The journey home

Szczecin to Leszno

2010-01-09T22:45:00.000-08:00

Szczecin is a large sea port on the Baltic Sea, very close to the German border and about half an hour by express train from Stargard. I arrive in the late afternoon, buy a ticket to Leszno for the next day, and spend the evening in my hotel room under a wave of exhaustion. I feel overwhelmed by my time in Stargard, in particular the drive to Kluczewo, which seems almost unreal. I had not felt happy about the hotel when I first arrived and almost wanted to leave - but then I met Zdzislaw. I could have missed meeting him altogether, simply by not wanting a cup of tea at a particular moment in time. But I did want a cup of tea and I went to the reception room to ask for hot water right at the moment when he was there. Would he have been there had I gone ten minutes earlier, or later? What was it that brought us together?

I also feel moved by the conversation I had with Edite, the receptionist who shared so many personal details about her life with me. There was such longing in her voice, a deep desire for a new direction, a new life, but one that seems just beyond reach. I have been in that position myself and it was humbling to hear Edite’s version of being there. I wanted to do something for her but I had no idea what that could be. Perhaps listening was enough.

The next day I explore Szczecin. It’s Sunday and almost everything is closed except for the Galaxy Shopping Centre where it seems that the whole of the city’s population has congregated. I have a coffee and a moment of shopping and then try to see the key historic sites. It’s an incredibly grey day, the whole skyline disappearing into a haze of fog. I see a number of monuments, the museum, a fantastic gateway that has become a jazz café, the palace, the opera house and the waterfront, which is a tangle of cranes emerging eerily from a misty Baltic Sea. I take everything in from an objective distance and with a sense of obligation rather than genuine interest - I guess I’m just tired and there is not enough room in my head to take in and assimilate more information. My mother would have passed through Szczecin by train - perhaps the train even stopped here for some time - but she was heading further south, deeper into the Polish countryside, to a town south of Poznan called Leszno.

The train to Leszno leaves at 17.55 and when I get on, it’s half empty. I share a compartment with a smartly dressed elderly gentleman who takes a polite but also concerned interest in me. He helps me lift my suitcase onto the storage rack and, even though he speaks no English or German, we manage to work out that I’m from Australia, that I’m travelling to Leszno and that he is getting off a few stops before me. When the ticket inspector comes, the gentleman explains something to him in Polish that I suspect goes something like, ‘This lady is from Australia and is travelling on her own to Leszno. Please let her know when the train arrives at the station and please also make sure that someone helps her with her suitcase.’ Over the next few stops the carriage becomes packed with university students, many of them standing or sitting on small fold-down seats in the aisles outside the compartments. Our compartment has also filled with students. When the second ticket inspector does his rounds, somewhere after Poznan, the elderly gentleman repeats his instructions about my arrival at Leszno, but this time he also addresses the students in the carriage. They all look in my direction, smile knowingly, and then return to their ipods and lecture notes.

My gentleman friend gets off a few stops before Leszno and we shake hands as I thank him for his kindness. He gives a final word of instruction to the young man sitting opposite me before he leaves our compartment. I feel slightly embarrassed. Outside it’s dark and I’m a little nervous about arriving at my destination in the night. I prefer to book trains that depart in the late morning or early afternoon – it gives me the chance to see the countryside and, because I arrive in the daylight, it’s easier to find my hotel and generally get my bearings in a new place. When we get to Leszno there are only two students left in the compartment and, as no doubt instructed by my gentleman friend, the young man opposite me dutifully helps me take down my suitcase. Another passenger kindly lifts the case onto the station for me. As in Latvia, you have to climb up two or three awkwardly steep steps to get into train carriages here, but in Latvia it would have been rare indeed for someone to help a stranger with their suitcase.

I find a taxi easily and we drive to the Akwawit Hotel, a type of spa village that people come to from all over Poland for a range of water cures. The complex was probably built fairly recently but it has a distinctly 1980s aesthetic. A water feature in the reception area echoes throughout an atrium that extends into the upper floors of the building. The interior décor is based on a combination of cornflower blue and palish pink and there are bulky, tubular handrails everywhere. I’m allocated a single room with a rather odd, L-shaped layout on the top floor. The bed is positioned under a steeply angled, attic-like alcove where it’s not possible to stand upright and the desk is in a small niche at the end of the L. I go straight back down to reception and ask for another room. This time I’m given one with a double bed, a normal, rectangular layout and a high ceiling.

In the morning, as I’m leaving to explore the town centre, I decide to ask about the various treatments on offer at the Akwawit, tempted by the idea of a massage, and possibly even a mud bath. I’m given a huge list, divided into various categories, but it’s written only in Polish. I can roughly guess what some of the treatments might be, but despite the fact that the receptionists can speak English, they are unable to translate the document they have given me. They look at each other, say something in Polish, and then look at me and say it is very hard to translate. After some discussion, I am booked in for a dry water massage (yes, such a thing is possible!) which was about the only treatment available.

To get to the old town, the hotel staff direct me to a narrow, grassy track that is clearly a short cut used by locals. It takes me under a highway overpass and beside a stretch of railway track to eventually emerge about 200 metres from the main station. I cross the tracks and keep going straight ahead, along what is now the main street of Leszno. I visit the tourist bureau and then wander about, getting a feel for the place. It’s not a very big town, but it is very charming. It was established in the 16th century by a group of Moravian Brethren, early Protestants who came from Bohemia. In fact, in the 17th century, Leszno had the largest group of Moravian Brethren in all of Europe. The town also boasts a number of stunning baroque and classical buildings, one of which is the town hall in the main square. Amongst its famous citizens is Jan Jonston (1603-1675), a doctor, teacher and naturalist of Scottish descent who spoke twelve languages and was the author of the Historiae Naturalis, noted for its beautiful engravings. Today, Leszno is rather sporty and promotes itself as the place to go for cycling, horse-riding, tennis and various aviation and water sports.

My mother and her family arrive in Leszno, known as Lissa under German occupation, in late October 1944. They are taken in by Elina Bönke, my mother’s cousin from Sarkandaugava, who is now a married woman with two children. They live in the downstairs apartment of Elina’s house, which is white and two storey and very close to the town centre. When they arrive, they have no idea at all how long they will be here or where the war might take them next. I can’t imagine what this would be like because it is a state of being that has never been part of my life experience. And, even though I have never been to Poland and everything is new and unknown to me, I know that I will be travelling to Berlin soon, and then on to Switzerland and Italy, and that I have a plane ticket that will take me back to Australia in about six weeks time. Of course, the unexpected may happen, but I still have some sense of security about the future. My mother’s family had no such security. But at the same time, they were very lucky because they had somewhere to stay, a roof over their heads. So many refugees were on foot, carting their belongings behind them, living in the outdoors in the depths of winter.

The family don’t know it at the time, but they will end up staying in Lissa for about two and a half months. They also have to work for the Germans, my grandfather getting a job on the railways and my mother making uniforms in a factory called Firma Erle. There are many Polish girls working in the factory and my mother gets on well with them, quickly making new friends. They go out together and when they get the chance, particularly enjoy going to the cinema. I ask my mother what the movies were, but she can’t recall a single title.

As I walk around the town, I know I’m not going to find Elina’s house because I just don’t have enough information, not even a street name, but I see buildings every now and then that I imagine are similar to the house my mother described. I do, however, find the movie theatre and I feel confident that it is the same one my mother went to with her Polish girlfriends. It’s had a makeover, but I can see that it’s very old beneath its 1970s façade. I wonder what movies were showing in 1944 and 45 in German occupied Poland…

I have coffee and cake in the restaurant underneath the Town Hall in the centre of the square and ponder what to do next. I’ve been wandering about Leszno rather aimlessly, following my nose without any clear strategy. I study the map from the tourist bureau and mark the location of the archives – it’s too far out of town to walk there so I would have to catch a cab. Besides, I have so little information about my mother’s time here that I’m not convinced I would find anything there anyway. I decide to keep wandering and find myself drawn to the area east of the town square. There are some smaller streets here with old houses that open straight onto the footpath, and for a brief moment, I see an image of my mother, at the age of seventeen, dark haired, slender, wearing a coat because it’s winter and it’s cold, disappearing around the corner ahead of me with her Polish girlfriends. They huddle together, arm in arm, chatting to each other. What do they talk about? The war? Rationing? Work in the factory? What the future might hold? Or are they more interested in what’s showing at the movies?

A little further around the bend, I come across a church – it’s Baroque and it’s called St Nicholas’s - and while the exterior is not particularly remarkable, the interior is another thing altogether - incredibly, ornately Baroque but utterly and unpretentiously beautiful. I am stunned by the carvings, the gilding, the sculpture, the paintings. There are two women washing the floor near the altar and about three people praying in different sections of the church, but each is rapt in their own world of work or prayer and seems oblivious of their extraordinary surroundings. I let out little gasps of amazement as I pass from one chapel to another along the right hand side of the aisles, but when I reach the one on the left, near the entrance, I am stunned into silence. Gazing down at me is most beautiful sculpture of the Virgin Mary I have ever seen. She looks straight at me, but at the same time, beyond me - through me - and I fall in love with her there and then. I light a candle in front of her and stand there for some minutes, just gazing. I would love to take a photograph of her, but even though there are no signs that prohibit taking pictures, it just doesn’t feel right. This church is completely different from those in big cities where you have to pay an entrance fee and there is an additional charge for photography – this is simply a place of worship.

I am so taken by the Virgin in St Nicholas’- with the idea of her beauty - that I am compelled to buy a reminder of her in a nearby Catholic shop. (Although I’m also a bit disappointed in my need to do this.) I would be happy with a postcard, but there are no images of my particular Virgin. I do, however, find a statuette that is rather charming. She wears a soft grey-blue mantle trimmed with gold similar to the Virgin in St Nicholas’s and she has a very peaceful face. She is also a bit heavy and I feel rather stupid buying something that will only add to the ever-increasing weight of my suitcase, but I buy her all the same, and when I get to Berlin, post her back to Australia. On my return, I am pleased to see that my partner has given her a prominent spot on the sideboard in the living room. She is a bit kitsch, I have to admit, but very lovely all the same. Sadly, she shows the scars of travelling long distances - both her hands are broken off at the wrists.

My wanderings in Leszno also take me into the yard of St Johns’ church, where I am lured by a large tree and the promise of a peaceful garden. It is here that I find an extraordinary collection of headstones and memorials from the 17th and 18th centuries. Most of them have been embedded into the church wall, but some are also freestanding and yet others have been laid into the exterior of the church itself. They are crumbling and moss-covered with age and damp, but intricately carved and beautifully, darkly gothic. Many are decorated with skulls, and in the eye sockets of some, insects have spun their white cocoons, giving them a doubly ghostly air. I take lots of photos.

As I explore Leszno, I keep thinking about the archives and the possibility of what I might find there, so I decide to pay a visit. I catch a cab, which takes me right into the depths of a housing suburb. Like the Akwawit Hotel, the Archives building is characterised by a 1980s aesthetic. I go up the small ramp and find the receptionist, who speaks no English but does have a tiny bit of German. We have a laboured conversation in which I ask for pictures of Leszno taken in World War II and for any information about the factory my mother worked in. The receptionist is kind, but she indicates that the archives will not be able to help me because they don’t store photographs. I feel a bit despondent but just as I’m about to leave she gets up from her chair, takes me into the reading room and introduces me to an archivist. I ask again if there may be any information about the factory my mother worked in – photographs, letters, anything. The archivist takes out about three or four old handwritten ledger books that list all the businesses that operated in the town during the war. We search through them together for the name of the factory, but there is no record of its existence anywhere. The name Erle also strikes no chord with the archivist – she has never heard of it in all her time at the Archives. ‘But it was the war’, she explains, ‘and perhaps the factory was only set up temporarily and was destroyed afterwards.’ I thank her and the receptionist and wait in the oddly quiet suburban street for the bus back into town. I don’t recognise the route, because it passes behind the centre of the town, and I get off at the wrong stop, on a big highway out near the University of Agriculture. (The journey is marked by many such incidents that take me in a completely different direction to the one I had intended to follow.)

When I make it back to the centre of Leszno, I pay one more visit to St Nicholas’s church to see my beautiful Maddona, and then head back towards the hotel. The distance seems much further now than in the morning, and I also can’t remember how to get to the little track that’s a shortcut. I stand at the railway crossing for ages, trying to get my bearings and I’m surprised at just how confused I am. I know I came out here, near the large model of a glider, but from where? I wander down a path that seems to be going in the right direction, but after ten minutes, I find myself under a huge railway overpass, walking amongst weeds and big concrete bridge supports. There are some youths on bicycles way in the distance. It doesn’t feel safe here and I turn back. I’m back near the glider again. I check my map and although I can work out where I am, I can’t see the track – or any other clear road to the hotel. I ask a young woman for directions and while she doesn’t really know where the hotel is, she indicates the general direction I should take. I eventually find the track and the hotel and collapse on my bed for a while. In half an hour I’m booked in for a dry water massage.

The hotel is divided into two sections – the hotel part, and the water treatment swimming pool part – which are joined by a long passageway on the second floor with security doors in the middle and at either end to prevent the public from wandering into the hotel part. I emerge on the swimming pool level but there are two other floors of treatment rooms, and lots of people milling about – young, old, school aged, middle-aged, disabled - who are all coming or going from sessions in the pool or treatments that occur behind rows of doors down long passageways. I’m given a pass which I use to get through a turnstile where a young, sporty-looking woman greets me. She leads me through a huge tiled room where semi-naked men are washing in open showers or relaxing in tiled baths and shows me into a small, private room with a large bed-like structure in it. I lie down on the rubbery surface as instructed and my assistant tests a range of water pressure options on me. The massage consists of great jets of water that slowly move up and down the underside of my body. It’s an odd sensation - not unpleasant, but not particularly relaxing either. Oh well.

