Because I had the motorbike and plenty of petrol I could get to Ingas any time - it was about 100 kilometres and took me a couple of hours. After a couple weeks I did so to visit, the factory was in full production. I had a good assistant manager and was not missed till I was on the way to Germany when they rang looking for me, so I just disappeared.
To leave for Germany we first went to Dizgaili about 20 kilometres from Liepaja. It was Adis (Milda’s brother) mother-in-law’s farm. From Ingas we packed a horse cart for each family – Millers, Zanis Lemchens, us, and a labourer came with us to return the horses and carts.
A: Ingas’ grandmother refused to leave, her daughter Constance was a chronic TB patient and was considered unfit to travel. Also, she felt she had to stay and wait for Adis and his family to return from Siberia. She was sure that the Russians would not touch her as she was too old – however both she and Constance were sent to Siberia to the salt mines. Constance died there but grandmother returned to Latvia. Adis children, Janis and Marite and their mother also returned.
The road was a constant traffic of refugees like us and the retreating army; horse carts and motorised traffic mixed up. A few times, Russian planes came over and machine-gunned the road. You stopped and dived in the deep ditches on the side of the road. I don’t remember any people being killed, but did see dead horses by the side of the road.
In Liepaja, we stayed at a roadhouse and by paying in bacon the landlady gave her room for Milda and the children. The men had to sleep on the wagons to protect them. In the morning before we went to see about getting on a ship, a man from one of the houses open to the courtyard where we had our horses came out swearing and calling our families names. Zanis, without saying a word, hit him across the face, the man fell backwards and as he got up Zanis repeated it, the man apologised saying he would not call him anything but sir.
We had to wait a few days for the papers to be arranged (this was done by a cousin who was in a position to help,) everybody was eligible to go and there was nothing to pay. While waiting, I met a very good friend from Kuldiga, Skujins, he tried to persuade me not to go to Germany but to stay and save the “fatherland” after sending the wives and children to Germany. He was involved with an interim government formed at Liepaja, the real one having disintegrated. I said I was going. This was in 1944.
Skujins stayed behind and afterwards I heard the sad story of what happened to him. As the Russians advanced all escape was closed and Skujins and the people from the interim government were trying to make their way through the forests along the coast with a view of getting to Sweden. As his group were crossing a road in a gully they were surprised by a Russian patrol and Skujins was shot in the stomach. He was carried to a barn, but as there were no medical facilities he shot himself. He was buried in the forest. The story was told by one of his group who managed to get to Sweden.
To board the ship, only the things you could carry were sure to get there. So we all dressed with many layers of clothing like two suits. The cans of butter and bacon, which were most valuable, we hung around the neck – half choking in the process, suitcases in each hand. One of the young sailors grabbed Ruta, aged 3, under one arm and a suitcase in the other and went straight up the gangplank, which was very narrow, with a rope on one side only. The German sailors were very kind to children.
We decided then to go to Sweden, a local man with three teenage daughters was arranging it. They knew a fisherman, and we packed some food for a day or so and very little else and went to Mersrags. As we got there a storm came up, and the fisherman said it was too dangerous to go to sea in it. We waited a couple days, hiding in a hay loft, but it did not improve, so we went back home. All of our friends laughed and teased us – the big Swedish travellers! After this the Germans increased their patrols to stop people leaving for Sweden.
Next, we decided to pack up ready to go to Germany. We packed the most essential things, mainly food. We took half of a smoked pig, and a 25 kilogram can of butter. Milda and the girls went in a horse drawn cart to Ingas, it took a couple of days and they spent the night in a forester’s home. The boy who drove the horses was expected back immediately, but there was no sign of him. The farmer who had lent me the horse and cart was getting upset. I was trying to telephone Ingas to find out what happened when I saw him drive past. The boy had thought all the food had been too good to leave.
Just at that time my brother Arturs who was a forester had been killed by the partisans (mainly Russian). So there was a funeral at Digaini. There were also a group of Latvian soldiers who had been called up but deserted with all their guns at Vandzene in hiding. They were persuaded to rejoin their group and were given a truck to get there. I went with them to Digaini and they joined in the funeral and after were taken to Paplaka where their unit was. By the time I got back to Vandzene they were back too having escaped once more.
