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The environment, as well as the school, shaped the personality acting through the Russian culture and spirit. However, the year of high school graduation was also the year of repatriation. He acquired a specialty, had an interesting job, spent most of his life in the city of Viesintai and still lives there.
The experiences of exile are immortalized in several dozen graphic drawings, whose exhibition is memorable on June 14, to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the first mass deportation, inaugurated at the Anykščiai Narrow Way Museum, next to the carriage of exile.
First memories
This special man was born on the outskirts of Lithuania, in Lazdijai, in the family of the border policeman Juozas Klimašauskas. Dad, who came from Vidžiai in present-day Belarus, was orphaned after the First World War, along with several teenagers of a similar fate came to Lithuania, lived with farmers near Utena, studied at a craft school, served in the army in Klaipėda.
I liked it, but I couldn’t stay, but I was already happy when I got married, I got a service in the border police. The border guards of that time were said to dream of serving on the most peaceful border with fraternal Latvia, and there were constant incidents on the Polish border.
When the Soviets occupied Lithuania in the summer of 1940, J. Klimašauskas was fired and the family, parents of three-year-old Alfred and his younger sister Aurelia, left for their mother’s homeland, the village of Nemakščiai near Utena. However, Soviet officials and their assistants also found Klimašausk there.
His father was arrested in late May 1941, sentenced to ten years, and imprisoned in the Rešiotai camps. The mother and children were taken on June 14 and transported from Utena station in a cattle car with many brothers and sisters to Švenčionėliai. The journey continued on high-speed trains, from New Vilnius to Moscow, and then to the city of Barnaul in the Altai Territory.
A. Klimašauskas said that he remembers those days a little, although in a very vague, fragmentary way, after all, he was only four years old. Then only a few unexpected events escalated: a huge fire in a bakery, the teenagers’ revelry hitting a huge snake crawling near the barracks, and a long queue for bread and soup. After crossing the five-year age limit, the memory captured almost everything the boy saw and heard …
Sister’s tragedy
This happened in the city of Barnaul. Several families were housed in an empty school, in a large room: the benches pushed to the edges, the deportees sleeping on the floor. It was summer. Younger children began to develop measles.
Klimašauskiukai also fell ill. When they recovered, the mother contracted typhoid fever, a terrible contagious disease. They isolated her and took her to the hospital. The children were left in the care of, although very good, strangers.
On the way to the hospital, the mother asked that all things be exchanged for food so that only the children would survive. They began to recover and the sister was the first to make amends. But somehow he fell and died unexpectedly. Strangers buried somewhere in the city cemetery. When the mother returned, she found her son still sick, calling out his name, but he lay silently, so weak that he had no strength to respond.
Live, work, live in the far north …
He lived in the Yuzhakov settlement for the first few months, after which a large number of deportees were placed in carts and driven further north to the Lena River. There he was sitting on a barge towed by a smoke-filled locomotive. I swam for a few days. They often stopped, landing hordes of people. Elena Klimašauskienė and her son were taken to the Laptev Sea.
The location on the rocky, clear and ugly shore of the Laptev Sea was called Bikovmiši. There, the men and women of the Russian commander built yurts: a lawn was laid on the wooden frames, leaving openings for the windows. There was no glass, so they were “glazed” only when the cold started, they covered them with chunks of ice and filled the cracks with snow. It was terribly humid inside, the loungers huddled next to each other, heating up from a stove made from a cut metal barrel.
The deportees were taken to work: most fished at sea. In summer, they sailed in large boats: four rowed and two cast nets. In winter, the plows were crossed in thick ice and the fish passed through them, submerged in nets. For work, they received only 500 grams of bread, the ration of those who did not work was even less, they gave maybe half a kilo of sugar and the same amount of fat or butter for one more month. And know. Although very controlled, the women, interfering deep under their clothes, brought fish. It was probably the party then.
The previous lives of deportees who entered the Great River Islands are much more difficult. Especially in Trofimovsk, where deportees died simply for their families. After a few months, the clothes and shoes of the condemned were completely torn. Tailors and shoes have just been stolen. E. Klimašauskienė was a very good seamstress.