I decide to leave for Berlin the next day. My mother can’t remember the date she left Leszno, but it would have been some time in mid January 1945, because that’s when the Red Army began to advance with great speed into Poland. Perhaps it was around the 17th, the day that Warsaw fell to the Soviets – the news would have spread quite quickly. But the departure was a little more complex than that, because it resulted in the separation of my mother’s family, who had so far managed to stay together during the whole journey from Riga. In a way, there were actually two separations – one that was totally unexpected, the other that just had to be, but both the result of war. On that particular morning - let’s say it’s the 17th of January - my mother, her parents and her brother, woke up to find that Elina and her husband and children had vanished. Presumably they had heard news of the Soviet advance during the night and had decided to flee, but without telling my mother’s family in the downstairs apartment – indeed, so quietly that they didn’t even wake them from their sleep. As my mother’s parents pieced together what had happened – it probably didn’t take long - a walk into the street, a question to a neighbour, perhaps the sight of others ready to move on too – there must have been a great sense of disappointment and abandonment. For whatever reason, Elina’s family had gone and had decided not to involve my mother’s family.

The family pack together whatever they can – some food, some clothes - I understand this happens very quickly – and get on a train that is heading for Berlin. Presumably they are on the train because my grandfather is working for the railways, otherwise they would have been on foot, as thousands of others were. The train is in extremely poor condition, with most of the windows broken. It’s January and it’s the dead of winter, the countryside covered in snow. As the train departs, my grandfather says goodbye to his wife and children – he must stay in Leszno and work on the railways as the Soviets advance westward.

Stargard Szczecin

2009-01-02T23:05:00.000-08:00

It’s a four hour trip from Gdansk to Stargard Szczecin and although I’m in a first class carriage, there is no power for my computer and there is no dining car either. My ticket is actually booked for Szczecin, which is where I assume I will be getting off, but in fact, Szczecin and Stargard Szczecin are two different places, which at the time of travel I don’t know because the results of my internet searches were a bit unclear. Just to add to the confusion, Stargard was called Stettin under German occupation - and I was unable to find any information (in English anyway) about a transit camp for refugees in Stargard, Stettin or Szczecin. I do know, however, that there was a POW camp in Stargard during WWII.

I watch the country-side through the window, take videos on my camera and finish reading Sebald’s book on destruction and the German psyche. In my carriage are three young women, one who spends almost the whole trip in conversation on her blackberry. When she is not talking, she is sending messages and consulting a large diary. Next to me is a man who speaks a little English and is also going to Szczecin. He kindly lifts my suitcase onto the rack above the seats. ‘I think you must have gold in there’, he says, because it is so heavy. I am embarrassed about the weight of my suitcase – how could this be? especially after I sent eight large parcels back to Australia before I left Riga. I vow to reduce its contents once I get to Germany.

We are about half an hour from Szczecin when the train stops at a particular station for an extended period of time. I look out the window fairly casually – it’s a rather grotty, depressing station – and gaze blankly at a large white sign just outside my carriage window covered in Polish text. I notice it has the word Szczecin on it, but then I notice that Szczecin is preceded by the word Stargard. In a small flurry of panic, I realise that this is where I have to get off and ask the man next to me if he could help me with my suitcase. ‘But your ticket is for Szczecin’, he says. ‘I know’, I reply, ‘but this is where I am going, this is where my mother was in 1944’. ‘So it’s a special journey’, he says, ‘it’s about your family history’, and he takes my suitcase down from the rack, and like a true gentleman, carries it onto the platform for me. He also wishes me good luck.

Stargard Szczecin Station

The train vanishes into the distance and there I am, on the platform of Stargard Szczecin, in a place that looks completely different from the images on the internet sites I had been checking. I drag my suitcase up and down the stairs of a small underpass and into the main part of the station. It feels a bit daunting here because it's very run down. I look for information signs, find one, wait patiently in a queue, but when it’s my turn the woman just shakes her head – she speaks no English - and points me to the adjacent counter and another queue. I wait here and again I have no luck and am sent to yet another counter, where of course, as I now come to expect, no-one speaks a word of English. The woman at this final counter just looks at me with a stunned expression on her face. I feel a small wave of panic pass through me – what the hell am I doing here? What was I thinking? Why didn’t I go to Szczecin, as I had originally planned and then I could have done a day trip to Stargard? But then I pull myself together and go outside station to see what I can find. There is a big map on the side of the wall, and I search it for the location of the station, but I can’t see it marked anywhere and there is no ‘You Are Here’ arrow. I ask a big, rough-looking man standing next to me for help by pointing to the ground and then to the map, but he just shakes his head and points to the taxi rank.

There are two cabs. I get into one and ask for ‘touristiko informacija’ (a strange hybrid of Latvian and what I think might be Polish that I make up on the spot) and the driver takes me to a small square in the old part of town and points to an office with ‘i’ on the door. The square looks completely dead – not a soul in sight – and while the woman in the bureau is quite friendly, she speaks no English. She does, however, draw a small map for me that shows the location of a hotel. When I leave, I notice there is another bureau diagonally opposite that looks more like the official Tourist Information office and so I pay a visit there as well. The woman working here also has no English, but she asks if I speak German (why didn’t I think of this at the station?) and we manage to have a staccato conversation. I haven’t used German for years and my vocabulary is very limited, but somehow I manage to draw out and string together enough words to make myself understood. (This is a physical experience, almost painful, because I can actually feel the words squeezing out from a very dormant section of my brain.) The woman explains that there are two hotels that would be suitable for me, one in the centre of town and the other further out. I decide for the more central option, which is supposed to be the best accommodation in Stargard and was also suggested by the woman in the other bureau, collect a range of information brochures and head off with map in hand.

Stargard Szczecin Square

Stargard Szczecin is much more attractive than its railway station suggests. It’s a very old town – one of the oldest in Poland, in fact – and has many beautiful gothic buildings. I stop to take photos here and there as I make my way to the Hotel Spichlerz. I walk through a superb old gate, turn right on the main street and reach the hotel in about fifteen minutes. While the signage on the street is clear, the entrance to the hotel is not and I mysteriously find myself inside a shop that sells Stihl products. The woman behind the counter is busy talking on the phone but she points next door, so I go back outside to search for the entrance. I eventually find it and after negotiating a series of Escher-inspired stairwells, I arrive at the back of the Stihl shop. It seems that the shop and the hotel are all part of the same operation. The woman is still on the phone but she indicates she will be with me in a moment. I find the reception area down another mysterious flight of stairs and wait until she arrives and checks me in.

The Hotel Spichlerz

I settle into my room, which is in a corridor between two flights of stairs that you can’t take the lift to. I either have to drag my suitcase up a small flight of stairs, or catch the lift to the first floor and then drag it down a small flight of stairs. It’s all quite confusing and I am beginning to wonder whether I should have opted for the slightly cheaper hotel that is further out of the centre of town. But even though it’s a bit monastic, my room is quite comfortable and I feel a little more relaxed now that I have a base in Stargard, although I do have the odd feeling that I’m the only person staying in the hotel. I unpack my computer and toiletries and I look out the window. The view is across the front courtyard, a big sloping expanse of pale gravel. The curtain is quite thin and just covers the window. I feel a bit strange, being here, in Stargard. Perhaps Valters Nolledorfs is wrong and my mother never came here at all.

My room in the Hotel Spichlerz

It’s starting to get dark and I’m quite hungry because I haven’t eaten since breakfast so I go in search of food. The receptionist, who only speaks Polish, recommends the restaurant Faroun, which is just a short stroll down the road. It’s actually a large fluoro lit café with about eight melamine dining tables lined up in two rows of four. With the exception of the lighting and the starkness of the décor, it’s a little reminiscent of dining rooms in Riga, where the food is home-cooked and priced by weight. I have a meat pancake, salad and coffee. The other guests observe me with interest – I’m clearly not local.

After dinner, my capitalist radar steers me around the corner into the main shopping street. I buy a few supplies in the supermarket and find myself feeling really settled – I’ve made transactions for accommodation, food and supplies so I know I can survive here. Of course, when my mother arrived here in 1944, the process of settling in, if you could call it that, was a completely different experience – delousing with giant hoses in public showers, being ill with dysentery, sleeping in vast barracks on wooden tiered bunks where thousands of others had slept…

I make my way back to the hotel through a park that follows the original walls of the old part of town – it’s very beautiful in the dusk - and I wonder how on earth I’m going to find the location of the transit camp in Stargard Szczecin.

Back at the hotel, I ask for the internet password but it fails to work – I try everything possible, but the system just won’t let me in. I have another moment of Western panic – no global communication possible from Stargard Szczecin. I’m now cursing and wish I had stayed at the other hotel. I’m in the wrong place, I say to myself in my little room, I’m in the wrong place. Why didn’t I go to the other hotel that’s a bit further out? It wouldn’t have taken that long to walk there.

I go up and down the series of stairs to get to reception to ask for hot water so I can make a cup of tea. There are some other people there – a man in his forties, a woman and a young child. They’re quite chatty with the receptionist who plugs in an electric kettle behind the counter for my hot water. The man, who I assume to be another guest, starts talking to me. I tell him I don’t speak Polish but we quickly establish that we can both speak a little German and, as we begin our rather stilted conversation, I realise he is actually the owner of the hotel. His name is Zdzislaw Kosikowski and he’s very friendly. Zdzislaw asks me what I’m doing in Stargard and I explain that I’m looking for the site of the refugee camp where my mother stayed in 1944. He immediately goes behind the counter, looks up something on the hotel computer and says that he knows where the camp was. I’m a little aghast – this was not meant to be so easy. He shows me a website and says, ‘Here, it must have been here, at Kluczewo’. He prints out the pages and points to a precise location on my map of Stargard. He tells me there was a huge German airbase there with military barracks and a labour camp for prisoners of war. We both use the word ‘lager’ as a way of describing the camp, but I also try to explain, in my very pathetic German, that my mother was a refugee and was here only for a week or so while in transit to Leszno. Zdzislaw says he is one hundred percent sure that Kluczewo is the place I am looking for. I ask if I can get there by taxi, and he says yes, sure, it’s about ten minutes drive away. He shows me books about Stargard published by the local government and finds one in which there is information about the airbase and the lager. He also presents me with a golden Stargard Szczecin commemorative coin in its own plastic case and asks me to sit down at the big table and write in the visitors’ book. ‘You must write why you are here – write everything you have told me – you can write in English.’ I sit at the table and do as I’m told, now drinking my cup of tea. Of course I know now that I am staying in the right hotel.

Zdzislaw Kosikowski, owner of the Hotel Spichlerz

The next morning I have breakfast with five other guests in a huge dining room that reveals the hotel is surprisingly bigger than I had originally imagined. Large glass doors open onto a wide tiled deck that in turn overlooks a park-like garden at the back of the hotel. The décor of the room itself combines timber surfaces with ornate floral wallpaper. A big flat-screen television on the end wall broadcasts the news - in Polish, of course. After breakfast, I ask the receptionist to call me a cab to take me to Kluczewo, but Zdzislaw, the hotel owner arrives, and says if I wait for him he will take me there himself! I am completely overcome by the kindness of this man.

Zdzislaw drives a shiny blue Peugot. On the dashboard, there are three books on the history of Stargard and as he drives, he uses one hand to flip through the pages to find snippets of information that might be useful to me. While he doesn’t drive fast, the car wavers all over the road as he simultaneously steers, searches through the books and talks to me in German. I watch for oncoming traffic with a certain level of anxiety but I also repeat the word ‘ja’, nod my head and make other exclamations that suggest I am following the conversation. Of course, I can only grasp a fraction of what Zdzislaw is saying, but I have found that in such situations it is more productive to smile and say yes and hang on to every word that possibly makes sense, rather than to look puzzled and say that you don’t understand.

It takes about ten minutes to get to Kluczewo, a small village on the outskirts of Stargard proper. The tree-lined streets shade pre-war renovated apartment blocks that housed the German Luftwaffe as well as newer, Soviet built housing blocks. It’s the height of autumn, the leaves are golden and Kluczewo looks quite romantic. I comment that Kluczewo 'ist sehr shön', and Zdzislaw retorts that that’s only because of the trees. We drive through the town and down a desolate road dotted with a few old buildings and eventually arrive at an abandoned railway station. The whole place is overgrown with weeds and the windows on the lower floor of the red brick building are boarded over, but those on the upper storey still have glass. We get out of the car and Zdzislaw tells me this is the station my mother would have arrived at in 1944. So not at Stargard Szczecin where I got off, but here… Zdzislaw takes a photo of me and I photograph him. The place feels ghostly. I try to imagine the thousands of people who must have arrived here during the war - was my mother’s family amongst them?

The abandoned Kluczewo Railway Station

We get back into the car and keep driving down a long curvy road. The land on either side is flat and mostly bare. It feels like lost land, land that no-one knows what to do with. In the distance, on my left, there is a long line of semi-circular grass-covered bunkers – lots and lots of them. These were for the airfield workers, explains Zdzislaw, and I can see that this must have been a huge airbase.

Grass-covered bunkers

As we keep driving, the road turns to concrete and suddenly we’re right in the middle of a huge abandoned runway that stretches in all directions for miles and miles. We get out of the car and Zdzislaw stands near the blue Peugot while I take photos. It’s vast and windy and a little bit spooky and I’m rather overwhelmed about being here. It’s not really what I had expected to see and it all feels rather unreal.

The abandoned Kluczewo airfield

We get back into the car and drive along another road and Zdzislaw points out where the camps were. 'Here', he says, 'was the lager'. There are some trees and shrubs lining the road and just beyond I see some rubble and the remnants of walls in amongst the grass and weeds. Further on, the land is flat and desolate. This is Anselm Kiefer territory. I see his open, muddy fields, thick with a dark history that is churned into the very soil. I take photos of the camp site. Zdzislaw also points to a field on the right and I think he says that this is where many people died, but I’m not sure if I understand properly and I’m too overwhelmed to be logical and ask him to repeat himself. It is enough just being here – and it doesn’t actually matter whether my mother was here or not.

