How I Became A Comrade: An American Growing Up In Siberian Exile

By John E. Armonas and A. Ruksenas

An American child deported with his mother to Siberia, torn from her when she is given additional punishment at hard labor in the notorious GULAG, is raised as a Soviet in order to survive. This is a true story of survival, adaptation, and ultimate triumph over injustice.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jun 11, 2013
• ISBN: 9780983233084

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lifetime.

Introduction

Love of Country is a universal sentiment. In my case it was somewhat complicated. I’m an American who was born in Lithuania, spent my formative years in Siberian exile under a totalitarian system, released to the United States by Premier Nikita Khrushchev at the height of the Cold War, and introduced to democracy at the age of 20.

I was taught in childhood that soviet dictator Josef Stalin was the Sun. I was taught that America was a degenerate capitalist country, that religion is an opiate of the people, and that the strict ideological discipline wielded by the secret police would lead to perfect Communism.

When I arrived in the United States, I was told that America is Number One, that Soviet Communism was America’s greatest threat, and that individual liberty was the core of a successful society. My mother, Barbara, who had spent time in America before World War II, told me wonderful stories about America when I was a child, but it remained a distant, imaginary place where my father, John, and sister, Donna, lived. I was eager to talk about America with friends and classmates, but couldn’t because it was a taboo subject.

Why my father and sister lived in America and I with my mother lived in Lithuania, later to be deported to Siberia, is the subject of this book. We were torn apart by cataclysmic events pitting Nazi and Soviet Totalitarianism against Western Democracy.

In America, I soon discovered that I had unfettered access to books and could speak openly with anyone I pleased. In order to understand the conflicting forces that shaped my early life, I absorbed myself in reading and research. Years later, as financial conditions allowed, I began to visit places that I previously knew only on maps in a Siberian school room.

In courses on Western Civilization, I became familiar with the 18th Century philosopher, Edmund Burke, considered the founder of modern conservatism. I remember him in particular, because my middle name is also Edmund; after the owner of the estate from which my father bought his farm in Lithuania. More important for me, Edmund Burke ignored the dogmas of all major religions and chose philosophy as a foundation for his life. Since I was not brought up with religion as a guiding light–in fact it was strictly forbidden under the Soviets–Burke’s choice appealed to me.

I found comfort in his observation that: In order to love one’s country, one’s country ought to be lovely. The nature of the State and how it interacts with its subjects determines whether an individual can survive or thrive, and to what extent he can love his country.

During the first eight years of my life in Lithuania, most of what I remember was not very positive. War, German soldiers, Russian soldiers, sickness, knocks on the window or door in the middle of the night by anti-Soviet partisans or Soviet secret police provocateurs. That was not a very secure or positive atmosphere for a child–or anyone for that matter.

In Siberia Mother and I were enemies of the people, struggling to survive, until Mother was given an additional 25 year prison term for being an American spy. Then I became Ivan an orphan raised as a Soviet in the Soviet system and in time absorbed into the Soviet Army as a child soldier–my only chance for a decent future and continuing education.

Upon our eventual return to Soviet-occupied Lithuania, Mother and I were viewed with suspicion and fear by former neighbors who were afraid of being associated with us. It was difficult to fit in back home, especially when Mother returned illegally.

Consequently, I applied for a coveted position for higher education in Russia, where, as a former child soldier in the Red Army, I was able to successfully compete. Still, because of my background and family ties to America, I had to pursue a non-sensitive field–forestry, where career opportunities most likely would have been back in the Siberian taiga.

Under dramatic, well-publicized circumstances prompted by my father’s and sister’s decades long appeals, my mother and I were finally allowed out of the USSR and arrived in the United States in 1960, where, at the age of 20, I started life, as if all over again.

In the Soviet Union there were official limitations. In the United States, there were boundless opportunities. I learned English, studied hard, and found that individual initiative–no matter under what political system it is practiced–is the key to survival and to success. Here, I was able to get an excellent education, learn a useful specialty, and start a meaningful career. America allowed me to do all that and become financially independent.

For me, there is no better satisfaction or sense of pride than knowing you can make it on your own without an inheritance or government intervention. I grew up under a strict socialist system, which required that everyone work. If a person did not have a job he or she was labeled a parasite and sent to labor camps in Siberia– the notorious GULAG. If a person had a measure of individual success, he or she was labeled an exploiter and sent to the same labor camps. The motto of the GULAG was: If you don’t know how to work, we’ll teach you. If you don’t want to work, we’ll force you.