A fateful trip to the doctor
The woman’s life with her son was difficult, it soon became clear that the baby had vision problems. The caring mother asked the commander to go to the doctor on Tiki. There, a Jew who had little knowledge of medicine, probably completed only two courses, and a strange last name, Churchill, worked there as a doctor. As much as she helped there, but when it became clear that the woman was a seamstress, the city administration quickly arranged for her to be moved to live with them. Thus, the deportees from Lithuania settled in the port city.
The Lithuanian mother distinguished herself by being very good, by understanding fashion and by being able to sew the best clothes for intelligent civil servants. And American allied ships from Alaska kept coming to Tiki. They brought food, military equipment, ammunition, and other goods to the Soviets. The officers acquired the best materials from the American sailors. E. Klimašauskienė sewed the best clothes from these materials. Life has improved a lot; after all, living in a normal apartment with electricity, there was nowhere to bathe.
Way home
The deportees could only study in Russian schools. After beginning his primary education in the settlements, A. Klimašauskas attended a Russian school in Tiki, in 1950-1956. He had already studied at Okliominsk High School and had graduated because he and his mother had been transferred to milder climates, albeit in Yakutia itself.
Immediately after 1951, a father who had survived the death camps approached them. He spoke about the horrors of Rešiotai, about the fact that the first two winters were the most furious. The poorly fed and poorly dressed prisoners were forced to work hard, so out of more than four thousand, just over four hundred survived, killing roughly ninety percent. The real genocide.
A. Klimašauskas returned to Lithuania in 1959. At the beginning of the 19th century, he stayed in Vilnius and was preparing to study aviation or law, but, as a former deportee, he was not accepted. He managed to enter the Vilnius Electromechanical Technical School, a Russian-speaking group. He graduated with honors as a radio and broadcasting technician. For seven years, he worked as a teacher of electrical and radio materials, industrial electronics, pulse technology, and drawing at the same technical school.
Year in public
While building a television and radio broadcasting station in Viešintai, a technical teacher working there offered to move to the village. You will no longer have to live in a bedroom, get an apartment, go around lakes, forests, improve your health. Persuaded. 1969 A. Klimašauskas came to the town of the Anykščiai district, where he still lives. He worked as a shift manager for a television station, an engineer from 1970 to 1997.
The vocation of teacher has become seductive: since 1973. He replaced the teachers in the schools of Viesintai and Surdegis: he taught astronomy, physics and technology. The difficulties experienced were gradually forgotten, and the ancient, dirty and ruined city of Viešintai grew, was beautified, and city-like amenities and services appeared. The children also grew and learned.
There was time and hobbies. Having made this one out of metal, he now works as a carpenter, but his greatest passion is gluing model airplanes. Not only world famous aviation aircraft, but also its own construction. The main materials – wood, thick paper – cotton and glue. Some with large wings over a meter in diameter. It will still have two models of the legendary “Lituanica”, the tough German military “Junkers – 87”.
He still writes poems, is a member of the “Marčiupys” literary club, his poems are published in collections, and in 2015 he prepared and published a collection of his memoir poetry “Confession without tears”, which he illustrated with his own drawings. Dad was encouraged to draw what he had to experience in exile.
Knowing her son’s abilities, she suggested capturing with drawings what no one had captured with photographs. So he created sketches and then discussed and clarified with his father. Thus, several dozen drawings captured not only the plight of deportees in the Laptev Sea, but also the plight of political prisoners in the Riotiot camp. The exhibition of several dozen dark pencil drawings “Life in Exile” is on display at the Anykščiai Library and the Museum of Local Customs in Utena.
Can this happen again?
He never felt any anger, great remorse for the experiences he had lived through. After all, violence is created by anger and fear. As far as I knew, ordinary Russians always behaved with respect, never humiliated, considered equal.
When a mother in exile sewed in private, she and her son ate whatever the rank of the official, planting them together, if at that time they organized a party, inviting them to have fun. The violence was spread by people who were also raped and who could not choose much. After surviving the anxiety of the coup in Russia after Lithuania became an independent state.
Then the Soviet soldiers occupied the public television tower and stopped broadcasting. However, they survived only a few days, because after the lost blows in Moscow, the foreign army quickly withdrew from our country.
