80th Anniversary of Soviet Deportations from Baltic States Commemorated with Exhibition in Prague
An exhibition “Under the Alien Sky”, dedicated to the 80th anniversary of the first Soviet deportations from the Baltic States, opened at the Lithuanian Embassy in Prague today. The President of the Czech Senate Miloš Vystrčil, as well as other politicians, officials, diplomats residing in Prague, and representatives of the Czech Lithuanian community, attended the event.
“It is important that we have the courage to talk about tragic events as well, because without courage, our most important qualities will not be able to manifest. I thank Lithuania, and the Lithuanian Embassy, taking care not only of themselves, but also of others. I also invite everyone to protect our own skies, so that they are not taken away from us", said the President of the Senate. Mr. Vystrčil also thanked the embassy for the tense cooperation in recent weeks preparing the visit of Belarusian leader Sviatlana Tikhanovskaya to the Czech Republic last week.
The exhibition represents the documented materials about the life that the repressed and deported people had to endure in Siberia in the 1940s and 50s. Compiled by the Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Research Centre, the exhibition was first presented in 2011. However, its current edition includes Czech translations and the personal history of Ambassador Laimonas Talat-Kelpša's family. “My grandfather was deported to Siberia on June 14, 1941, when he was only 17. My grandmother was forced to flee to Siberia because her mother had already been arrested and only thanks to the kind people’s warning she avoided the arrest herself. My father was born and raised in Vorkuta. So if the Stalinist terror seems a distant past to many in Europe, I would say: no, its legacy is still here, with us; the victims of terror are still alive and still asking ‘Why us?’, says Ambassador Talat-Kelpša.
In his view, combining collective memory and personal recollections allows the viewer to get a more complete picture of what was going on during the soviet occupation of the Baltic States.
On June 14, 1941, the Soviet authorities started mass deportations of the Lithuanian population to Siberia. In few days alone, the Soviets deported, killed and imprisoned about 23,000 people, of which 5,000 were children. In total, by 1953, about 130,000 people had been deported from Lithuania, while another 156,000 were jailed.