That was an unfortunate and ultimately fatal way to rule a State. The Soviets stifled initiative. When every aspect of life is dictated from the top, life becomes drudgery.

I’ve lived here more than 53 years and observed the evolution of liberal and conservative policies on issues affecting our lives and the future of our Republic. I believe that only living in a truly free society, unconstrained by big government, can the talents of our citizens be best developed for success, sustainability and survival in a challenging and even hostile world.

America has been through difficult times and has become stronger and wiser as a result. I am certain that problems we face in our time will be overcome, as well. The Constitutional principles of this country, if we live up to them, will assure that.

As far as I am concerned, America will always be Number One.

John E. Armonas

Mentor, Ohio

February, 2013

1

A CHILD OF TWO WORLDS

Some years ago, I took up study of the Japanese language. It was out of a curious interest over the lingering presence and labor of Japanese prisoners of war who had gone before me in my exile in Siberia; building the bug infested barracks where we lived as deportees, and etching permanent messages in hillside boulders at the Soviet tank division where I later served as a child soldier in Buriat Mongolia.

I learned in Japanese an appropriate saying: Monogokorogatsuku –an expression describing a child’s life from birth to about three years of age, where he remembers nothing of his existence. In my case, I was about three and watching my uncle shave with a straight edge razor. I tried it myself, but put two deep gashes into my cheek. I still have the scars, but no memory of how I got them. I know about it from adult relatives who witnessed the incident.

So it was with my earliest years in a time and place that had such a profound impact on the 20th Century.

Some months before I was born, my father, John, returned to America from his farm in Lithuania to be on U.S. soil–as the law then required for citizens living abroad up to five years–and make preparations for his family to repatriate to the United States. There was talk of war and countries along the Baltic Sea, as well as Poland, were in the crosshairs of two aggressive totalitarian dictatorships–Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.

Father came back to Lithuania in July of 1939 and told my mother, Barbara, that they should sell their farm just outside of the village of Suostas near the Latvian border and move back to America as soon as possible. Before they could do so, cataclysmic events overtook them.

In August Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia signed their infamous Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of Non-Aggression where the two totalitarian powers divided up countries standing between them into spheres of influence. A month later, on September 1, 1939, Adolf Hitler attacked Poland, igniting World War II. The Soviet Union, in keeping with provisions of the agreement, attacked Poland from the east on September 17, 1939. That September and October the Soviets forced each of the Baltic States to allow stationing of Soviet troops in their countries. Finland, to the north, refused. It was a larger country and geographically better suited to resist.

I was born on November 30, 1939, the day the Soviet Union attacked Finland in an attempt to take it over.

Though vastly outnumbered in troops and equipment, the Finns held off the Soviets for four months, inflicting heavy losses in what came to be called The Winter War. A peace treaty was ultimately signed in Moscow on March 13, 1940 whereby Finland maintained its independence, but ceded some territory and assets to the Soviet Union. As a result of this conflict, the League of Nations expelled the Soviet Union from its ranks.

The outcome for the Baltic States was not as fortunate. In June of 1940 the Soviets issued ultimatums to Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia to form governments friendly to Moscow and allow unlimited numbers of Soviet troops into each country. President Antanas Smetona of Lithuania urged resistance, but his government ministers voted for acquiescence. Smetona and his family consequently fled west seeking political asylum. Following June 15th, 1940 Josef Stalin annexed each of the Baltic States into the Soviet Union. That annexation was never officially recognized by the United States and other Western Allies.

With war raging, the American Consul in Lithuania urged all American citizens to leave the country and return to the United States.

My father and older sister, Donna, were born in the United States and eligible to leave immediately. Although born in Lithuania, I was an American citizen by birth due to my father’s status. My mother was born in Lithuania, but was not a U.S. citizen, even though she had lived in the United States early in her marriage. Now, she could not leave for America without first getting necessary immigration documents through the U.S. Department of State and the American Consul in Lithuania. The Consul advised my father and mother to leave me behind with Mother. I was barely nine months old when Father and my five-year old sister, Donna, left for America on August 8, 1940. Mother remembered that Donna cried inconsolably as we were separated. The Consul assured that Mother would have an easier time in securing her papers with me–an American citizen– in tow.

How a seemingly routine question of citizenship delayed our departure from Lithuania and eventually resulted in Siberian exile, is rooted in the historical and enduring quest of immigrants for the American Dream.

