointed to the flour her male companion carried.

  “Of course I do,” the frail mother replied as she slipped off the coat and glanced at her children. Her family carried the sack of flour when they returned to the train.

  The woman that instigated the trade was now preening in her new coat. My momma was furious and started yelling at her, “What did you do? Why did you do that? What will that poor woman use for a coat this winter? You know that they are from St. Petersburg. Why are you so greedy? You should be ashamed of yourself. That was sinful!”

  The man pulled the shocked woman to his side and they started to walk away. He turned his head toward my mom and growled, “Mind your own business, you crazy woman!”

  The human affliction called greed is always present in every population, even during these harsh times. It is a fact that a few of the many people carrying food and clothing to meet the trains demanded and got gold, jewelry, or other valuable goods as a condition of their generosity. My mother was always deeply ashamed that Russians would stoop that low. The incident bothered her for the rest of her life.

  Mother felt that if people were more religious, it would not have happened. I too was ashamed of their actions but I never believed that religious conviction would halt greedy activity. Who knows? Mother thought that the couple with the sack of flour were cruel. Maybe the poor woman who gave up her coat thought that they were like angels for providing her family with a large supply of food.

 
; 41. Torn Fabric

  For some unexplainable reason, most people think more about their past than about their future. Why? Maybe they are just getting older and they like to remember their youth when they were healthy and good-looking, even if they hadn’t been that happy. Maybe they want to learn lessons from their past and analyze them to avoid making the same mistakes in the future.

  Human beings have so many choices to make that many just choose the most realistic one and impatiently strive to reach their goals and make their dreams come true. There is not much time for them to think about their circumstances.

  Young people do not talk much about their past and older people do not talk much about their future. But sometimes the past and the future meet on the crossroads of life. Mostly, it happens through the relationships of parents and their children.

  My brother Slahva married when I was 13 years old, so there was only Mom, Dad, and me in our large apartment in Ryazan. We stayed there for the last nine years of his KGB work and then he retired. My parents loved each other very much and there was a respect and trust between them that lent great strength to their union. One of their commitments to keep their love ongoing was to take separate vacations. My mother’s annual 30-day vacation to the Black Sea was a respite for me because my father was not very concerned about what and how I ate, wore, or acted. My mother was always strict with me about my manners, how I dressed, what I said, how I walked, and so forth, and I loved her for that. Among her rules were: no elbows on the table, no reading during meals, eat only at the table, peel the potatoes before boiling, no legs crossed or folded under when sitting, no pants except for sports, no slumping, keep the neck straight and the head up, and go to bed at 9:00 p.m. sharp.

  Acquiring ladylike behavior was a difficult journey for me and it is possible that my mom’s standards for me were higher than the times or society demanded. When Mom was at the Black Sea, Dad and I even ate boiled potatoes with the skin. Looking back, this strikes me as an act of rebellion by my dad and me and this secret hooliganism brought us closer together. Now I believe that Dad did tell Mom of this and she kept quiet to foster the father-daughter bond.

  Dad and I always greatly enjoyed our relaxed time together and did whatever we felt like with no unpleasant consequences, but we still eagerly anticipated Mom’s return so we could resume the family togetherness. It was as if absence made the heart grow fonder. Mom always came back full of energy and she revitalized us.

  One year in the mid 1960s when my mother returned from her vacation at the Black Sea she was very different. Dad and I were expecting the usual exuberance, the emotional hugs and warm kisses, the smell of her perfume and the comfort of having her near. However, one look at Mom’s face revealed that something was very wrong. She was trying to smile but she was an emotional person and could not hide her feelings. She looked confused and despondent.

  “What happened to you? Are you sick? What’s going on?” Father’s voice was full of apprehension.

  We did not have to wait long for her explanation. It was a disturbing story she told. Mom said that at the end of her vacation she was lying in her lounge chair on the cozy beach of the small town where she was staying. She noticed a couple near her and she could not take her eyes off the man. The next day, they took a place that was more of a distance from where my mom usually stayed. My mother’s curiosity led to investigating the man and his wife. She found out their first and last names. She had never heard these names before but she was certain that she recognized the man.

  My mother walked along the beach looking for the couple but they immediately left when they spotted her at a distance. She spent about two more hours on the beach and then went back to the place where the couple stayed in hopes of meeting the man and talking to him. The clerk informed my mother, to her huge disappointment, that the couple originally planned to stay for a whole month but were there only two days. That same day they had come back from the beach and checked out, departing for parts unknown.

  Telling this story to my dad, my mom concluded, “I thought that my poor niece Galena could have her long lost father back, that he could again be part of her life. I thought that it could be such a happy moment for the orphan Galena—and for him—to meet each other after so many years of separation.

