June 14th

Today was one of the Victims of Communism Genocide Memorial Days in Latvia (the other is March 25). On this day in 1941 15,424 deported on were deported to Siberia and other regions of the Soviet Union, of these 46.5 percent were women, and 10 percent were children below the age of 10. While this number might not seem very big to many Americans it was huge for a nation of 2 million people. Additionally, the people that were targeted during this deportation were the intelligentsia and other people considered to be unreliable or dangerous to the totalitarian Communist regime. I went to the Occupation Museum today to take part in the memorial. I was chatting with some of my former colleagues (I worked at the museum in the summer of 2005) in English and this lady came up to us and started telling us that she was deported at the age of 7 to Siberia. She asked my friend to translate and I said I spoke Latvian so she continued telling me her story and how some of her family members didn't survive the deportation. She said that because I was a foreigner it was important for me to understand what the Latvians had gone through. It was really one of those experiences that I will remember for the rest of the my life. Here are the pictures from the memorial day.



The president's speech
Flower laying