Suffering, death, and homeland in the memoirs of Lithuanian deportees

ENDuring 1940–1953, about 132,000 people from Lithuania were deported to remote areas of the Soviet Union, where they suffered from hunger and the need to work excessively to survive and faced the deaths of their loved ones and acquaintances. At the end of the Soviet era, memoirs of the deportees of the Soviet regime began to be published in great numbers in Lithuania. Discussing the life stories of the deportees, this chapter analyzes the concept of “homeland” as a sacred land of the living and the dead. The concept makes a link between individual stories and collective stories, providing individual and collective meaning for experiences of suffering, facing death, and rejection by compatriots upon return to Lithuania. The term “homeland” also highlights the foundation for a unified national experience. The analysis is based on collections of memoirs of deportee life published in 1989–1994 and some memoirs published a few years later. A greater part of the narratives analyzed were written by people deported in 1941.