SIBERIAN EXILES - Part 1 Lithuania

‘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.