A: At this funeral, because the world was in such a turmoil, somebody had brought musical instruments and there was plenty of drink and it finished with people dancing and singing – not the usual funeral.
At Vandzene, the factory was in a bad condition; dirty and a lot of the equipment was out of order. The manager said that nothing could be done as it was impossible to get any parts or repairs. With my previous experience at Snepele I knew that if I went in person with some butter I could get it, rather than leaving it to the committee. This way I could get anything that was in any of the warehouses so I took a truck and filled it with everything needed. I had the whole place whitewashed and all the machinery fixed so that we could really start producing.
The factory also owned a truck which had been abandoned in a shed because petrol was not available. To change it to gas I arranged for the fire brigade to take the truck to Riga and do the conversion. Now we had a truck to use and my plan was that if the Russians were to come closer we could escape in the truck. However, the unexpected happened – the Russians had already entered Tukums and somebody came who lived this side of Tukums and told us of how he had two cans of petrol buried in his garden and that we should go and dig them out. I was against using the truck but one of the members of the committee was going along too so I agreed. They went as far as Pure and asked at the town hall whether they knew how far the Russians were and were reassured that they were not near yet. Soon after they saw dust coming ahead – it was a Russian tank, a small tank. They were stopped and in the tank was an officer. The driver of the truck, who was small, jumped in the ditch and escaped but the committee member was arrested and the truck blown up. The committee member was a civil guard and was well-dressed and had shiny boots. The driver came back after about three days and told us about it. The wife of the committee member was coming to me crying about what I had done had killed her husband. Later, he also came home and told how the commanding officer he was taken to admitted that his responsibility did not include taking prisoners. When asked about his boots he told how the Russian soldiers had taken them and he was offered Russian boots. The Russian officer wrote out a pass on a piece of paper torn from the edge of a newspaper so that he could go home. So that was the end of the truck.
A: The Russian army was pushing the German army back, and again the war was getting closer. At one stage some Russian tanks came within 10 kilometres of Vandzene. Mother, Ruta and I went to a remote farm in a dense forest just in case the tanks pushed through. They were repulsed. At this time I had some skin disease on my legs; they were a mess of open sores and I had bandages on the full length of them. At this farm there were a lot of children and we all went to catch yabbies for dinner, I was not to get my legs wet. I “accidentally” slipped in and once wet spent the rest of the day in water. When the bandages were taken off the legs were really soaked, but the next morning they were well on the way to being healed. At this place I also came face-to-face with a wild boar on a forest track. The other children knew what to do, we just stood still close together and the boar went away.
After about a week the investigator telephoned to say that there are a lot of problems at Vandzene milk factory, the manager had married a farmer’s only daughter and was going farming, so they needed a new manager urgently. The investigator was advising me to change jobs and he gave me the best references as an energetic manager. It did not take me long to decide to take it up, and I gave notice to the committee. Everybody was very surprised that I would leave after 13 years in the job.
A: The Vandzene factory was much larger; it also had large cellars under the main floor where cheese was made and a big boiler house which supplied the milk factory and the potato starch factory behind. There was a proper flat one end of the building for our accommodation and separate offices upstairs. Also included was a very large garden with every type of fruit tree and bushes of three different types: currants, gooseberries, and raspberries. Next door to the garden there was a farm with many glasshouses growing grapes, so I lived on fruit in the summer. At the back of the garden was an elaborate chicken house in a wired yard. During our first spring there, mother ordered 20 or so chickens from a hatchery which became my charges during the summer holidays. They kept me very busy as, having imprinted on me, they followed me everywhere.
That summer, father became very ill, and was diagnosed to have had paratyphoid after he was discharged from hospital. During his stay in Talsi hospital, he would only drink fresh fruit juice so my job was to collect the fruit every morning.