The sites of what I assume was the POW camp

Later, when I get back to Australia, I find a website that documents the memoirs of a Jewish woman, Lieb Lurie, who hid her real identity by paying for the papers of a Polish farm girl. Lieb writes about arriving in a transit camp in Stargard in 1942 where she stayed until the end of the war, working on the telephone system. When she arrived at the camp, she washed and received a haircut and also records that over time, the camp grew to 2,000 people - Ukrainians, Czechs, Frenchmen, Italians and Poles. It would be safe to assume then, that this is the camp Valters Nollendorfs was referring to and which my mother most likely passed through. However, I remain confused about the POW camp in Stargard – was it the same as the transit camp and the lager? Or were these different camps in different locations?

Zdzislaw heads back to town. We drive past the huge new Bridgestone factory, one of the largest outside Japan. It covers 100 hectares, an area as vast as the airfield we just visited, and has created hundred of new jobs in the area. There is also a sugar refinery here and a Dutch factory of some sort. Stargard Szczecin has gone from one type of labour camp to another.

Back in Stargard, the traffic is getting thick. It’s All Souls Day, remembrance day for the dead, and everyone is heading for church or the cemetery. People on the street carry wreaths or red glass candles holders that they will place at the graves of family and friends. Zdzislaw drops me off at the hotel and I thank him, wishing I could also give him a Tasmanian souvenir or some other token of my appreciation. He says I can check out of the hotel any time I like.

Everything in Stargard is closed except for the churches, and I so decide sit in on a service in a big Cathedral near the town square. Even though I’m neither Christian nor Catholic, it seems the right thing to do, given that it’s All Saints Day. Of course, I come from a Christian background and the stillness of the church and the rituals of prayer and hymn singing have a calming effect on my sense of being. I once toyed with the idea of Catholicism – just as an idea, nothing more - because I liked the concept of confession and being absolved of sin on a regular basis, a sort of fresh start whenever you needed it. But it was only ever an idea, and a very naïve one at that.

After church, I’m not sure what to do. I need to get to Leszno next, but I don’t really want to spend more time here. Stargard is a beautiful old Pomeranian town, but I also feel a bit trapped within its historic walls. It was a transit place for my mother and I feel it is a transit place for me too.

I do a final circuit around the old town's historic buildings and make my way back to the hotel. There is a different receptionist on duty and she has my godmother’s name - Edite – and she speaks English! I ask her if she knows what time the trains depart for Szczecin and she checks on the internet. It's about an hour before the next train and so we both go into the big dining room and pass the time over a cup of tea. Edite looks very young and I am surprised when she tells me she is forty years old. We chat easily and she tells me a lot about her life and the various difficulties she has faced. She is determined, however, to remain positive and has a dream that one day things will get better for her. I suggest that she may be able to use her English skills as a means to a better job and we agree that one day I will return and we will have coffee together in a café in Szczecin, where she sees a possible future for herself. We say goodbye and I head for the railway station.

Edite

From Warsaw to Gdansk

2009-01-01T22:37:00.000-08:00

The trip from Warsaw to Gdansk takes about four hours by train. I’m traveling first class in a cabin that seats eight people. I make some notes on my computer and start reading WG Sebald’s On the Natural History of Destruction, a reflection on Germany’s silence in response to the utter devastation of so many of its cities during WWII. Occasionally I look up and check the woman sitting directly opposite me. She’s probably in her late fifties and is dressed from head to foot in various shades of purple. She spends almost the entire journey with her eyes closed, praying quietly to herself while counting rosary beads. Every now and then I also look out the window and take small videos of the passing countryside. Poland is not too different from Latvia but the forests seem a little scrubbier and the trees a bit shorter. I particularly notice this with the birch trees. I also get a strong sense that I’m traversing a very small stretch of a very vast country. We pass through forests, farms, big open fields and acre after acre of the now familiar community gardens. Of course, for me, none of them compare with the magnificence of Biruta’s and Aturs’ garden, with its large summer house, five beehives and well-trained chickens that forage in the woods during the day and return to roost in the coop every evening.

The train passes through some railways stations and stops at others. As it comes closer to a station, more buildings appear, and on the buildings, a seemingly endless band of graffiti that looks as though it has simply continued on from Latvia and Russia. The graffiti is indiscriminate and snakes across everything in its path - ugly soviet housing blocks, beautiful historic buildings, private houses, brand new office blocks. And while the text may be different because it is in a different language, the formal elements of the graffiti - its style, scale and range of colours – are virtually the same as in Riga, Moscow, Warsaw – and later in Szczecin, Leszno, Berlin, Hannover, Geneva, Milan, Naples, Pompei... As the trip progresses, my disdain for its persistence and its complete lack of discrimination, in particular when it smears the base of stunning historic buildings, grows stronger and stronger.

I arrive at Gdansk and catch a cab to the Hanza hotel, which is where Michael Pallin stayed when he was filming his series on Europe. It’s not a very big hotel but it’s right on the Motlawa Canal in the centre of the old town. I’m sure Pallin’s room would have had a view across the water – mine, however, looks over the street. I am also convinced I have been given the wheelchair accessible room because it is the only room in the hotel with a giant sized door (I know this because one morning I walk down all the corridors on all the floors in the hotel and check the size of all the doors to the rooms – mine is the only one of such large proportions). My bathroom is also huge and has convenient handrails next to the toilet and in the shower.

The view from the Hanza Hotel across the Motlawa Canal

On my first evening I take a walk along the picturesque waterfront which is lined with amber shops and restaurants. Right next door to the hotel is the famous Zuras crane, a giant Medieval wonder of engineering that was originally built in the 14th century. For centuries it was used to load and unload cargo from ships but now it is part of Gdansk’s maritime museum. I stop to admire the amber shops every now and then. There are so many here that I can barely believe it – shop after shop after shop, all selling every type of amber jewel imaginable. I thought there was a lot of amber in Riga, but here, there are entire streets that are just amber stores, like the beautiful Mariacka Street.

Mariacka Street, lined with amber stores

The Zuras Crane

I reach the Dlugi Targ, the main ‘square’ of the old town which was once the ‘Royal Road’ and is entered at either end through ancient gateways. Like Warsaw, Gdansk was reduced to rubble during WWII and was completely rebuilt, brick by brick. I have a friend who dislikes the rebuilding of cities destroyed as the result of war and sees it as a type of Disneyefication of place, but I don’t agree. I am stunned at the sheer amount of work, the extraordinary attention to detail and the almost defiant dedication that must have been required to reconstruct what I see now, as I walk through the square. I am entranced by the buildings – I can’t imagine them scarred by war – they feel like they have been here, settling and weathering, since they were first erected. Most of them have steps that lead to their entrances, flanked by fabulous gargoyle drains. I stroll from one end of the square to the other and I feel really happy to be here – it’s much easier and friendlier in terms of scale than Warsaw. I have a friend back in Hobart who is half Polish and I wish I could beam her down to enjoy Gdansk with me - I am convinced she would just love it. I have coffee in a smart café that also offers mouth-watering cakes and ice-cream before heading back to the hotel in the dark.

The old town, Gdansk

A doorway in the old town

One of the many gargoyle drains in the old town

The next day I walk to the Roads to Freedom, or Solidarity Museum, which tracks Polish resistance to Soviet occupation from the end of WWII. I am very moved by the exhibits and find myself spontaneously crying as I walk through the rooms. The crying response started back in Riga and has been with me ever since. It starts without any conscious invitation and makes me weep with embarrassing profusion at the slightest trigger. But I can’t pin down the nature of the trigger – sometimes I go somewhere and fully expect the crying response to kick in – a cemetery, for example, where a relative is buried - but no, not a single tear. At others, I just have to glance at a small object or a stranger’s face and the weeping starts instantaneously. In this museum, it’s all bound up with the focus on the 1980 dockworkers’ strikes - I am overwhelmed by the images, objects, soundtracks and reconstructions that represent the fight for civil rights, the determination of everyday individuals to resist oppression. I even weep at the giant plastic souvenir Pope pen that was used to sign the strike conditions, even though it looks almost comical displayed in its own glass case.

The entrance to the underground Solidarity Museum

Inside the Solidarity Museum

The Pope pen and the conditions of the strike

* * *

I need to find the port where my mother’s ship would have landed in 1944 and I ask the receptionist at the hotel if she knows where it is. She gives me instructions to catch tram number 8 and tells me that will take me there – she is quite specific and even marks the direction of the tram on my map. She actually sends me on a wild goose chase – I take tram number 8, excited at the prospect of arriving at the old port, but the tram just goes deeper and deeper into Soviet housing block areas. It’s all very interesting, but after about 45 minutes, I get out, cross the tram tracks and go back to where I came from. I stop at the Solidarity memorial where the 1980s dockworkers’ strikes took place (here there is no weeping) and then head back into town.

Gdansk railway station from the tram stop

Just opposite the railway station is a Holiday Inn and I ask the staff here for the location of the old port. This time I get good information – I have to go to Westerplatte, where WWII started, which is on a peninsula opposite the new wharf. There is no easy way to get there at this time of year because the tourist season is over. During the summer, there is a boat that takes you there (how perfect that would have been) but now the choices are limited and I decide to hire a cab. I go back to my hotel and they arrange for a driver to take me on a round trip to Westerplatte.

My cab driver, Roman Zagorski, arrives in his Mercedes. He speaks English well and also has a great sense of humour. He’s a bit round and jolly and when he laughs, reveals a great row of small, dolphin-like teeth. But he also takes the journey seriously and assumes the role of personal tour guide. He knows Westerplatte intimately and shows me all the significant sites, including the spot where WWII started, of course.

Roman Zagorski with his Mercedes

We drive around small roads where there are many old factories. We stop so I can take photographs. I get out and walk on the sandy beach and watch the waves roll in from the Baltic Sea. Roman has worked out a little itinerary for me that would take me on a ferry to the other side of Westerplatte peninsula but unfortunately, the ferry is not operating today. We are both a bit disappointed. He shows me where the ships would have come in during the war and I try to imagine what it was like for my mother and her family to arrive here, in a strange land, on a ship that had been bombed carrying a cargo of wounded soldiers and refugees. Did they know they were going to Gdansk? Or did they just get on the ship and hope that it would take them away from the encroaching Soviet advance? They would have known, of course. My mother tells me later that my grandfather’s cousin, who was the one who had arranged for them to go by train to Liepaja, was looking after the wounded soldiers and had to accompany them to Gdansk. He was allowed to take his family with him, but as he was single, and my grandfather was his closest relative in Riga, he asked my mother’s family if they wanted to go. They did. They made the decision to leave instead of staying.

The Baltic Sea from Westerplatte

The wharf where my mother's family would have landed in 1944

I wonder what my mother’s life would have been had they stayed – how would communism have treated her and what opportunities would it have offered? Would she be living now in a Soviet housing block in the outer suburbs of Riga, in a tiny flat with paper thins walls, growing all her own vegetables and flowers in a community garden? It seems futile to think about this, because had she stayed, I would undoubtedly not exist and nor would the questions. The fact is, my mother left her homeland and went to Australia and she now lives in the Latvian Retirement Village in a small but sunny unit with Mr Chips, the most beautiful dog that could possibly be, and a very lovely garden that she takes great pride in tending.

Nevertheless, I feel a desire to spend more time here, to sit here on the sandy beach, look out over the Baltic and just take in where I am and how far away it is from little Hobart on the other side of the earth. But it’s also cold and windy and I’m with Roman, and the meter in his Mercedes is ticking away as he smiles at me with his dolphin teeth and suggests some further extensions to our trip. I thank him and say I have seen enough and he drops me off near the main street of the old town.

The Baltic Sea from the beach at Westerplatte

On my final night in Gdansk, I catch a cab to the Szydlowski Hotel, which is where Gunter Grass, the Nobel-Prize winning author of Tin Drum stays whenever he is in town. Gdansk, of course, is his home and in this hotel he has a table permanently booked in the restaurant. I decide I should eat a meal there – who knows, perhaps Grass himself may turn up. The hotel is about fifteen minutes drive from the old town and it’s a smart but fairly modest 3 star establishment. I ask at reception if this is where Gunter Grass stays and they tell me yes, there is a picture of him in the café, where he sometimes dines. I take a seat and order Polish sour soup, which is served in a hollowed-out loaf of rye bread. It’s just delicious – very similar to Latvian sour soup, but Latvians don’t serve it inside a loaf of bread. It’s made from sorrel, boiled eggs and chunks of bacon and has a distinctive sour flavour. I take photos of my dinner, ask the waitress to take a photo of me sitting in the Gunter Grass cafe and then take a cab back to the old town. The next day I catch another train and head deeper into the Polish coutryside in search of the camp in Stargard Szczecin.

Polish sour soup served in a loaf of rye bread

Goodbye Riga

2009-01-01T03:27:00.000-08:00

My mother has very little memory of her arrival in Gdansk from Liepaja but does recall arriving some time in the morning and being taken by train almost immediately to a huge camp where there were thousands of other refugees, all sleeping in giant barracks on tiered wooden bunk beds, about fifty people per room. She had thought the camp was not too far from Gdansk, but Valters Nollendorfs, the director of the Occupation Museum in Riga, is almost one hundred percent sure that the camp is the same one he passed through one month before my mother’s family arrived there. He says the camp was in Stargard Szczecin, a satellite town of the larger port of Szczecin (Stettin under German occupation). While I can’t absolutely confirm that this was the place my mother went to, his description and my mother’s are so very very similar that I am convinced he is right and so I change my itinerary to include a stop in Szczecin.

Before my mother’s family can enter the camp, they are deloused along with all the other refugees because almost everyone has become infested during their long journeys from various Eastern European locations. They take off their clothes and hang them on racks to be fumigated and then go into large open showers where men with hoses wash them down with some type of disinfectant. I ask my mother what this experience was like and she says that because everyone was standing together, in a long row, and they were all being hosed down as a group, it was not so bad – it was something you had to accept, in a matter of fact way, as part of the new and unknown rules of life as a refugee.

