Latvians Keep Memory of Soviet Deportations Alive

Latvians gathered across the Baltic nation Monday to remember the tens of thousands of their countrymen deported to Siberia during half a century of Soviet occupation.

With 42,000 Latvians hauled off in cattle trucks on March 25, 1949 alone, the date is now Communist Genocide Memorial Day in Latvia, an EU member of two million people.

In the central village of Giksi, residents turned out to honour deportees, hailing a new edition of Latvian bestseller "Velupes Krasta", the diaries of local woman Melanija Vanaga, who spent 1941-1957 in a gulag.

After decades of forced silence, she published her harrowing tale of the struggle to survive the brutal labour camp conditions when Latvia regained its independence in 1991. She died in 1997.

Excerpts of "Melanie's Chronicles", a film adaptation of the book due to be released next year, were also screened by producers in Giksi Monday.

An original plan to film on location in Siberia proved impossible.

"It's still a very sensitive subject in Russia and not enough time has passed," producer Inese Boka-Grube told Agence France Presse.

Several "Siberian Children", or Latvians removed from home at a young age and brought up far from their roots, also attended.

"I left at age eight and spent the next 33 years in Siberia," 80-year-old Dzintars Zalitis from the central town of Sigulda told AFP.

"It's important that people remember these stories, and that we old people talk to the young ones."

At the Freedom Monument in the capital Riga, President Andris Berzins called the deportations "one of the worst crimes ever committed against the Latvian people".

He then warned of further depopulation today because of a wave of economic migration to the West.

According to last year's census data, the population has shrunk by more than 10 percent in a decade.