• • •

My paternal grandfather and three of his brothers were part of the massive wave of immigration to America at the turn of the 20th Century. There were no opportunities in Czarist occupied Lithuania, and America beckoned with the proverbial streets paved in gold. He worked hard, saved his money, and after several years returned for a visit to his homeland. There in the town of Pasvalys, he met my grandmother. They fell in love and wanted to get married, but her parents were against it. She was an only child from a prosperous family and he was deemed unsuitable for her.

So, they eloped, traveling to Germany where they bought ship’s passage to America and settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Grandfather worked in a musical instrument repair shop, where he specialized in violins. In 1905 they welcomed their first-born son, my father, John.

They saved some money and by 1908 decided to visit Lithuania to make peace with the family. Everyone was happy, especially since my grandparents seemed to have made a success of their life. Anyone who returned from America appeared wealthy. The word amerikonas (an American) became a synonym for prosperity. Few people realized that hard work and perseverance, often under extreme conditions, was the price for that wealth in the burgeoning American economy. Amerikonas had a tinge of envy when uttered by locals, but after the Soviets occupied Lithuania, it took on more sinister political connotations.

The family urged that my grandparents leave my three-year old father with them and return to America to make some more money. They did so and came back seven years later, in 1914, to retrieve him. By now, Father was ten and attached to his grandparents. He didn’t want to return with his parents to America and on the day of departure ran away and hid. My grandparents had to leave without him. They did eventually return and settled in Lithuania.

In 1924, at the age of 19, my father decided to go to America on his own. His three uncles were still in the United States and living in Cleveland, Ohio. Father was detained at Ellis Island for over a month, because he couldn’t prove his U.S. citizenship; but the uncles retrieved his birth certificate from Cambridge, and he joined them in Cleveland.

My father had only a fourth grade education and ended up working at a variety of menial jobs. However, he was intelligent, industrious, and thrifty. Through his experiences in the days of the pre-union labor force, he also was attracted to progressive causes, a euphemism at the time for people espousing socialist ideas.

By 1928 he had saved enough money to return to Lithuania, where he deposited 10,000 in Lithuanian currency (litai) into a bank in Pasvalys. (At the time one dollar was equal to 10 litai.) That was an enormous sum by local standards and word soon spread about the rich amerikonas in town. He was invited to parties and offered marriage proposals. He could have married a girl from a well-to-do family with a dowry and bought a farm around Pasvalys, where the land was very productive.

Instead, he married my mother, who came from a poor widow’s family in the neighboring village of Maskoliškiai and didn’t have a dowry. They did buy an 80 hectare farm from the Rindaugai Estate next to the village of Suostas, 36 kilometers north of Pasvalys and about three kilometers from the Latvian border.

Father leased his purchase to a tenant farmer, knowing that he could get a better return on his investment, than interest from a bank in the United States.

Then my parents went to America to earn some more money; my father going first and mother following several months later after her entry permits were processed by the U.S. government. Since they had planned to go back to Lithuania sometime, Mother did not bother to apply to become a citizen of the United States. This turned out to be a big mistake.

In Cleveland, Father worked in a dairy and Mother spent several years working in tailor shops. They lived happily for the next six years during which time, in 1934, my sister, Donna, was born. Effects of the Great Depression did not escape my parents and they decided to see what prospects there might be in Lithuania. They visited in 1935 and seeing that their farm was doing well, decided to stay and manage it themselves.

Father had ideas to upgrade the farm and make it more productive. There were three existing buildings on the property when he bought it: an old house, an old barn, and a grain storage shed (kl tis). Father applied for loans from the Lithuanian government and built four new buildings; a small modern house for the hired help (kumetynas); a building where linen from other area farms could be processed (jauja); a building for storing hay and straw (daržin ); and a new barn (kut .) Outside the house was a kap ius, an underground cellar about four feet deep and 10 feet square. The kap ius was covered with about three feet of dirt to keep the temperature above freezing and constant in summer and winter.

All fruit and vegetables were stored there in the fall. Carrots were placed in sand, so they wouldn‘t dry out and winter apples were placed between layers of straw. What couldn‘t be stored was made into jam or canned.

A well was not only a source of water, but a cooler. During summer many things were lowered into the water attached to a milk can or a small beer barrel.

Almost everything on the farm was hand-made. Mother baked fresh bread and made cheese from fermented milk (Farmer‘s Cheese). She also made Olandiškas (Holland Cheese) for sale in Riga, the capital of nearby Latvia and largest city in the region, even though it was close to 50 miles away. She sold some of her bread there too.

Our family lived in the large existing farmhouse with a dirt floor. Father had plans to modernize it, as well, but the war intervened.