The camp itself is a type of transit station where people get dispersed to other places. My mother’s family are on their way to stay with relatives who live in Leszno, a small town south of Posnan, but they are unable to leave the camp for a week or so because my mother becomes ill with dysentery. This may also explain why her memories of the camp and its location are so vague. There is no medical centre, but she is given some medication. When my mother has recovered sufficiently from her illness, they head for Leszno, where Elina Bonke, my mother’s cousin lives. Elina is my grandmother’s brother’s daughter, and she lived in Sarkandaugava until she married and moved to Poland. The photograph, which I also included in the posting on Sarkandaugava, is of her confirmation, with my mother seated on the floor in front of her parents. Gunars, her brother, is second from the left in the front. (As a child, I was always a little disturbed by the shaved heads of young boys in these old family photographs. It was the 1960s when I first viewed them with any real understanding of their content, a time when everyone was growing their hair long. For some reason I associated the shaved heads with something a little sinister - a type of undisclosed punishment.)

Elina Bonke's confirmation in Sarkandaugava. When the family escape
Latvia, they go to stay with Elina and her husband in Leszno, Poland.

I can’t follow my mother’s journey from Liepaja to Gdansk by ship as there are no ferries or boats running the route. I could make a longish digression by catching a ferry to Sweden, then a train to a specific city on the Swedish coast where a ferry does leave for Gdansk, but such a trip would take quite a number of days and while I would like to do it, my time is limited and I am presented with an alternative option. A friend in Hobart, the artist Liz Woods, introduces me to Jarek Lustych, also an artist and based in Warsaw who would be happy to show me around the city’s contemporary art scene. I had not originally planned to go to Warsaw, but this seems like too interesting an opportunity to miss, so I decide to fly there to meet with Jarek, and then catch a train to get to Gdansk.

* * *

I leave Riga on the 25th October. During the week before I go, I make several trips to the post office by taxi and send about eight parcels back to Australia. I have accumulated a lot of stuff – books, catalogues, old magazines from the 1920s and 30s, maps, art work trials and various other things that have become a burden because of their bulk and weight. The apartment looks spare and minimal again, as it was when I first arrived, and I feel a pang of sadness about leaving it. I have become accustomed to living here, in this huge space – it feels like home – and I am also a little scared about heading off into Poland to a series of places I have only ever visited on the internet.

My home in Riga for two months

The night before I go I have dinner with Anda Klavina in Osiris Café. It is hard to say goodbye because I have grown very fond of her over the last seven weeks. She has been more than just a very helpful project officer for the residency, she has become a good friend. I will miss our talks about art, life, relationships and what it is to be Latvian.

Anda Klavina, the et+t residency project office, and me. Behind us are some
of my works in progress, digital images printed on a canvas-like material.

My cousin Mara and her husband Viktors take me to the airport. They truly feel like family to me now and have been incredibly supportive during my stay. They have had me over for dinner, collected my mail from Australia and have helped me find materials for art works. Mara also phoned me almost every day to check that I was ok and, of course, we both travelled to Moscow together, which was a great adventure that still seems like dream.

I fly to Warsaw with Lot, the Polish airline, on a very small plane that only takes about 30 passengers. It’s a very smooth and uneventful flight, despite my initial concern about the size of the plane. As I’m waiting for my luggage, I ask two of the other passengers if they would like to share a cab into the city. Jarek has warned me that taxi drivers in Warsaw can charge outrageous sums for short distances, and I’m glad that the two women, Canadians who have been working in Latvia on a social justice program, are happy to join me. When we emerge from customs, we are almost immediately accosted by a private driver who wants to charge us 10 euros each for a 10 minute trip. I barter with him but he declines my offer of 5 euros each. We eventually find a cab driver who charges 10 euros for all three of us. The Canadians get off at the Hilton and I am dropped off at the Bristol, a commanding old art nouveau hotel on the famous King’s Way, right next door to the Palace and very close to the old town. I’m staying here because I succumbed to a fantastic internet deal and I feel a bit guilty. My room is plush and spacious, with antique furniture, a marble bathroom and views over the Palace courtyard. As I luxuriate on the bed, testing out the range of pillows and flicking through the channels on the big flat screen television, the guilt magically vanishes and I feel like a princess.

The Bristol Hotel, right next to the Palace

My first afternoon is spent exploring the very beautiful old town. I find it hard to believe that most of what I see has been reconstructed, brick by brick, after almost complete destruction during WWII. The buildings are richly decorated and I fall in love with the use of colour, floral patterns and touches of gilding. A restaurant in the main square of the old town is covered in vines and autumn leaves and looks like it belongs in a fairytale. In one of the smaller streets, I come across a busker dressed as the grim reaper. When I give him a coin he comes to life and rings a bell. Closer to my hotel is the university, large bookshops, some private galleries and a number of churches. I feel relaxed and happy, and also very safe here in Warsaw, and the anxiety I felt about going to Poland vanishes completely.

Views in the old town, Warsaw

I arrange to meet Jarek in the foyer of the hotel at 11.30 the next day and we spend all afternoon together, visiting two contemporary art galleries and the Palace gardens. As we walk, I ask Jarek about his art practice and he tells me he is working on a project I incorrectly interpret as being about ‘The Laugh’. I have trouble following the logic of what he is saying and eventually realize his project is not about ‘The Laugh’ at all. I confess that I have misunderstood and Jarek repeats that the theme of his work is ‘The Luff, The Luff’. And then it clicks and I get it - Jarek’s project is about ‘The Love’. We laugh about my misinterpretation.

I get to see one of Jarek’s recent projects on our way to the first gallery. It’s a site-specific work in an abandoned street display cabinet in front of some shops. Jarek has covered the cabinet with silver leaf and from its little ceiling hang the two rounded but separated halves of a silver heart. It’s a delicate and subtle work that transforms a small part of the street into something magical. Jarek likes to work outside the gallery system, surprising the public with his projects which he sets up in unexpected places - he has been using the heart shape – a universal symbol of ‘the luff’ - in a number of recent works.

Jarek Lustych and his art work

As we move on, trying to find a contemporary art space that has only recently been opened in the city, I get to see some of Warsaw beyond the old part of town. There is a very different aesthetic operating here – one that aims for grandeur, scale and monumentalism. We walk past the Palace of Science and Culture, a massive Soviet building that was completed in 1955 as a gift to the people of Poland. It is the tallest building in the country and seems impossibly huge and incredibly, bleakly Soviet in its design. There is a similar building in Riga – the Latvian Academy of Sciences - but it’s not nearly as big. It towers behind the central markets but is dwarfed by the truly massive radio and television tower, the highest structure in the Baltic states. I go back to Wasaw's Palace the next day, explore a little of the interior and take the lift to the 30th floor where there are great views over the city from an observation deck.

The Palace of Science and Culture, Warsaw

Riga's Academy of Sciences, with the radio and television tower in the background

Getting around Warsaw is quite hard work because all of the streets and boulevards are huge – so huge that it is daunting to stand on one side of the road and contemplate getting to the other side. In some cases, there is no pedestrian access on the surface and you have to look for specially constructed underground walkways that get you from one side of the road to the other. Jarek doesn’t like the grandeur of the streets – he thinks they are too big and too wide, and as a result, it’s difficult to feel a sense of intimacy with the city or with the people. By the time I get to day three in Warsaw, I agree with him.

We eventually finally find the new gallery, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, which is tucked in an alleyway and appears to be in what was once an old office building. The floors and walls have been purposefully left ‘unfinished’, creating a look and feel that’s clearly been inspired by the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. (I’ve never been really convinced by this style of gallery because unless the work is site-specific, it often ends up competing with the space itself.) The exhibition is called Nie Ma Sorry, which is translated as Ain't no sorry. There are quite a few video works and we move from one to another together, discussing each before moving to the next. My favourite is a compelling video projection by Agnieszka Polska of a series of old black and white photographs of people undertaking rehabilitation exercises. Polska has animated individual body parts at a very slow and meditative pace – an arm gradually moves upwards, a hand strokes a neck, two legs are raised and lowered alternately. While the actions themselves are rather insignificant, there is something about these minimal movements that is utterly mesmerising. Jarek says its because the pace of the animation matches the pace of normal breathing but I think it is also the nature of the images themselves, which seem to bring to life subjects from a long gone past. The work is also accompanied by a series of small, still images that have been pasted to the wall.

Inside the Museum of Modern Art, with Wojciech Kosma's Cross pulse counting, 2008

A still from Agnieszka Polska's Correction exercises, 2008

Afterwards, we have coffee in a restaurant close by and then catch a tram to the Royal Baths Park, a vast 76 hectares of Baroque gardens and buildings established in the 16th century and acquired by Stanisław Poniatowski in 1764 after he became King of Poland. The gardens are stunning and we stroll through the grounds with hundreds of other people - the trees are golden, the buildings ornate, there are ducks and swans in the lake and everything looks like a postcard.

A view in the Royal Baths Park, Warsaw

In the same grounds, up a steep slope, is the Ujazdowski Castle, which houses Warsaw’s major contemporary art gallery. It’s currently showing a retrospective of sculptor Marek Kijewski (1955-2007) who sadly died at the height of his career. I ask Jarek what he died of and he replies, ‘Too much hard living’. The exhibition, titled I'm All A-tremble When I Can Shower You with Gold, is a wild and highly individual mix of Pop art and contemporary kitsch. There’s lots of bright colour, gold leaf, neon light and fantastic creatures and objects that are partially constructed from children’s sweets.

Marek Kijewski (1955-2007) and an installation view of his retrospective

What strikes me about this gallery and the work in it, is that Poland doesn’t appear to have been left behind during Soviet occupation in terms of contemporary art developments in the West. There is a small survey of 1960s and 70s Conceptual art and it looks typical of what you would see in any Western gallery. The situation is quite different in Latvia, where contemporary art has had to go through a process of ‘catching up’ and still seems to be finding its own voice. Here, in Poland, the work appears to have developed without restriction and with a great sense of confidence. I discuss this with Jarek and he tells me that each Soviet republic was allowed to develop something specific to itself. ‘And Poland’, he states, ‘was given the licence to think.’ Again, I can’t help making comparisons with Latvia, which seems to have been so much more oppressed than Poland during Soviet occupation.

Jarek asks me if I want to walk the three or four kilometres back to the hotel and I say no, let’s catch the tram please! We spend an hour or so in a casual but groovy bar just across the road from the Bristol where you can have cheap meals with your drinks. We have white Polish sausages and mustard. Jarek has to work the next day, and is tired from being up all night playing a part in a Polish television sitcom, otherwise he would show me more of the sites around Warsaw. I too, am exhausted and look forward to relaxing in my swish hotel room.

In the groovy bar across the road from the Bristol. Jarek is below the
drawing of the whistling teapot on the wall

The next day I take to the streets of Warsaw on my own and walk to the railway station to book my ticket to Gdansk, negotiating huge people-unfriendly boulevards to get there. The Palace of Science and Culture is right behind the station, and I spend about half an hour trying to find my way into the building. It is so massive and contains so many different museums and offices that it is not easy to find the right entrance for the viewing platform. Inside, it’s a bit like a railway station – lots of pinkish granite and marble, high ceilings and stairwells. I buy a ticket, go downstairs to the lifts and then catch the express to the 30th floor. Here too, it feels impersonal and cold, but there is an impressive chandelier in the entrance and the views of the city are superb.

A view of Warsaw from the 30th floor of the Palace of Science and Culture

Later in the day I catch the tram to the zoo on the other side of the river to see the bears, which I find rather sad, then further out to the giant markets where I get a bit lost, and then back to King’s Way for a stroll around the university as it begins to get dark. In the morning, as I head for the railway station, I get my final glimpse of the giant Palace of Science and Culture before I vanish into the underground and settle into the first of many train trips that take me through Poland, Germany, Switzerland and Italy.

I love Liepaja

2008-11-23T13:30:00.000-08:00

Aija Druvaskalne-Urdze, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Leipaja University

At the Spektropia conference, I am introduced to Aija Druvaskalne-Urdze, the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Liepaja University. Liepaja is on the west coast of Latvia and is where my mother and her family boarded a ship in October 1944 and headed for Gdansk. When Aija hears that I’m planning to go there, she offers me a lift in the University mini bus and I happily accept. We leave on Wednesday 22 October and the trip takes about three hours. The other passengers are a local Liepajan and two students – Agnese and Elvis, who have been in Riga for the Spektropia conference. I sit next to Agnese in the bus and we talk a bit about art and other things. She is extremely well travelled and has been all over Europe. She has also been to America and tells me she arrived in New York on 10 September 2001.

Agnese in the entrance to the Faculty of Arts building, Liepaja University

When my mother’s family decide to leave Riga and head for Liepaja, it’s a very sudden decision. They hear that the Soviet army is invading Latvia from the west and is making its way towards the capital city. It’s 9 October 1944, and a relative asks if they can be ready in two hours. The family pack one suitcase and a box of food and are picked up by truck from Ganibu Dambi 40 and are taken to the railway station.

When I ask my mother what it was like to pack a few things and leave, she says it was not really very traumatic or out of the ordinary. Her family had never had very much in the way of possessions, so there was not very much to pack – and they had also moved from one place to another as a matter of course, going wherever my grandfather could get work. So the concept of gathering belongings and leaving for another location was nothing new to my mother and she says that at the age of seventeen, the idea of leaving the country was also accompanied by an odd sense of excitement and adventure. I can understand this – at that age, the world is just beginning to open its doors to you, and now it presents a completely unknown future. A friend, whose mother is also Latvian and left Riga around the same time, relates a similar story. His mother was a nurse, a few years older than my mother, and for her the war offered the opportunity to leave behind what was a difficult family situation and, despite the obvious danger, swap it for something new and exciting. So while the war was so very horrific in so many and countless ways for millions of people, for some it actually offered the possibility of a new beginning.

The train trip from Riga in 1944 took three days, arriving in Liepaja on 13 October, the day that Riga fell to the Soviets. Today the same journey takes about three and a half hours. During the war the train had to keep stopping and starting, presumably to let military trains through. It was on this trip that my mother met the unknown young man travelling with the sack of books who gave her the copy of Pedejais Pagrieziens, (The Last Bend in the Road) which was translated by her male namesake, M Berzins. On the train there are many wounded soldiers sleeping on bunks behind net curtains - the few civilians that include my mother’s family are not permitted to go near them and stay in their carriage, the floor lined with straw. At Liepaja everyone boards a ship and this is where my mother sees just how badly injured the soldiers are. The ship is bombed several times and some people die from schrapnel wounds, but it manages to set off into the Baltic sea for the port of Gdansk.

