Claudia Heinermann's Projects

‘Siberian Exiles ‘ is a trilogy about the deportations from the Baltic States to Siberia under the Soviet regime. In three parts, eyewitnesses tell about the deportations from the Baltic states to Siberia under the Soviet regime, the organized resistance against the Soviet occupier, the life in the Gulag camps and the beginning of the Cold War. ‘Siberian Exiles Part 1- Lithuania’ focuses on the experiences of six Lithuanian survivors, who were deported as children to the Laptev Sea above the polar circle. During the first major mass deportation in 1941, their families were sent to the Altai region in the south of Siberia to cut down trees and work as farm labourers. In 1942, they were moved, along with three thousand other Lithuanians, to the delta of the Lena River to build up a fishing industry. The deportees had no housing, protective clothing, food or technical equipment. During snowstorms, they had to build their own huts with their bare hands. The exiles suffered from constant hunger and many illnesses such as scurvy. For many it became a death sentence. The Lithuanians shared their destiny with deportees from Finland and from Churapcha, a village in Yakutia, East Siberia. All lived under equally miserable conditions and many perished. Towards the end of the 1950s, the Lithuanians were finally allowed to return home, provided they could pay for the return journey themselves. However, even after returning to Lithuania, their lives were far from easy. As former exiles, they were discriminated against and held back in their opportunities. In 2018 Claudia Heinermann travelled to the Altai and Yakutia in search of traces of this remarkable chapter in history and recorded what she encountered there: the landscape of these remote areas, the villages, the culture, and the indigenous people with their still vivid memories of the time under Stalin.

Siberian Exiles is a trilogy in which eyewitnesses tell about the deportations from the Baltic states to Siberia under the Soviet regime (Part 1), the organized resistance against the Soviet occupier and the life in the Gulag camps (Part 2), and the beginning of the Cold War (Part 3). Freedom Fighters - Part 2 When the Soviets reoccupied the Baltic states in 1944, the atrocities of the first occupation were still fresh in people's minds. They knew that a new wave of violence and repression was expected. Because of this, there was a strong willingness among the population to fight for their independence. Many men headed to the forests to avoid the mobilization by the Soviets. An armed partisan war against the Soviets ensued, which lasted from 1944 to 1956. The total number of partisans, including women, is estimated at over 50,000. People in the surrounding of the forests helped the partisans to get food, medicine, bandages, and clothing. Some became informers, passing on important information or distributing the underground partisan newspaper. Others wrote and distributed patriotic pamphlets encouraging the population not to surrender to the occupier.

On 25 March 1949, Marju and her mother were deported to Siberia close to the border to Kazakhstan while Marjus father was send to a Gulag camp. In August 1953, Marju was out on the far steppe when she saw clouds surging and boiling in the distance. An incredible storm then blew up and everything went dark. She had never seen anything like it. In the early 1990s, Marju read about the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. She realized that she had been living next to this nuclear test site during her deportation. A mere 400 km away, surface tests were carried out, mushroom clouds rose into the sky, and the earth was contaminated with radioactivity. Between 1949 and 1989, the Soviet Union carried out a total of 456 nuclear tests at Semipalatinsk. According to the Kazakh health authorities, more than 1.6 million people were exposed to fall-out from the nuclear explosions. Marju understood that she had probably witnessed the detonation of the first hydrogen bomb on the steppe that day in August 1953. Claudia Heinermann travelled to Kazakhstan in search of traces of the Gulag camps where Marju’s father and other Baltic nationals had been imprisoned, and to uncover the history of the Semipalatinsk nuclear test site. During her travels Heinermann spent several days at the nuclear test site and visited Kurchatov, the former administrative centre of the test site. She talked to former employees, who had worked on the test site under an obligation of secrecy, and went to the villages that had been located in the fall-out zone for years. She spoke to eyewitnesses who in their youth had seen the mushroom clouds rise and felt the earth shake. But most important, she learned how the Gulag system was used to develop the Soviet Atomic Project. Without the prisoners the Soviet Union could not have developed Nuclear bombs in such a short time. Laboratories, nuclear reactors, factories, and uranium mines were needed. The test site Semipalatinsk was established so that the bomb could be tested. Gulag camps were set up at strategic locations to build the necessary infrastructure at lightning speed. To achieve this, the NKVD supplied thousands of forced labourers.

Wolfskinder A Post -War Story Hundreds of thousand Germans fled the advancing Red Army in East Prussia and Königsberg at the end of the Second World War. Time and again children got lost or went missing on the flight. While some witnessed the murder of members of their own family, others were forced to watch helplessly their siblings die of starvation, the grandparents die from weakness or the mother succumb to an epidemic. On their own, these kids now tried to survive in the forests of the Baltic states. Against hunger, cold and Soviet despotism, they waged a battle for life and death. Some found shelter with Lithuanian farmers who took them in secretly and barely able to care for them. In return they had to work the homestead. Most were denied an education and many can’t read or write to this day. In general most children were given a new identity and Lithuanian names to disguise their origin. For decades they remained behind the Iron Curtain without their fate being known to the general public. I first heard about the wolfskinder in 2011, and the topic has gripped me ever since. Around sixty wolf children are left in Lithuania today, most of whom are well advanced in years. To date I have visited 42 of them during a number of trips. I took portraits of them and documented their living conditions and residential environments as well as historic photographs and documents. I eventually created a photo book of all the collected material; the book was nominated for the Prix du Livre at Arles 2016 and for the Best Photobooks Kassel 2016 and it won in the first prize of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis 2017.

Enduring Srebrenica 21 years ago, Srebrenica (UN-protected) was attacked and captured by the Army of Republika Srpska under Ratko Mladić. Following the town's capture, all the men "of fighting age" who fell into Bosnian Serb hands were massacred in a systematically organized series of summary executions. 8.000 Muslim-men and -boys got murdered. The Srebrenica massacre is considered the worst massacre in post-World War II European history to this day. The traces of that drama are huge, trauma’s which are almost not possible to heal. Our lives moved on. The weekly news is about other subjects, new disasters need to be told. But the people who were involved in the war in Bosnia can't move on. Lots of them think about the war every day. Because of the genocide many women lost their husbands, suns, fathers, brothers, uncles, neighbors and good friends. Some of those victims are identified and reburied, others are still missing. A lot of mass graves are not opened yet. The ICMP (International Commission on Missing Persons) is working hard every day to identify body parts. For the identification, they use DNA material from family members, but also personal things which are found in the clothes and remaining. Every year on the 11th of July the bodies which are identified in the past year will be buried. Some families bury one of their loved ones every year. In Bosnia there are still several Muslim- and Serbian refugee camps with thousands of families that are living there. Some refugees go back to their old houses and try to rebuilt them. Others are afraid to go back, because of the memories and that what they will find there. Most of the people don't have the financial possibility to rebuild their houses and therefore they have to stay in the camps. When you travel through Bosnia you can’t escape of the sad view of all the wrecked houses, covered with bullet holes. The traces of war are there to be found everywhere. For instance warning signs for mines on trees. Among the UN soldiers there are men who can’t get over the past. Lots of them have trouble to move on with their lives. Some of them have PTSD and get treated for that. In my photo project I want to show the traces of the war in Bosnia. The troubled humans have to move one with their lives after such a dramatic event. I want to show the problems and trouble people are facing after the attention is gone because our attention is drawn by new disasters that need to be told.