I was born in a hospital in Biržai, the closest Lithuanian town to the south of our farm. My parents felt it was safer for me to be born in a hospital, rather than at home with the assistance of a mid-wife. And, since my father was an American, there was a certain pride in being able to afford a hospital.

Mother was not overly religious, due mainly to my Father’s worldly outlook, but for the sake of family, neighbors and tradition, went along with religious rituals. They entrusted my godfather, Uncle Juozas and godmother, a friend of the family, to take me by horse drawn sled from Rindaugai to Suostas to be baptized. My parents stayed home, since godparents had the obligation of taking the child to church. After all, they’re the ones who promised to raise me in the Catholic tradition, if anything happened to my mother and father.

On the way back from church the sled overturned. When it was righted I was missing, lost in the snow. After some frantic clearing of snow around the sled my godparents found me and delivered me safely to my parents.

Within nine months safety translated into being an American and able to get out of the country.

• • •

Despite American assurances that Mother and I would be able to rejoin our family soon after Father and Donna left for the United States in August of 1940, we became trapped in our Soviet-occupied homeland.

Mother continued managing the farm, but needed extra help. She hired a woman and her son by the name of Kurkauskas. The son, Jonas, who was in his thirties, called his mother, Babutyt , an endearing form of grandma. I never did learn her first name, because we all called her Babutyt . Mother housed them in the main farm building and moved us into the kumetynas.

My memories start with World War II and our farm, when the Nazis came.

There was a large pond next to our farm that I remember Mother warning me about. She said a giant frog lived in the pond and might catch me if I got too close. I believed her and stayed away. A big tom turkey used to chase me around and flail me with its wings. One time a turkey drowned in the pond and Mother told me: You see. The frog got him.

Our ram knocked me over a few times, while our flock of geese would chase me on the way to school, hissing and nipping at my behind. I loved life on the farm. I helped feed the birds and animals and was one of the helpers during harvest time. Mother always encouraged me by saying what a good worker I was.

Not far from us lived Mr. Petras Drevinskas a prosperous farmer in the region. He was memorable, because he had a tractor and threshing machine. Everyone knew him.

During harvest time he would travel from farm to farm threshing winter wheat. Winter wheat was planted in the fall. It grew through the spring and was ready for harvest in the middle of summer. It was hot and dusty labor. Many neighbors would come to help, with wives and daughters feeding and supporting the threshers. In Lithuanian, this is called talka or volunteer help. After the job was done, there would be a celebration with beer and lots of food. The next day it was all repeated at another farm. I was fascinated by the whole process. The noise, dust, men shoveling stalks of wheat with pitch forks, women bringing food and water, and the movement of the long, wide threshing belt was awesome. I was mesmerized by the rhythm of the conveyer belt as it separated the kernels from the stalks.

The harvest celebrations were not only part of tradition, but helped distract people from the fact that Lithuania was in a war zone and occupied by invaders. I remember Babutyt during these celebrations. She was an outgoing, earthy woman who often was the life of the party. She would recount how she had worked for Sofija Smetona, the wife of Antanas Smetona, the last President of the Republic before the Soviet occupation.

One of the President’s estates was about halfway from Suostas to Biržai and she, together with her son, were employed there. Babutyt used to tell us how she would fall on her knees and kiss Mrs. Smetona’s hand whenever the First Lady arrived. For that Mrs. Smetona would always give her 5 litai, for which she was very grateful. That amount was usually a day’s wage for a laborer. Once, there was a fire at the estate and several servants lost their jobs, including Babutyt and her son, who then came to work for Mother.

We lived in a beer producing region and beer was not only celebrated, but served at every occasion. Even in school we learned: Alus yra sveika gerti. (Beer is healthy to drink.) During celebrations, like harvest time, about a dozen people would sit at a long table and drink prescribed amounts of beer, calculated ahead of time by the local brewer.

Among the revelers, there were those called viedrinei (pail consumers); those who could drink a pail during the parties. After a few hours, those needing to answer nature’s call, had to get past others to do so. If there were musicians present they would start playing the going to pee march and the person would have to pay a small tribute to the musicians.

Babutyt had her own way of meeting this challenge. She would stand up where she was sitting, start singing along and clapping and let nature take its course. We always knew where she sat because there would always be a tell-tale puddle on the floor. She was unconventional in other ways too. Her son, Jonas, was in love with a woman from a neighboring village, but Babutyt would not let him marry. I do not want another woman in the house while I am alive! she would declare. (Babutyt died when she was 80. Jonas was in his 60‘s, and the baby was in his 40‘s, when Jonas finally got married.)

In the winter of 1943 I contracted mumps and open wounds