There were two streams of refugees heading to sea from Liepaja around this time. One group boarded fishing boats and tried to make it to Sweden, the other went on ships to Poland, following the German retreat.

As we drive into Liepaja, I sit on the edge of my seat, looking out for views of the port. It’s there, on the right, as we cross the bridge into the main part of town. I ask where the railway station is and Aija points to the opposite side of the port. The train runs once a day now, but I imagine that back in the 1930s the timetable would have been more frequent.

The port of Liepaja in 2008

I stay in a modern hotel just opposite the main university building and in the morning begin a tight schedule of appointments. Elvis meets me at 9.30 and we head for the Faculty of Arts main building where I give a one hour presentation to a group of multi-media students. I’m not sure what they think of my work or my project, because they are fairly quiet and don’t ask many questions, but they seem interested and Aija tells me that they have a long discussion about the presentation the next day. Both Angese and Elvis tell me that studying fine art in Liepaja is much more exciting and offers more possibilities for experimentation and self-directed projects than at Riga’s Academy of Fine Art (Agnese did a first degree in Riga’s Academy). They have specifically chosen to study in this smaller town, rather than in the capital city, because of the more progressive teaching system.

After my talk, Agnese takes me to another part of town to the Art School. We walk through the market and pop our heads inside a fantastic old building where the stairwell is painted with superb but crumbling art nouveau images. The art school itself has been impressively renovated from the outside but inside, shows obvious signs of its age. As I step into the main office, a photographer starts snapping his camera, recording my first stunned moments as I’m greeted by the head of the school, Inta Klasone. She is delighted to see me and very excited that an artist from Australia is visiting the school. Apparently there will be an article in the local newspaper about my brief stay.

Art Nouveau images on the walls of an old building in Liepaja

Inta Klasone, Head of the School of Art, Liepaja University

I am taken on a tour, and get to see many of the studios and meet students in the midst of their classes. While the school is progressive, the basics of teaching still hinge on the principles of the Academy, and in most rooms I visit, the emphasis seems to be on realism with a group of students behind their easels, drawing or painting a still life arrangement. But there is also a computer lab where they have the latest Macs and a printing studio with large scale digital printers. Everyone is incredibly friendly and I am invited to speak to a class in the afternoon, but it’s just not possible to fit it into my schedule. Aina invites me to return next year to give a presentation at the school’s annual conference, which will be on the theme of the portrait. The topic links in perfectly with my project about my mother and I plan to return in 2009 to take part.

Studios in the School of Art, Liepaja University

Agnese then walks me to the Liepaja Occupation Museum where an appointment has been made for me with the manager, Aina Burija, who gives me a personal and very generous tour of the museum’s collection. There is a lot to absorb and I take photographs of many of the displays. There are objects, maps, documents, photographs, lists of names and places, a small installation of a mother living in the gulags, a recreation of the office from which Liepaja’s involvement in Latvia’s independence in 1991 was organised… I am particularly taken by a striking red ballot box from 1940, the year the Soviets invaded Latvia and staged supposedly democratic elections which only listed candidates from one party. The museum also houses a superb collection of cameras and film equipment that belongs to a local resident. I am particularly anxious to see the displays about refugees and displaced persons’ camps on the next floor, but time runs out and I have to leave for my next appointment. I will return to the museum later in the day but Agnese is waiting to drive me to the suburb of Karostas in her car.

Aina Burija, Manager of the Occupation Museum in Liepaja

The Karostas area of Liepaja has an interesting history and a very distinct character of its own, which is associated with its military past and the architecture. My reason for coming here is to visit the military prison, which was originally built as a hospital but was never used for that purpose. On the way, Agnese takes me to a huge, recently renovated Russian Orthodox church right in the midst of an extensive Soviet housing block area. Its golden cupolas look surreal against a backdrop of rows and rows of apartment buildings. Just inside the entrance are baskets of scarves – we each select one, cover our heads, and go inside. The space is vast and open – no seating as is the way in Russian Orthodox churches – but the architecture is lavishly decorated. A team of old ladies scurry around the edges of the space with mops and other cleaning items. I buy a candle and place it at the central altar, near a huge icon of the Madonna.

The Russian Orthodox Church in Karostas. The housing blocks are obscured by the trees.

We then drive to the military prison, which is much smaller than I had expected. Since the prison opened in the early 1900s, it has been used by the Soviets, the Latvians and the Germans, shifting hands many times, but most of its history is associated with the communist era. It became a museum in 1997 and I am met by one of the founders, who is dressed in a Soviet uniform and gives me a private tour.

The entrance to the Karostas Prison

My guide at the Karostas Prison

Soviet Officer quarters in the Karostas Prison

The building itself is extremely stark, dank and cold and is only livened by the displays in some of the rooms. I can’t help drawing similarities to Port Arthur, even though the two prisons are a century apart. My guide shows me one particular cell, the size of a modest bedroom, where 50 prisoners were housed simultaneously. He explains that the only way they could all fit into the room is by standing, but he points out two places near the door where it is possible to sit. I wonder if the prisoners devised a rotation system so that each person could get the chance to sit for at least a few minutes. There is a small window close to the ceiling at least 3 metres up, and the walls are painted concrete covered in thousands of markings made by the prisoners. Next door is the bathroom. There are two holes in the floor in one corner, a big flat area nearby with drains which is probably the urinal, and a long trough with a few taps along another wall. All 50 prisoners were given a total of 1.5 minutes twice per day to do whatever they had to do and be back in the standing-room-only prison cell - failure to maintain cleanliness was punished. My guide also tells me that meals had to be consumed within 1.5 minutes and apparently the food, which was usually a gruel of some sort, was served at a very high temperature in metal bowls. The solitary confinement cell is a black hole with a tiny window in the door. The prisoner was permitted to sit for four hours per day – no bed, no blankets - and the other twenty had to be spent standing to attention on a specific spot on the floor. The other cells in the prison had wooden plank beds but there were no blankets and no heating. It seems inconceivable that anyone could survive the winter here, which can get to minus 20 or more in Latvia, and the standing-room-only cell, probably stinking because of the body heat, suddenly seems an attractive option.

Karostas Prison Bathroom

I catch a minibus back into Leipaja and return to the Occupation Museum, where Aina shows me the rest of the collection which is all about Latvian refugees and their life in displaced persons’ camps. The display focuses on how Latvians maintained their culture in the camps, establishing choirs, folk dancing and theatre groups, as well as schools, sports groups and guides and scouts. There is even a picture of Latvia’s sixth president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, in a DP camp in Lubeck. Vike-Freiberga was born in Latvia in 1937, ten years after my mother, and also fled the country in 1944 with her family. In 1949 they moved to French Morocco, and in 1954, to Toronto, Canada, where Vike-Freiberga established an academic career of international significance in clinical psychology (she also happens to be fluent in English, French, Latvian, Spanish and German) before taking on the role of steering Latvia back into democracy when she became President in 1999. I take more photos and wish I had more time in Liepaja.

Latvia's President, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, in a DP camp in Lubeck
front row, second from right

The day has vanished. I say goodbye to the museum staff, pick up my bags from the hotel, take the tram to the bus station, catch final glimpses of the port, and board the bus back to Riga in the dark. It’s along journey and I get back after 10pm. The next day is my last in Riga, otherwise I would have stayed longer in Liepaja. I like the city – it has a very relaxed, easy-going feel - and all the people I encountered were incredibly open, friendly and generous. In fact, I think I love Liepaja. I just feel very guilty that I did not get to the beach, to see the Baltic sea.

The Archives

2008-11-09T10:10:00.000-08:00

My grandfather works in the chemical factory Rutenbergs/Metils throughout the whole time the family is in Sarkandaugava. The factory building no longer stands and I go to the State Historical Archives to see what I can find. The archives are on the other side of the river, on Slokas iela, in a huge building with a spacious entrance foyer that leads to two long corridors that stretch out on either side. In public buildings in Latvia, offices usually don’t have reception areas and doors are not always labelled, so I have found myself in corridors staring at rows of closed doors, wondering which one I am supposed to enter, and what the protocol is for entering. I knock first as a matter of courtesy and on this first visit to the archives I am sent away because there is already another client in the office. I sit outside and wait. Eventually I return to the office where I fill in a form and am sent down another corridor to a small waiting area with a couch and a coffee table. From here, through double glass doors, I can see into the busy, tantalising world of the reading room.

Latvian State Historical Archives in Slokas Iela

While I wait I flip through a visitors’ book sitting on the coffee table. A few pages in, I notice that members of the International Map Collectors’ Society (IMCOS) have made comments - I turn the page and I’m overcome by a small rush of excitement to see a comment by my partner, Gerard, who was here in 1996 attending an IMCOS conference! He congratulates the archives on how well they have preserved their superb collection of maps. That particular conference was the very first international conference ever to be held in post Soviet Riga. I also attended, but while I went to many of the discussions and events, for some reason I missed the trip to the archives.

After about fifteen minutes, I meet Ira, the archivist, who becomes my personal research assistant over the next couple of weeks. There are a number of forms I have to fill in, but once the bureaucratic procedures are set in motion, I’m in the system and am able to access all kinds of material I had not imagined would be possible. Before we proceed into the reading room, I feel compelled to show Ira the comment in the visitors’ book and explain that it was made by my partner.

Ira Zaneriba, Latvian State Historical Archives

Ira explains to me that in addition searching for files on the Rutenbergs/Metils factory, I can access a number of different records that may have information about my family - passports, census records, and books that list the occupants of all houses and apartments in Riga. I am excited at the prospect of what I might uncover, fill in more forms and return three times over the next few weeks to view various records, take photographs and collect scans and photocopies.

Each time I come back to the archives, I view a new set of documents, some that are relevant, others that are not. Those that are relevant have a tremendous emotional impact on me and I struggle to convey my encounters with these seemingly insignificant envelopes, pieces of folded paper, ledger books and passports. Even though I am unable to translate all of the abbreviated, handwritten Latvian notes, the documents nevertheless speak directly to me in a language that exists beyond the written and spoken word.

The first document I view is the handwritten ‘Mājas Grāmata’, a register that lists everyone who lived in Lienas iela 8, the apartment building my father lived in. I had not originally planned to research my father’s side of the family as part of this project, but how I could resist the possibility of also viewing records about the Ozolins? In the Lienas iela book everyone in the family is listed, including when they were born, whether they are married or not, their profession, and which apartment they live in. My grandfather, Peteris Ozolins, who died of tuberculosis in 1932 when my father was seven years old, is listed as a clerk; my grandmother, Pauline, as a housekeeper and my father, a student. My father’s older sister, Irina, and his younger brother Peteris, are also registered. I turn the pages slowly and read over the entries multiple times, then take note of all the pages I would like to have copied.

My cousin Mara is from the Ozolins side of the family – her father was my father’s younger brother, Peteris. It is a family that was typically split as a result of World War II, Mara’s father staying in Soviet Latvia, my father and his older sister ending up in Australia. Peteris had a successful career as a merchant during Soviet times (this seems to me a paradox!) and he was also very popular with the ladies. His first wife, Benita, is Mara’s mother. His second wife, Taida, is good friends with Benita and we meet at Mara’s house for dinner twice during my stay in Riga. Benita had a particularly difficult life before she met my uncle - both of her parents were shot when she was 14 years old. It is Benita who tells me that when my father left high school, he worked in the famous Kuznecovs porcelain factory, hand-painting designs onto plates and other wares. When I first visited Riga in 1992, about nine months after the end of Soviet occupation, Benita presented me with a plate featuring a Latvian girl in national costume hand-painted by my father. At the time I was utterly astonished because my father had never told my family about his job in the porcelain factory, or his artistic skills.

Taida on the left of me, Benita on the right

My cousin Mara, holding her French Bulldog, Taida, Benita and Mara's husband Viktors

On the same day that I see the Mājas Grāmata, I also see a picture of my father’s mother as a young woman for the very first time in her passport. I open a thin brownish envelope and unfold a piece of thicker-than-average paper and there is the strong but gentle face of my grandmother staring back at me. I can see how similar my aunt Irina was to her mother, but I can’t really see anything of myself. Ira asks me if I have ever seen this picture before, and I say no, never. It seems so strange to be handling these very personal documents, which evoke very private and subjective reactions, in a public reading room.

Pauline Ozolina's passport, my grandmother on my father's side

On my next visit, there are more faded envelopes and this time I see pictures of Peteris Ozolins, my grandfather, for the very first time in my life. One of the passports is again a folded sheet of paper. When I open it, I am immediately drawn to the photograph in the lower left that shows Peteris from the waist up. He's smartly dressed in a suit and a shirt with one of those detachable starched collars. In one hand, he holds a newspaper or journal, giving him an air of youthful authority. The passport is dated 1920, so he must be twenty-six but he looks much younger. I give a little gasp when I see that on the right hand corner of the page is an official, smudgy blue fingerprint of his index finger. I run my own finger gently over the surface.

Peteris Ozolins, my grandfather, first passport

In another envelope there is a passport booklet and I am a little distraught when I open it and see the word ‘Anulets’ (Anulled) stamped in blue with the date 15 August 1932 hand-written beneath. The same stamp was on the previous passport too, but here it seems harsher and more final. I turn the page and here is another picture of Peteris, older than in the folded passport, and I immediately see the similarity to my father – the high forehead, the hairline, the structure of the face - he is very handsome, as my father also was. On the page opposite the photograph, it states that my grandfather had registered in the army reserve until I January 1935; on page 10, that he died on 26 July 1932. There is also a third document which is difficult to interpret because it is covered in notes in various handwritings, but it appears to have been issued in 1920 or 23 and records my grandfather as a fugitive of war. The final document I view is his baptism certificate. It is a complete surprise because it is beautifully handwritten in Russian and shows that my grandfather was baptised in the Russian Orthodox church. A friend who is an historian explains that this was very common around the late 19th century, and that many Latvians converted to Russian orthodoxy, apparently under the promise of being allocated parcels of land by the Russians.

