"Do Not Forget, You are Not in Lithuania"

June 14th, 1941, my grandparents Kazimieras Klimauskas, Apolonija Klimauskienė, and aunt Daina were loaded onto trains and exiled to Siberia. My mother, Vida, was in hospital and left behind. Orphaned, she eventually made it to America. After Lithuanian independence, I me Daina. In 2014, she showed me her writings about her youth in Siberia. I was impressed by how vividly Daina wrote. Though the stories portray the hardship of life in Siberia, they also describe a joy that I had not seen in other accounts of deportation. Each photograph is accompanied by a story from Daina’s youth in English and Lithuanian. The photos are my interpretations of how Diana might have felt, or how the situation might have appeared through her eyes. I hope my photographs make the viewer momentarily feel the real experiences that Daina describes in her writing. The photographs are both silver gelatin and digital images. I am working to develop this project into a dual language book. Daina is still living in Kaunas, and sadly, she is seeing history repeat itself with the recent events in Ukraine. I ask myself how is this story relevant given the current world situation? But I believe its important not to forget the deportation of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, Ukrainians, Poles, Finns, Russians, Estonians and many others to Siberia over the last 80 years, and to honor how they survived together in such challenging conditions.