Anna's Story: A Latvian Tale of Love, War and Peace., Paperback/Anna Lejins

Descriere

This is a memoir of a Latvian English teacher who recounts what it was like to live through the momentous events that shaped the first half of the Twentieth Century. Through simple but poignant language she takes the reader from life in the Latvian countryside to the Revolution of 1905 in Latvia, then part of Tsarist Russia, life in Russia during the First World War and the Russian revolution, then her return to Latvia and the War of National Liberation in Latvia against Germany and Russia. She tells of life in independent Latvia, her schooling and education as an English language teacher, her trip to London and Berlin and her marriage to Eduards or Teddy as she called him. He had been caught up in the Russian Civil War and found himself fighting in four different armies until with a Latvian unit he was able to return to Latvia travelling accross Siberia to Vladivostok and then by ship from Japan to Latvia. They are both teachers and Anna describes in detail the life of a middle class family until the Second World War shatters their dreams and hopes in Latvia. First Latvia is occupied by the Soviet Union and then by Nazi Germany. Through Anna's eyes we see the reign of communist terror and changes this brings to her school. Her brother, his wife and two small children are deported to Siberia .The Soviet nightmare is replaced by the Nazi German occupation after Hitler turns against his former ally Stalin. Anna is interogated by the Gestapo, luckily by a Latvian, who see's that she has been wrongly denounced. She describes the war years on her parent's farm where she and her family have taken refuge and their attempt to save the school's Jewish doctor by signing a petition together with the other teachers and students addressed to the German occupation authorities. Her humanity shines forth in the family's treatment of a Russian prisoner-of-war assigned to them by the German army to work on the farm. Tragedy strikes as she looses her first born child. With the approac