My grandfather's second passport

My grandfather's baptism certificate

The next document I view is about my mother’s family and it’s in a large folder with hundreds of pages that are the 1935 census records of the Kandava district. The records themselves, while numbered chronologically, are in no logical order and I have to go through them one by one until I find the one that lists the Berzins family. It is number 461 and is so close to the end of the pile that by the time I get to it I have almost given up hope that it exists. But there it is, and as with the other documents I have viewed, I feel a small rush of excitement mixed with anxiety as I read the information it contains. It states that my mother’s family live at Valdeki on the property owned by Antons Benjamins in a building that has seven rooms. It also lists the following sanitary conditions: drinking water from a tap (the other options are a pump, a well, a lake, a river); lighting is electric, and the toilet is inside the house rather than outdoors. My mother told me that this was the first place she lived where there was an indoor flushing toilet, and now that small fragment of her past is confirmed in an official census document. There are twelve people listed on form 461, with the Berzins numbered 1-4. My grandfather is recorded as a farm hand, my grandmother as a worker, and my mother and her brother as workers’ children. There are four other farm hands on the list, plus a mechanic and a gardener.

Page 461 of the 1935 Kandava District Census

The final documents I view are my grandfather Alberts wages booklets from when he worked at the Rutenbergs/Metils Chemical Factory in Sarkandaugava. At first I am confused about why there are two booklets, both from the same factory, but then I see that one is recorded under Soviet rule and the other under German rule. In the latter, it shows that my grandfather worked his way up from being a labourer, to a distiller, to a shift work manager, and that he earned 140 Latts per month. In the Soviet booklet, his profession is listed as ‘Meistars’ or foreman and his wages are in roubles. He earns around 235 per month and amounts are subtracted for rent and community cultural relations. The cover and first pages of the Soviet booklet bear the statement ‘All workers of the land unite!’ followed by quotes from Lenin and Stalin.

The cover of my grandfather Alberts Berzins' wages booklet under Soviet rule

Inside my Grandfather's German occupation wages booklet

I am not sure how to react to this striking evidence of two different occupations of Latvia during World War II, occupations that shifted back and forth in a very short space of time. The history is complex and begins with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact of 1939 between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union that gradually saw the Baltic States come under Soviet rule. In June 1940, Latvia was occupied by Soviet military forces and a staged election was held in which there was only one approved list of Soviet candidates. As a result of this ‘election’, on 5 August 1940 Latvia was formally announced as the 15th Soviet republic. On 14 June 1941, or day of terror, there were unannounced mass deportations of around 15,500 people, including children, who were sent to labour camps, mostly located in Siberia, for suspected anti-Soviet leanings. Shortly afterwards, on 1 July 1941, the country was occupied by Nazi German forces, who seemingly ‘liberated’ the country from Soviet terrorism and prevented plans for further mass deportations – but of course, under the horrific policies of the Nazi regime, most of the Jewish, gypsy and other ‘undesirable’ sectors of the population were exterminated or sent to concentration camps. Both the Nazis and the Soviets conscripted thousands of Latvians into their armies during the war. In 1945 Soviet occupation was reinstated, followed by another deportation of around 42,000 people, many of whom were farm workers who resisted collectivisation. My mother’s family were part of a huge wave of refugees – I believe the total is around 200,000 - who left their homes in 1944 to escape living under the Soviet regime. My mother’s family followed thousands who fled to Germany.

I sit at the desk in the archives, a little stunned and overcome by everything I have viewed. On the one hand, the documents are very ordinary, offering simple facts about everyday people; but on the other, they are super-extraordinary. They provide more than just factual information about members of my family – they offer a tangible link to the past, direct proof that this is where I am from, that this is my history. I want to bundle up everything and take it with me, but of course, this is not just my story – these little details of individual lives form part of the larger puzzle of a country that has been fragmented through occupation by one power after another, struggling between two outrageous systems of government.

I fill in many forms with Ira’s very patient assistance to request copies of all the documents. Scans are very expensive – around $20 per image – and I order three of these and collect them before discovering that it costs about half this amount per document to take photographs with my own camera. Ira is very understanding about the expense and when she asks me how many photos I will be taking, adds that she will not be standing next to me, watching while I take them.

Sarkandaugava - The Red Daugava

2008-11-08T11:02:00.000-08:00

My mother’s family leave the Benjamin Estate at Valdeki, Kandava in 1936. My mother thinks they left in 1935 but my grandfather’s wages booklet, which is held in the National Archives, and a photograph taken in 1936 of my mother in Sunday School in Kandava, prove that it was 1936 when they move to Riga to the fairly industrial suburb of Sarkandaugava where my grandfather gets a job in a chemical factory that makes acetone from birch trees. The factory is called Rutenbergs but eventually has its name changed to Metils. I assume the name changes under Soviet occupation.

The confirmation of the beautiful Elina in Sarkandaugava, a relative of the family.

My mothers parents, Marta and Alberts, are in the front row on the right.
My mother is seated on the floor, her brother Gunars is second from left.

It takes about 20 minutes to get to Sarkandaugava on tram number 5, which has a stop very close to my apartment. It’s a drizzly grey day when I decide to go and I spend a lot of time juggling my umbrella and the camera. I want to get off on Ganibu Dambi, near the bridge, because number 40 is where my mother lived before fleeing Riga on 9 October 1944. But she also lived in three other places in Sarkandaugava – Ganibu Dambi 28, Aptiekas iela, and Tvaika iela 11. Ganibu Dambi is a very long and wide road lined with factories and large business that leads over a bridge into the centre of Sarkandaugava. I get off the tram a little too early and end up walking a couple of kilometres more than I intended. I find 28, but there is no sign of a house, just a huge building. I take photos and keep walking until I reach 40. The house is still there, behind a big metal gate and it bears the sign 'Professional Instruments'. I wonder what sort of instruments these might be.

Ganibu Dambi 40

In 1992 I came here with my partner Gerard and we knocked on the door and a friendly man let us inside to look around. The building was originally divided into 4 apartments – two above and two below – and my mother’s family lived upstairs. In 1992 it had been turned into makeshift offices and the man who let us in was operating a wholesaling business of some sort from there. I saw the building again in 2001, covered in snow and sporting a new curved roof. There were security guards watching it then, and I think I even remember guard dogs, so goodness knows what it was being used for. Now the building looks rather unkempt and insignificant. When my mother lived there, it was in the grounds of the factory, behind what I presume to be the same big iron fence. It was in this building that my mother spent the longest period of time in one place in Latvia.

The area behind Ganibu Dambi 40, presumably where the Metils Factory was located

The Sarkandaugava Bridge

The view as you cross the Sarkandaugava bridge

I take lots of photos as I cross the bridge and make my way into the centre of Sarkandaugava. It’s much more run down here than in central Riga and with the exception of the shops looks more like I remember the city when I first came here in 1992. Many of the buildings still have that grey-brown Soviet era aesthetic that I associate with film noir.

Views in Sarkandaugava

I walk down Aptieka iela, (Chemist Street) which is quite narrow but also very beautiful, lined with trees and both grand and modest buildings. My mother can’t remember the number of the house she lived in and so I take photos of any place that takes my eye. There are a few very impressive renovated buildings but I doubt that she lived there. It’s a long street and eventually curves down towards the river, stopping at Tvaika iela. About two thirds of the way down, I am struck by a big building behind a high fence that is set well back from the road. It is a medical institution of some sort and I am later told it was, and still is, Riga’s psychiatric hospital. (My relatives refer to it as the Traka Maja – the mad house.) I shudder to think about the fate of the patients during German occupation.

Views down Aptiekas Iela

The Psychiatric Hospital

Tvaika iela is a major road and is very busy with traffic. I turn left into it with the intention of following it all the way back to the bridge, but after about 500 metres or so, I turn back. There are very few houses, only one other pedestrian in the distance, some industrial buildings on one side of the road and I feel a little uneasy. Over the other side of the river is a huge huge building that must have been a factory at one point in its life, but it is hard to determine what it is used for now, if anything. It has hundreds of small glass windows and must have been incredibly grand in it heyday. I take photos and then head back up Aptieka iela.

The corner of Tvaika and Aptiekas Ielas

The huge, seemingly abandoned factory

This time I notice that Sarkandaugava Library is on the street and I decide to pay a visit – perhaps they have some photos or other information about the Rutenberg/Metils factory. As with all my visits to public institutions in Latvia, I am at first greeted with suspicion, but once I begin to explain what I am looking for and why, people are generally incredibly helpful. I think they are also struck by the way I speak and often remark on how good my Latvian is, but I am not actually convinced because I know I keep getting my endings wrong. There are also times when I get completely confused by a word and mix up all the syllables so that an embarrassing stream of pure nonsense comes out of my mouth. One taxi driver said to me, ‘Oh, you speak such a different Latvian, more like before the war, without all the Russian influences and words like ‘davai’.’ (I must write a posting about language and the use of the word davai.) In most cases I think people are simply amazed that I speak Latvian at all when I literally live on the other side of the earth where the standard language is English. Of course, there are thousands of people who speak Latvian outside Latvia, and who speak it with great competence and without all the silly grammatical errors I keep making.

The Sarkandaugava Library

The librarian takes a real interest in my story and calls her colleague over. I have to go to the National Archives for information about the factory, but they are able to direct me to the locations of some schools that were operating here in the 1930s and 40s. Although my mother went to school in central Riga, in a building at the end of the street where my apartment is located, after a few years she was sent to a local school. I head off in search of the particular school the librarians suggest is most likely to be the one my mother attended. It’s a bit of a walk down a long industrial street, but I eventually find it and it is still operating today. It’s a big brick building with huge trees growing out the front that almost completely obscure it from the street. Later, my mother tells me it’s the wrong school and I feel somewhat disappointed that I didn’t manage to find the right one.

The wrong school

Before I head back to central Riga, I stop for lunch in a local workers’ café with good and inexpensive meals that are paid for by weight. The staff here greet me with the suspicion I have now become accustomed to, and while I’m eating I sense I am being observed by the other customers. When the girl from the kitchen comes out to clear the tables, she stares straight at me with an almost shocked looked on her face. I smile at her and she’s taken aback. It’s an odd feeling, to know that I am being watched by others – but perhaps I’m just being paranoid. I have a coffee and take the tram home.

* * *

My mother first went to school in Kandava at the age of seven, which is when all children start their formal education in Latvia, even today. In Kandava there was one class for all ages of children and my mother received no formal teaching as such. She had an exercise book in which she copied what the older children were doing and also did some embroidery work, but otherwise, she was allowed to do what she liked. It was only when she moved to Riga that my mother’s teaching became more structured. When the family moved to Sarkandaugava, she was sent to Kronvalda Ata 23 Pamatskola on the advice of a neighbour who said it was an excellent school. My mother loved it there and made friends with a student whose name was also Mirzda Berzins. This second Mirdza has an older sister who was quite wealthy and had a vineyard, a wine cellar and a car – things my mother would only have been able to dream about.

Kronvald Ata Pamatskola 23, just down the road from the apartment I was staying in.
When I arrived it was being renovated; when I left the renovations were close to completion.

My mother tells me a story about Kronvald Ata school. She is about nine years old and has failed to do her homework or some other task and as a result is sent home to get her parents’ signature in her work book. Instead of doing as she is told, and possibly getting punished by her parents for her oversight, my mother decides to go and wait in Kronvald Park, which is adjacent to the school, until she thinks classes have finished for the day. She sits on a park bench for what she believes is an incredibly long time but after boredom sets in, heads home. Of course, her estimate of the time is way out and it is still quite early when she returns. When her mother asks her why she is not at school, my mother tells her that the teachers have declared a holiday – and my grandmother apparently believes this story. By chance, my mother’s grandmother is visiting at the time and my mother tricks her into signing the work book by covering the teacher’s comments with a piece of paper. The story is of a simple childhood prank, but it also reveals something about my mother, suggesting a certain sense of confidence, resourcefulness – and even defiance - that I don’t believe I have inherited. I don’t think I would have had the courage to come up with the lie about the school holiday – and then to say it with enough conviction to persuade my mother it was true.

After about three years, my mother is sent to Sarakandaugava Pamatskola 13, which is closer to home and doesn’t require tram travel. It is also where her brother, Gunars, who is five years younger than her, begins his education. My mother is not happy about the change because she loves the Kronvalda school, but she has no choice in the matter. She suspects that her parents make the decision based on saving the cost of tram travel to school six days a week, (there were classes until midday on Saturdays at that time). And I assume it may also be associated with moving to Aptiekas or Tvaika ielas, which are in the centre of Sarkandaugava, from Ganibu Damba 28 which is closer to Riga’s centre.

When she reflects back on her interrupted education, which ended before she could finish high school, my mother says she was disappointed that her parents never showed any real interest in her studies or encouraged her to pursue a good education. She was a bright student and did well and believes she could have achieved more in life had she received some direction at home. While I can understand my mother's disappointment, I also suspect that my grandparents just didn't know how to give my mother the support she wishes she had been given. As a result of this lack, my mother - and also my father - constantly reminded me and my sisters that our most important duty was to study hard at school and that if we focussed on our education, the world would open its doors to us and we could achieve anything we desired.

Sarkandaugava Pamata Skola 13. My mother is in the very back, right in the centre.

In Sarkandaugava, my mother suffers very poor health. She is extremely thin and remembers that if she pressed her fingers into her belly and sucked her breath in hard enough, she was able to feel her spine. At the age of eleven she has her appendix taken out in the Stradins Private Clinic. Ordinarily, her family would not have been able to afford private health care, but the country is under Soviet rule at the time and the general public are given access to treatment in private hospitals. The operation is performed by Dr Stradins himself, who was planning to use a local anaesthetic to remove the appendix, but because my mother makes such a big fuss, crying and yelling, she is given ether through a face mask.