One of the milk collection points was by the seaside and the man who delivered it was a very large fisherman who was my friend. Mornings when he had caught sole and smoked them overnight he would try to tiptoe into my bedroom in his big boots to leave me a freshly smoked sole. I was always glad to see him.
In Vandzene, mother held many parties, mainly large dinner parties with loads of food and a big crowd. Father would leave the party at about 10 PM, go to bed, and wake up at about 3 AM when people would start to leave and insist on partying on. My room opened off to the large dining room that was used, and I insisted that the door be left partly open.
At the factory all went on as before, the equipment had been rebuilt for steam and it was going well. Only our living quarters were still the same – not satisfactory. I was planning and suggested that a second floor could be put above the factory for a flat. At that time the materials for building or adding to milk factories were possible to get. I knew Kuldiga, the district building inspector, and invited him to the factory to have a look. He checked the existing walls on the lower floor which were made of stone, about one meter thick. He decided that they were strong enough to support the upper floor, and he himself did the sketch and promised to draw up the plans which contained a room at each end of the roof, a bedroom, a living room and a kitchen in the middle. I also managed to get all the materials myself. I went to the cement factory and saw the manager bringing him two kilograms of butter as a present (at that time all business was done this way by seeing the appropriate person on a one-to-one basis). He put the butter in his desk drawer and wrote an official order at the current price for cement. That was also how all the other materials and tradesmen were organised. The work went on very quickly and for 40-50 kilograms of butter and some thousands of worthless German money (I knew that after a war money became worthless, that has always happened) the factory gained a great increase in value.
But with this started other problem, some people were jealous and did not like me acting as a dictator, as I was acting that way to get things done. An investigator was sent to the factory to check all of the books and to report on my actions. He worked there many days and did not find any problems and saw that all my actions were to benefit the factory, not myself, and in fact I was still managing the factory and doing all the bookkeeping. After he had finished and written up all the reports, I gave him two kilograms of butter, not as the investigator but as a Latvian’s Latvian (this was an expression used.)
The next year the Germans came in. They found all the documents and lists left by the Russians and the names of people who had denounced those arrested by the Russians. Amongst them was the factory cashier. They were jailed in Kuldiga, condemned to death and shot. The military court captain, Kukis, was a previous National Guard officer. After the Germans came in, a lot of the administration was taken on by past Latvian National Guard, and at first the police in Kuldiga was run by agricultural officers, managed by Peteris Skujins and Pelekis, both from the agriculture department.
All of the Jews were put in a ghetto, a field with barbed wire around. All of their possessions were plundered and sold. Skujins was urging me to take a piano and some good furniture but I refused, I found all this action repulsive. I got to know Skujins before the Germans came in, he had come to Snepele factory to check on the distribution of seeds to the farmers (these seeds were sent from Russia and they wanted them grown by the farmers to then produce rubber.) This was at a time when the Germans had already taken Liepaja and everything was very dangerous, particularly to be on the roads. So Skujins hid near the factory in some bushes till the Germans came in and he could go back to Kuldiga.
After the Germans came in life went on as in independent Latvia, things started with great enthusiasm and we were happy to get on with work again. The noise of the war went quickly far away in Russia.
We had most of the rebuilding finished when the great upheaval started – Russians came in (communists). Those that were in the National Guard were denounced as capitalist servants. Then imprisonment and people being sent to Siberia started. From our friends, the National Guard captain Osnieks and Milda’s brother Adolfs with their families were taken on 14th June, 1941 (This was the day for mass arrests across Latvia). The men were separated from their families and disappeared while the families were taken to Siberia and after the war many returned to Latvia. The morning of June 15th there was a lot of anger amongst the milk deliverers because the Latvian district committee had issued a list announcing the unsuitable people for the present situation and the best workers and most reliable were listed. Also, that morning a gypsy I knew named Rulle came in the factory and she asked for a drink of milk for which she was going to read the cards. I did not believe in fortune telling, but this one came true. She said, “You will be travelling across the oceans to a very distant land where you will start a new life.” Believing it or not, I did travel to Australia, which is far.