  My father took her hand and said, “Darling, maybe the man was not who you think he was.”

  “Yes, he was. It was Grigorie, Galena’s father.”

  Mother had met the militiaman Gregorie many times while she was living in St. Petersburg and he was dating her sister Vera. Mom knew him very well. She also knew that Dad could easily find Gregorie and she begged her husband to do so.

  My dad said sadly, “Let it go, dear. Just let it go!”

  Years later, mom admitted that dad’s advice was wise. Father undoubtedly had strong reasons for not sticking his nose into Gregorie’s life. Who knows what had happened to Gregorie? Maybe he had a dead man’s documents. Maybe he had been in the Gulag. Maybe he was protecting someone. Maybe the authorities were looking for him. Maybe he knew something that he should not.

  When you are a child, whatever happens to you, even a small event, can affect your future many long years later. Many people had their destiny turned inside out from the black winds of World War II which affected the very fabric of their lives.

  During my later years, as Mother related to me some of her childhood stories, it became apparent that she was the rebel in the family. Her older sister Vera and younger sister Shurra were well-behaved young girls but Mom got into fights, took off by herself into the woods, and was frequently in trouble with her mom. She reckoned that she was the favorite of her dad because he defended her actions and would not discipline her.

  The following is one story that Mother told several times over the years. One warm summer afternoon, as she and other children swam in the river, a local boy named Kesha was teasing her, pushing her under the water, and telling her to ask for mercy. Mareika finally retaliated and repeatedly pushed him under the water until he was screaming for mercy. Other boys told their mothers about the incident and the story got back to Lena. She told her daughter that she nearly drowned a boy and she must stand in a corner. When her father learned what had happened, he lifted the punishment, saying, “Well, she should-n’t have done that but she was only defending herself and there is no wrong in that!”

  Interestingly enough, 28 years later, in 1958, my mother was on a sentimental visit to this area of her childhood. When she detrained from the St. Petersburg train at the town of Malaya Vishera, she caught a local bus. But, since the bus didn’t go all the way to her destination, Mother had to get off and find other transportation. She was unsuccessful, though, and finally started to walk along the road, still looking for a ride. A passing lorry stopped and she heard a cheery voice, “Hey, girl, do you want a ride?”

  Then she and the driver locked eyes. “Mareika, is that you?”

  Mother responded, “Kesha, is that you?”

  She happily climbed into the lorry and they traded stories as he drove. Kesha had many wartime stories from his army days as a truck driver. She asked about their other childhood friends and he responded, “Let’s stop and take a break from this hard truck. There is a nice grove of new growth birches up there by the bend in the river. During the war, everything around here got wiped out, including the trees. But they are coming back.”

  He parked the truck in some shade. They got out and shared the gorgeous view and a bottle of water as they continued their conversation, “No one that we knew is still around. They are all gone. I was the only one, but now you are here. Are you going to stay?”

  Mother responded, “I am happily married with a family. I’m only here for a visit.”

  Kesha, disappointed, was silent for a moment, then he regained his cheerful mood and the couple continued reminiscing and enjoying their long ago past. That chance encounter was the highlight of Mother’s trip.

  Kesha mentioned to Mother that the wife of her
mother’s cousin lived in the area. Mother knew nothing of these relatives and was excited at the prospect of finding some of her mother Lena’s relatives. Kesha, being a local truck driver, was always making small business transactions with people and thus he knew many things about many people including who moved in and who moved out of the area. He knew that this woman had returned after the war and was living somewhere close by, although he did not know her specific address. Mom continued searching for her through a special address service department of the government that started in the 1920s and still exists today. After a few days, to her surprise, Mom found Anna’s address. She was ecstatic.

  Anna was very old and living with her grandson Yuri in a small, poor house. Mom saw that the grandson was handsome with blue eyes and blond hair. Anna, now just a shadow of the former beauty she had been, looked like a poor peasant woman who had lived a hard life. Mom identified herself and the woman started to cry hysterically. Afterwards, Mom thought that the crying was due to Anna’s guilty conscience. Anna welcomed Mom into her home and she stayed with her for two days.

  Mom asked about her family and Anna responded that she only knew about her grandson, who lived with her. She was very happy that Yuri was there to share her life and keep her company. She did not know where anyone else was; the other relatives had not returned. The Germans had occupied this area during the war, people had scattered, and their fate was unknown.

  Anna, Lena’s relative, about 1958.

  Mom invited them to visit her in Ryazan. The woman responded that she was too old and weak to travel but the boy would enjoy the visit. In September of that year, 1958, the young man Yuri arrived for a very pleasant visit which we all enjoyed. Mother was overjoyed to play hostess to her second cousin. She would ask the neighbors, “Look closely, do Yuri and I look alike? Can you tell that we are related?”