Later, when she is living in Tvaika iela, my mother becomes very ill with pleurisy, which is then followed by rheumatic fever and an extended period of time in Riga’s Second Hospital in Pardaugava, on the other side of the river. The hospital’s website reveals that Dr Pauls Stradins was the key founder of this hospital and is considered Latvia’s most significant contributor to advances in medicine. As a result of her illness, my mother misses out on a year of schooling.

In May 1943, at the age of sixteen, my mother is confirmed in the Jauna Gertrudes Baznice, a Luthern church on Freedom Boulevard. (She is top left in the photo.) In the same year, she sits an exam at the Teachers Institute in Jelgava, but while she does very well, it is recommended that she attend Riga’s Valsts Komercskola instead, a high school that has more of a commercial focus. I wonder if this decision is made for my mother on the basis that her family are not well off and it would be more appropriate for her to make a career in the commercial rather than academic sector. The Komercskola is on Kronvald Boulevard, right next door to the primary school she loved so much. My mother spends only one year in this school before the family flees from Latvia.

The tram stop outside Kronvald Ata Pamatskola, which was my regular tram stop.
The building on the left was apparently Rigas Valsts Komercskola, which my mother
attended for one year before leaving Latvia.

To Russia with love

2008-10-28T14:08:00.000-07:00

On Thursday 9 October, my cousin Mara and I catch the 4.20pm Latvian Express train from Riga to Moscow. We’ve got a four berth sleeper all to ourselves for the entire journey and it feels like a real adventure – the rattling of the train, a meal in the dining car, staring out the window as day fades to night, watching for signs of Russia in the landscape and architecture after we cross the border, and talking our way into the darkness of the Russian countryside…

The last time Mara was in Moscow was about 20 years ago and she’s very excited about seeing how the city has altered in that time. She tells me that during the Soviet era, you could get better quality things in Moscow and so people went there specifically to go shopping. Mara also studied there for a while, and she was the member of a folk dancing group that performed in Moscow as well as many other cities in the Soviet Union. When she was about eighteen, the group was selected to tour a number of cities outside the Soviet Union. There was great excitement about this opportunity, but Mara was not allowed to go. Her visa application was rejected by the government and she cried for days from the disappointment. I ask her why she was not granted a visa. ‘Well, no-one ever told you why decisions were made,’ she says, ‘but probably because my records showed that I have family who live in the West’. My heart gives a little jump. It has never occurred to me that my parents’ decision to leave Latvia for a better life elsewhere would have impacted on the life of relatives who stayed behind. So even though Mara was born in the 1950s, she could not escape our family history. Mara also explains that while she could study almost anything she wanted, certain types of work, especially that associated with the government, would also not have been possible for her. She continued to dance and also taught dancing, but eventually studied English at University and became a high school teacher. (I find this an interesting paradox - Mara was allowed to learn and to teach English - the signature language of the West - but she could never be given permission to use her skills outside the Soviet Union.)

The train stops at the Russian border for well over half an hour as everyone’s passports and bags are inspected (it’s quite a complex little bureaucratic system - see the picture of me holding my customs declaration). I want to take a photograph of the border control area from the carriage window but Mara tells me I’ll get arrested and that will be the end of our adventure. I particularly want a photo of those big circular hats the Russian military wear, but of course, I will get plenty of opportunity once we get to Moscow. The train starts again and we get into our pyjamas and under the covers in our sleeping berths. Back in the mid 90s, I was on a train very much like this one with my partner Gerard when we travelled from St Petersburg to Riga. We had a first class cabin, so there were only two sleeping berths, and the only real other difference was that we had a television perched above the cabin door. It was almost completely unwatchable for us because the programs were voiced over in Russian, German or Latvian, but you could still hear the original language underneath, plus there were subtitles, sometimes in two languages. It was like trying to decipher a secret code.

On this trip I don’t sleep too well. The bed is narrow and hard and I can’t get comfortable. I get up around 3am, go to the toilet and then peer through the window as we speed through the Russian countryside. We stop for about 20 minutes at a big station that is lined with seemingly endless rows of oil tankers. The station lights bathe everything in a yellowish-green glow and I feel like I’m in a very strange dream. I do eventually manage to get a little sleep, but it’s very fitful.

When we arrive at the Moscow-Riga Express station, we are met by Andrey Tchoukine, a Russian artist I met at the Cite Internationale des Arts in 2002. Although we have been in regular email contact over the last six years, it feels quite odd to be meeting him now, here, in Russia. I am also worried that I may not recognise him, but there he is, waiting for us just a little way down the platform. He’s neatly dressed in a camel coat and dark trousers and he’s carrying five yellowish-pink long stemmed roses that he presents to me when we greet each other. We take some photos of this special moment and then Andrey guides us to our hotel via the amazing Moscow Metro system. I feel waves of dizziness come over me - a mixture of excitement and lack of sleep - as we push through the crowds. I’ve never seen so many people underground at once in my life and, of course, I’m awestruck by the grandeur of some of the stations we pass through. Mara asks me what I think of the people we see. Do they seem different from the general population in Riga? I say no, everyone looks extremely familiar.

After we settle into the Budapest Hotel (it’s very comfortable, very close to Red Square and quite reasonably priced), Andrey takes us to an Indian-come-Asian-come-Russian style restaurant where we eat a late breakfast of soup, vegetable piroshki and cottage cheese patties. Then we begin our tour of Moscow through Andrey’s eyes. The first stop is the Kremlin. I had no idea it would be quite so beautiful and quite so breathtaking. I gasp at all the golden domed churches. They are stunning from the outside and like jewel boxes on the inside. The interiors feel much more Eastern than European to me – there is no seating, and while the spaces are grand, they soar upwards rather than width ways – and they also feel a bit confined. There is not an inch of wall space that is not adorned with frescoes or icons that glitter with gold, and in amongst everything there are the tombs of saints and tsars, decorated with elaborate carvings and protected behind glass and bronze display cases. I am completely overwhelmed and find it almost impossible to take in any detail. My eye keeps moving from one image to another, unable to settle on anything. Andrey points out favourite icons and particular shades of blue paint. We move from one chapel to another, and after we have seen everything that can be seen in the Kremlin, and I’ve taken plenty of photographs, we make our way to the Metro again to catch a train to the Tretyakov Museum. It is a beautiful building and has an extraordinary collection of Russian art, particularly Russian realism from the second half of the 19th century. Andrey shows us his favourite artists. He too, is a painter, and follows the realist tradition. When I met him in Paris back in 2002, he was spending much of his residency copying the masters in the Louvre and other galleries. We enjoy being saturated with art, but by the end of the day, Mara and I are completely exhausted.

The Tretyakov Museum

Our second day in Russia takes us into the countryside, to the village where Andrey lives, which is about 100 kms south west of Moscow. We have arranged to meet him at a particular Metro station and all I can say is, thank goodness Mara with her perfect Russian is with me, because without her, I would never have been able to unravel the mystery of the Metro system. While we don’t exactly get lost, Mara has to ask for directions many times until we finally get on the right line and make our way out into the suburbs. It is a bit stressful, but the experience takes us through a series of fantastic stations decorated with stunning chandeliers and Soviet sculptures.

When we reach the designated station, we can’t quite remember where Andrey told us to wait for him. We decide to take an exit and go outside, but this is a mistake. Andrey phones me and tells us to go back down underground. When he finds us, he admonishes me. ‘Why did you do it, Brigita?’ he says. He takes us through a different exit where a friend is waiting for us in a car and drives us all the way to Andrey’s village, which takes about an hour. Mara and I sit in the back. The sky is grey and it begins to rain. We zoom along a huge highway - the rain gets heavier and the Soviet housing blocks in the distance eventually give way to forest. I truly feel I am on the other side of the world.

We are dropped off outside Andrey’s home and briefly shake hands with our driver, who quickly disappears, I think back in the direction of Moscow. Andrey has clearly gone to a lot of trouble with the logistics of our visit and Mara and I feel both humbled and honoured. We are shown into the house, which is brick and two storey and is divided into two separate apartments – Andrey and his parents live in one half, and another family live in the other. The garden, which is overgrown and still has some remnants of summer flowers and fruits, is also divided. We take off our shoes and meet Andrey’s aunt and mother, who give us slippers and show us into the living room. There is a wall unit, a couch, a piano, a round table, a giant desk and the walls are covered with paintings and other art works, mostly copies of the masters by Andrey himself. A copy of a Rembrandt portrait of his naked wife hangs on the wall above the couch. We present our gifts and then Mara and I sit while Andrey busies himself in the kitchen, making us tea.

We have a full itinerary. After morning tea, we go up to Andrey’s studio, which seems to take up the whole top half of the house. The walls of the stairwell are lined with Andrey’s paintings, pre-empting what we are about to see in the studio itself, which is dominated by a huge painting that runs all along one wall. It shows what I assume to be members of Andrey’s family or his friends out in the garden busy with various housekeeping tasks. All the other walls are covered in smaller paintings. There is an easel in one corner, a lounge suite, a television, a desk with a computer and three other doorways through which Andrey produces more and more paintings until one side of the room is completely stacked with his work - landscapes, interiors, portraits and many paintings of flowers that are so vivid and realistic that the petals seem to be falling from the canvas. I take photos of Andrey with his work and then he puts on a dvd of Tarkovsky films for us to watch while he goes downstairs to cook our dinner.

A little later, Andrey’s brother arrives to drive us to the estate of Russian realist painter, Vasily Polenov (1844-1927), whose home is near the Oka river and is now a museum. The trip takes about half an hour. Inside the car, the black vinyl seats are torn and peeling, and there are no door or window handles. With the exception of a small slit of an opening on the front passenger side, the windows are closed tight, and the smell of petrol gradually and increasingly pervades the cabin. I feel a little sick and headachy, and for a brief moment, as I look out the window and consider where we are, hurtling through the remote Russian countryside in a rather dilapidated car with two men we barely know, and dense forest on either side of the road, I feel a moment of David Lynchish terror descend upon me. But the moment passes and we arrive at the Polenov Estate, are released from the car, and get to breathe fresh air again. Andrey’s brother arranges to meet us in about an hour.

The estate is beautiful, and I sense within Andrey a longing for the type of intellectual life that was lived here – painting in the spacious studio; travelling overseas to gain inspiration for new work; holding soirees with other artists, poets, writers and musicians…

We tour the house, wearing those big felt museum slippers over our shoes, and then explore the grounds, going right down to the River Oka. We also visit some artist studios set up in small cabins on the estate. One of them is a friend of Andrey’s - he’s very friendly and takes a picture of me painting the little canvas he has just started. Then our chauffeur arrives to take us back to the house. I ask Andrey what his brother does and he tells me he is an entrepreneur – but the exact nature of his entrepreneurship is not revealed.

Brigita attempts realism

Back at the house, we help set the table in the living room and have dinner with Andrey’s parents. His mother was a science teacher at high school and his father was the head of a Kolhotz. His father is very talkative and has a long conversation with Mara. (How I wish I could speak Russian!) When he finds out we are Latvian, the discussion becomes a little political. Mara turns to me and tells me that he just said that the Latvians don’t think much of the Russians! But she handles the situation well and manages to keep the tone friendly. It would have been so good, says Andrey’s father, if we had all remained as one Soviet nation - then we could have entered this capitalist era together, rather than separately. Mara responds diplomatically and I try to imagine what this trip would have been like without her - she not only acts as a go-between for me, but also has a wonderful ability to engage people in conversation. Had I been on my own, there would no doubt have been many periods of long silence. While Andrey does speak a little English, it is fairly broken and limited.

Dinner starts with borsch, followed by fried salmon steaks accompanied by potatoes and salads of seaweed, carrot and cabbage. For dessert there is Andrey’s own apple strudel and then, as we sip tea from delicate Russian china, we are treated to a small piano recital. Andrey plays Mozart, Bach and Chopin – and then it’s time to say goodbye. Andrey’s mother gives us each a big hug, and as we make our way to the railway station, we watch Andrey’s father herd their two cows into the stables for the night. It has been a long day but an extraordinary one. I feel overwhelmed by the sincerity of Andrey and his family and level of hospitality that has been shown to us.

On our third and final day, Mara and I are on our own. We sleep in a bit, have a long breakfast, and then make our way to Red Square. Interestingly, Andrey didn’t show us Red Square, even though we walked right past it on our way to the Kremlin, so today I’m going to get my fix of Soviet tourist attractions. My major objective is to see Lenin in his mausoleum.

The Square itself is only about 500 metres from the hotel, so we don’t have to walk far. Near the entrance we participate in a good luck ritual, throwing a coin over the left shoulder and making a wish. Once the coin hits the ground, it’s collected by a team of old ladies who are the managers of this lucrative little business. Just beyond is Red Square and I’m very excited. It’s fantastic, of course, but at the same time I had imagined it to be much bigger! One side is dominated by the austere black and red granite of the Lenin Mausoleum and directly opposite is GUM, a magnificent department store that Mara remembers with great fondness from the Soviet era. At either end are churches and museums. It’s a dull and drizzly day but the square is crowded with tourists and the Russians put on a great show for them. People dressed as Lenin, Stalin and tsars wander about and offer to pose in tourist photographs.

