Genre: Classic
Number of pages: 206
Publication date: Mar 14 2017
Dalia Grinkevičiūtė was deported at the age of fourteen in 1941 by the Soviets along with her mother, brother and thousands of other Lithuanians to the Siberian Arctic. A place historians have come to call the “special settlements“ —islands of misery to which Stalin deported mostly women and children (the men having already been sent to concentration camps).This book is her legacy. She wrote it on her first escape at the age of 22 and kept it in a box, which she buried fearing the KGB might read it. A few months later she got caught again. In 1991, four years after her death, her memoirs were found and were celebrated like a miracle by a national event.
“Dalia Grinkevičiūtė develops through the destruction of her humanity according to the soviet plan an incredible force of language one can‘t escape. It is not the pathetic story of a hero but the story of a constant indignation and self-assertation, a literary document like they are only a few of them.“
Regina Mönch, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
“Grinkevičiūtė‘s book is a distressing historic document but also the evidence of a literary work of great significance.“
Andreas Breitenstein, Neue Zürcher Zeitung