Because I’m often asked, I’ll start off by clarifying that I’m not writing my family memories, nor am I of Latvian lineage. My area of interest and chosen subject is twentieth century Latvian history and the Latvians who lived it.
It began with a Latvian man I employed in 1988, for this writing I’ll call him Edgars. Late afternoon on a quiet March day, I noticed him standing at the office window, watching the street where several birthday hats wearing neighborhood nine-year-olds were attempting skateboard stunts, while eating ice cream cones. Edgars, who seldom spoke, began telling me about his own life as a nine -year-old. By the age of nine, he’d lived through four years of enemy occupation and war and had never tasted ice cream. On his ninth birthday he was following his mother and brother on their trek from the boys’ birthplace, Bauska Latvia, to the Baltic Sea coastal city, Liepaja. Like thousands of Latvians, they were fleeing ahead of the rapidly approaching Soviet Army.
I thought I knew about World War II in Europe. That day, I found that I knew nothing about what had occurred in the Baltic States and specifically in Edgars’s native country, Latvia.
Over the next several months, after hearing more of Edgars’s childhood memories, I looked for additional information. I learned that the three independent Baltic States: Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania had been invaded and occupied by the Soviet Russians in June 1940.
Then, in June 1941, the Germans invaded and were in control of the Baltic States until the autumn of 1944 when the Soviet Army returned. Many people, remembering their horrific year under Soviet domination, June 1940 – June 1941, and fearing what was to come, chose to flee.
The Soviet’s considered Edgars’s mother, a physician, to be a threat to the regime because of her education. She feared she would be deported or killed. With the family’s important papers and photographs, a tiny box of soil from her garden, and three satchels of clothing, she and Edgars (9) and Kārlis (10) set out for Liepaja.
I knew that Edgars’s father, a Latvian Army officer who resisted the Soviet’s first occupation, had been killed by the Soviets in August 1940. Late one afternoon, when we had locked the office for the day, a customer knocked on the door and put a payment envelope through the mail slot. Edgars was shaken. “That knock,” he said. “I was five when a Russian knocked on our door, gave my brother and me our father’s bloody uniform shirt, and said ‘give it to the bitch so she knows we killed the traitor.’ Mother screamed and cried and told us our father was a hero; he’d been trying to rid Latvia of the thieving Russians.”
Edgars was deeply ashamed of his PTSD. Following his brother’s suicide, Edgars was occasionally under a doctor’s care and on medication but, for the most part, he dealt with his demons silently and alone. The last time I saw him, he said, “assign a fake name to me when you write.”
I was stunned by his request. Although I was searching for information about the 1940 Soviet takeover and Latvians who had resisted the Soviets, I was not planning to write about Edgars’s life.
The decision to write about those who resisted came in 1990 when I read that Latvia had declared that what had been done to the country in 1940 was invalid under international law and asserted that Latvia’s independence still legally existed. The wheels of change were turning.
When Latvia regained her freedom in 1991, new materials about Latvia’s history, written in or translated to English, began appearing. I was able to interview three women who, with their families, had left Latvia in 1944 at the ages of eleven, thirteen and fourteen.
When I met and interviewed Dr. Zaiga Phillips, I knew I had the basis for my historical novel: “Still the Caretaker: A Latvian Girl’s Journey.” My writing turned from note taking to working on a manuscript.
In 2016, Zaiga and I made a trip to Latvia. We were able to see her childhood home in Ape Latvia and the farmhouse and outbuildings that belonged to her Auntie Zelma and cousins Velta and Radvilis. We visited her church and many of the places of her childhood. We drove much of the route Zaiga, her mother, grandmother and little brother walked while fleeing ahead of the Soviet Army in 1944 and walked along the Liepaja docks where the family boarded a German troop ship and left Latvia.
Immersing myself in Latvia, eating the food, breathing the air, walking the lanes and meadows and absorbing the feel of places mentioned in my writings was a crucial and enriching part of my research.
And so, dear reader, this is how my writing began and evolved. I have two additional books roughed out. The second book, which I’m working on now, is the story of a middle-aged seamstress who was active in the resistance and fled to Gotland Island in 1944. The third book will feature a storyteller woman from Staicele Latvia whose efforts to resist the occupation ended tragically.