A: On May 20th, 1940, Ruta was born, right in the middle of all the chaos. A lot of the time mother, Ruta, the doctor neighbour and her family lived in a nearby forest where the maids of the two families, who were sisters, used to carry food secretly. I was at Ingas, and with Constance we lived in the fields and forest on the farm and had food drops arranged for us. Father had an arrangement that he would be notified when the arresting officers would be coming and he had worked out a quick escape route. We knew that we were on the list of people to be deported – some official who was friendly to father had told him secretly. But because the Russians also wanted the butter produced at the factory our time was delayed. During the Russian occupation, all public places had to have an altar-like structure covered with red cloth and three very large portraits on the wall behind: Stalin, Lenin, and Gorki. To everybody’s amusement, father’s old, bad-tempered cat took up residence on this altar, but had to be watched if any officials visited.
A: The above covers the years 1932-40. In 1935 I, Aija, was born. When I was one-year-old, I was very sick for months. It started with whooping cough, then I had a mystery illness which I believe was TB, as at this time Milda’s sister Kostance became chronically sick with it. Milda’s father died of it and her brother Sass was very sick with TB of the spine and spent 1 ½ years in hospital.
From the time I can remember, mother did not work in the factory and there were other employees and a part-time maid who minded me and did some cooking, cleaning, etc., she may have also worked in the factory. During this time, father had a small shop, just as his father had had before. It was in a small room at the end of the factory and offered essentials for the farmers: salt, sugar, herrings and sweets. So now it was my time to climb the shelves to get some sweets, but I don’t remember ever being punished – anyway, I only liked two kinds: some very sour long sticks and halvah. Father himself ate boiled sweets all the time, even in bed.
The next nearest factory was in Kuldiga 18 kilometres away, but the Snepele factory only received milk from about 30 farms. The others processed the milk themselves and made butter which they sold in the market in Kuldiga. I suggested to the committee president that the two of us should canvas all of the farms in a 4-5 kilometre radius, which we visited on my motorbike. We offered them to try selling the milk to the factory for a month, we even lent them cans for transporting the milk. The results were surprisingly good; their income was 100% higher this way. Our intake trebled instantly. That caused problems of processing, our plant was not big enough and the petrol motor driving it was small and worn out. I had to buy a steam engine in a hurry. In Vidzeme, the older horse drawn steam engines were very cheap because there they were installing fixed steam engines. The whole factory had to be rebuilt for steam use and to process 2000 litres an hour. So as not to run up debts, I bought second-hand machines from Vidzeme where the factories had been built too close together and now were combining. It was a big job because I supervised the rebuilding and was responsible for setting up the machinery. I was also doing the bookkeeping. Milda started to work at the factory full-time and was helping with the books, keeping the farmers books up to date for milk delivered, and calculating the amount payable. I am now surprised that we managed. We got up at 4 AM with the sunrise. Besides both of us, we had a cleaner. Milda manned the weighing stage receiving the milk and I made the butter and kept the machinery going. If something broke I took the parts and on my motorcycle went to Kuldiga where the specialists could repair, weld it, or make a new part. Getting back at night, I had to install the new part. During my time there there was not a time that the factory was not operational. I considered my job not as a salaried employee but that I was personally responsible to get it done.
After only about a week, Milda’s mother quietly brought her daughter to my place one evening with all of her possessions. At that time at the factory the living part consisted of a bedroom, a kitchen and a very large room that doubled as living room and office. That is where we started our new life. Because in autumn and winter there was not much milk, the factory operated only every second day. We heated our rooms and kept warm as Milda’s health improved. We were careful not to have children being so young – we wanted to enjoy our youth. We had already before marriage joined an acting group and formed a theatre group with a local teacher, Juske, from across the road taking on the role of director. The rehearsals were usually held in the large room at the factory.
Later, a women’s section was started for the civil guards, preparing the women in case of war to work in hospitals. E. Pormece became the director and the woman doctor who lived next door took on training in first aid. Because at that time there were quite a few newly-married couples we also started learning folk dances and performed them after the play performances. A weaving course was run to weave the folk dresses of Kuldiga district.