We walk in the direction of the Mausoleum and realise that to get to see Lenin, we have to leave the square and join a long queue that runs along a gate near the Kremlin. We only have a bit over an hour before they close the Mausoleum for the day and I’m a bit anxious that we may miss out. We wait for about half an hour and then we're in. Security is tight. While it is free to view Lenin, we have to pay to leave our cameras and mobile phones in a cloakroom, then we join another queue where we are scanned and have our bags checked. It’s raining a little more heavily now and we walk fairly quickly past the monuments to various Soviet leaders, each adorned with a red plastic carnation. Mara reads out particular names and I can see that she is engaging with a history that has specific significance for her. Then we approach the entrance to the tomb itself. The whole experience is dominated by the aesthetics of black granite, dim, dramatic lighting, and the strategic positioning of Russian militia. Right in the centre of the entrance, is a Russian soldier standing to perfect attention. As we approach, he automatically and very precisely raises one finger vertically to his lips, making a silent ‘shhh’ gesture. Then he points to our left, again with perfect precision, the arm straight and level, the finger a very clear direction. We make out way down the stairs. At every corner, a Russian soldier points us further into the depths of the mausoleum – there is no possibility of straying from the path, or of lingering on the black granite steps. We descend two levels and then we are there, within the tomb itself. It is nowhere near as big as I had imagined. Lenin is to our right, illuminated within his glass box. The casket itself is quite large and the top and corners are draped with swathes of sculpted bronze cloth. Lenin looks quite small and frail in comparison - and also extremely fake. His little face and hands seem to be made of papier mache painted with flat acrylic paints and covered with a layer of face powder. His beard and moustache are very spiky and his body seems almost hollow. If he is a fake, it’s a very bad one. I imagine that if you were making a fake Lenin, you would be able to create something far more realistic and convincing, and so my guess is that he probably is the real thing. We have to maintain a forward momentum with the rest of the viewers and are not able to linger. Before we know it, we have emerged back into the grey drizzle of red square where we take our time looking at the other memorials.

The rain really starts to bucket down and we take shelter in the fantastic GUM store. It has to be one of the most beautiful department stores I have ever seen! There is a huge delicatessen that displays its fruit, vegetables and other products as if in an art exhibition. Mara asks me to take photos of the fruit drink dispensers, which are big inverted glass cones and bring back fond memories of her childhood. We stop at a café that overlooks the central fountain and eat pancakes and drink coffee. We both feel like we’re in heaven.

Mara in GUM

That afternoon we go to the shopping district of Arabat to buy souveniers and then, by the time we get back to the hotel, it’s time to tackle the Metro again and catch the train back to Riga.

The journey back is less restful because we have border checks in the early hours of the morning rather than late evening. We also have to stop at Vilikie Luki (which means big onions) a station about half way between Riga and Moscow, where my great grandfather on my mother’s father’s side of the family died. I had wanted to spend a few hours there, but it was very difficult to find a suitable time for arrival and departure. On this route, it pulls into the station at about 3am in the morning and I was not too keen to get out and find somewhere to stay at that hour in a remote part of Russia when I don’t speak the language – Mara was also not happy to participate in this part of my adventure. There was a possibility of catching a train at night, arriving at 6am and then catching the 3am train back to Riga, but this also didn’t appeal for obvious reasons. The other problem was that I don’t have any information about where my great grandfather is buried or what part of Vilikie Luki he lived in, so in the end, I decided it would be enough to take photos of the station – at least then I could say I had been there.

Mara and I sleep in our clothes to make it easier when we get to Vilikie Luki. I set my phone alarm for 2.30 but I don’t get much sleep – I guess I’m nervous about missing the stop. But everything is fine - I’m already up when we reach the station, I put my jeans and shoes on, wake Mara, and we go out into the odd yellow-green light of the Russian railways. Velikie Luki is a surprisingly big and grand station, the building probably dating from the early 1900s. I take photos, Mara takes photos of me, and our carriage steward takes a photo of us as well. When she hands back the camera, I tell her that my great-grandfather died here, but it comes out a little loud and Mara says it was like an announcement across the whole station! We climb back into our carriage and I take a video of us leaving. From what I can see of the town, it’s quite big. I wish there had been some way of seeing the place in the daylight...

As I related in a previous posting, my great grandfather, Marcis, joined the communists when he was in his thirties, leaving his wife and a family of six children to take up the cause. I wonder what he was thinking when he decided to make this very dramatic change in his life – what it was like to leave those he loved for something that he must have felt was even stronger than that love. But perhaps he had been one of the Latvian Riflemen, who were taken under the control of Lenin during WWI. I guess I will never know.

But what I do know is that in June 1941, my grandfather Alberts was sent news that his father was dying. He travelled by train to Velikie Luki but arrived a day too late – his father had already died. The doctor who looked after Marcis told my grandfather that his father’s dying words were that he had made a mistake in join the revolutionaries. I wonder what my grandfather thought of his father? And what it was like to be the eldest of six children abandoned by their father for political reasons? I also wonder how much contact there was between Marcis and his children. I am assuming that letters must have been written on some sort of regular basis because otherwise it would have been very difficult to track Alberts. I also wonder about Marcis’s son Edvards, who was killed by the Latvian Aizsargi or Homeguard for suspected involvement with the communist party - perhaps there was some contact and influence there too.

The doctor who looked after Marcis in his last hours warns my grandfather that he should leave Vilikie Luki immediately as he will not be able to get back into Latvia if he is found in Russia. I am presuming then, that he does not stay for his father’s funeral, but I may be wrong. I am also assuming that the warning is in some way linked to the massive deportations that occur Riga on 14 June, 1941, when thousands of Latvian citizens are herded into trucks and cattle trains and sent to Siberia.

My grandfather gets back to Riga safely. The family lived in Sarkandaugava at the time, a rather industrial suburb of Riga that hugs the banks of the Daugava river. (Sarkandaugava means Red Daugava.) My grandfather had apparently gone fishing in his boat on his return from Russia. It is very early – perhaps 6 in the morning? – and my mother is sent to fetch her father and ask him to go to work immediately. He works in a big chemical factory where they make acetone from birch trees (coincidentally, my grandfather’s surname, Berzins, means little birch tree). There is some sort of crisis at the factory and he is needed urgently. On her way to the river, my mother is shocked to see her girlfriend, Aldona Ikmanis, whose father was a policeman, being loaded onto a big truck with her whole family. Her girlfriend is crying and my mother, who would have just turned 14, has no understanding of what is going on. She tells me that this is the one time she remembers feeling really terrified. Of course, no-one knew what was going on at the time – the deportations happened without warning and mostly during the night, so it would have been very difficult to make sense of what had occurred until well after the fact. (As an aside, I notice that in all the bookstores there are now numerous publications about the deportations, so there has been a great rewriting of history that was not possible during the Soviet era.)

It seems remarkable to me that my grandfather’s return from Russia coincides with the deportations of 14 June. I wonder why he decides to go fishing and whether he had any idea about what was going on when he got back to Riga. Presumably not – presumably he simply wanted a moment of quiet and solace in his boat on the river to contemplate the death of his father. It would be interesting to confirm the date of my great grandfather’s death, which would help pinpoint what happened in terms of historical context, but that would probably mean going back to Vilikie Luki, actually staying there and visiting the archives office. It would probably also demand learning some Russian – or convincing my cousin Mara to come with me.

Spectropia

2008-10-18T11:16:00.000-07:00

Here is my latest manifestation. I am wrapped in a shroud made of copper cloth, lying on a glass table in Riga's Artspace Gallery. I'm participating in a work by Canadian artist Catherine Richards, who is interested in the impact of new technology on the body. Just an hour ago, I heard her give a presentation as part of the Spectropia International festival for new media culture art and communication, and now I am lying here on the glass table, listening to the sounds of all the other art works, the voices of visitors, the occasional whispers of the two young women who carefully wrapped and tied me in the copper cloth... I am oddly relaxed, self-contained, even though I know that people are observing me. I remain cocooned for fifteen minutes and while I am relieved to finally be released from the copper shroud, I also feel a strange desire to remain within it. There is something meditative and secure about the experience - a feeling that nothing else in the world actually matters while I lie on the table, that I have left all other responsibilities behind me.

Over the last two weeks or so I have continued to accumulate extraordinary experiences. So much has happened in such a short space of time that it has been difficult to record and document everything - and now I have to catch up. I have been to Moscow and back by train, stopping at Vilikie Luki (which means 'big onions' in Russian) at 2.30 am to photograph the railway station so that I can say that I have been to the place where my great-grandfather, who left a family of six children to join the communists, died in 1941. I have waited in the rain in a long queue outside Red Square to see Lenin in his mausoleum; have got lost in the amazing Moscow Metro with my cousin Mara; have gasped with awe in the extraordinary churches in the Kremlin, and have been driven through the Russian countryside in a dodgy car with peeling vinyl seats, no door or window handles and the strong smell of petrol increasingly pervading the cabin. I have been a guest on Latvija's Radio Station 1 where I managed to converse in Latvian during a half hour interview. I've viewed passports and census information about my family at the State Archives, including seeing two pictures of my father's father for the very first time in my life. He died in 1932 at the age of thirty-seven and his baptism certificate from 1894 is in Russian, revealing that he was Russian Orthodox, something no-one in my family knew about. I have also viewed my mother's father's wages booklets from the time he worked at the chemical factory Rutenbergs, which later had its named changed to Metils - one booklet record his wages in Latts, the other has quotes by Lenin and Stalin on the first page and records the wages in Roubles. I have also been treated for a medical condition which took me to two different polyclinics, one some distance out of the centre of Riga where I had to have an examination that required a general anaesthetic (despite my initial terror, it was all perfectly fine and very professional). And I have also given a presentation about my work here at the residency.

Riga itself is awash with golden autumn leaves that workers spend all day raking into garbage bags that in turn pile up on the sidewalks and in the parks. I only have six more days left before I leave for Poland and I know it will be very hard to leave. Please watch for more postings in the next few days that will fill the gaps about my recent adventures.

The view from my apartment window

Begging

2008-10-02T12:21:00.000-07:00

Today I see a man in the street whose face is so badly beaten up that it almost looks like raw meat. I can barely look at him and almost weep from the sadness and the shame of it. I suspect he sustained his terrible injuries as the result of a drunken brawl – but why is he walking around the streets and not recovering in hospital? Just around the corner is an elderly lady in an ancient wheelchair, wrapped in layers of old woolen garments and only partially sheltered from the rain. She holds out a small plastic tray. She is the fourth or fifth old lady I have seen begging in the space of an hour. I give her a coin, she thanks me, and we nod to each other. I feel an overwhelming sense of distress that so many old people are reduced to begging in the street, and for some reason, the distress is far more intense and emotionally disturbing than when I see people begging in Australia. Is it because these people here are Latvian? (Of course, they may also be Russian.) Is it because I see something in their eyes that connects me to them, deeply, genetically, in a way I don’t feel a connection to my fellow Australians? Is it because I see my history in their faces?

I have to fight back the tears as I make my way to the Magnum Printers. I am overly emotional, over-reacting, over-experiencing…

The trip to Valmiera

2008-10-02T07:11:00.000-07:00

I am having trouble keeping up with the documentation of my adventures. I need to record my impressions quickly, before they vanish, but I also need time to assimilate what I have experienced. In between, I am developing art works and thinking about how best to convey the myriad of visual data and emotional reactions I have accumulated. I am both excited and exhausted, even though my project is only in the early stages. I want to rest, but I am afraid of what I will miss.

On Friday 26 September, I head for Valmiera, which is where my mother spent the first five years of her life. I have relatives there – my mother’s cousin on her father’s side, Biruta, and her husband Arturs. They will meet me at Lode, the railway station near their home and just two stops from the city of Valmiera.

On the way to the central railway station in Riga, I drop off my and my cousin Mara’s passports at a Russian travel agent who will arrange visas for our trip to Moscow in two weeks time. I’m carrying a rather heavy backpack – gifts for Biruta and Arturs, my computer, some things for staying overnight, a book to read – and it’s a long walk from the travel agent to the railway station. I’m also quite tired because I barely slept the night before. I trudge along Elizabetas Street, stop at an ATM, withdraw some money and as I turn to head for the station, I trip on the uneven footpath and fall quite dramatically in front of a group of smart looking business men standing outside a swish hotel. They rush to my aid and help me up. I am a bit dazed and shocked. My right ankle is very painful and I’m scared I may have sprained it. I manage to keep walking and realise I have been very lucky – the ankle is bruised and swollen, but the pain is in the muscles and ligaments rather than the bones. I make it to the station and notice my hand is bleeding. This is not an auspicious start to the trip.

The train trip to Valmiera is nothing like any other train trip I have ever experienced. The carriage is completely full by the time we leave the station and it’s incredibly noisy. Everyone seems to be talking at the tops of their voices, both in Latvian and Russian. There is also a group of teenagers who all have mp3 players turned up so loud that you can hear each one over everyone’s conversations. The teenagers call out to each other and wander up and down the carriage periodically – but when the train guard appears, they calm down. I am lucky I am sharing seating with two Russian grandmothers and a young boy - they talk all the way, but they are relatively quiet and calm. I am amazed at the young boy, who engages confidently in a very intense discussion with the two grandmothers and I wish I could speak Russian so I could understand what they are talking about.

It takes two hours to get to Valmiera and at about half way we stop at Sigulda, a very beautiful city popular for holidays, country walks, cultural festivals, and snow sports in the winter. You can go ballooning, bungie jumping and cycling there, and visit an historic castle. The train magically empties at Sigulde and the carriage quietens down. I ask the guard if there is a toilet on the train and he points me in the right direction. I make my way through two carriages and eventually find the toilet, but when I try the door, it’s locked. All of a sudden it opens and a young man enveloped in a cloud of cigarette smoke glances at me, slams the door shut in my face and locks it. So much for the toilet.

I get out at Lode and almost immediately recognise Biruta and Arturs who are waiting for me. Platforms are at ground level here in Latvia, and I have to climb down quite steep steps to get out of the carriage. I wonder how elderly people or mothers with young children manage.

I met Biruta and her family when I was here in December 2001 and all of Latvia was under snow. Her Soviet built apartment block seemed indistinguishable to me from all the other apartment buildings in Lode, but now the village is green and lush and I can see that the buildings are actually quite different from each other. We walk up five flights of concrete stairs to get to Biruta and Arturs’ apartment. The front doors on this level are all quilted with red and pink vinyl and decorated with brass studs. Inside, the apartment is tiny but cosy. There is a living room with the obligatory wall unit, a small bedroom, a tiny kitchen, and a bathroom and toilet that are each the size of a cupboard in the centre of the apartment. We sit in the living room for a while and talk, then Biruta prepares a lunch of rye bread, cold meats, home made cottage cheese and salad and we move to the tiny kitchen.

When I look at Biruta, I see myself, my mother and my mother’s father, Alberts. We all have round faces, dark hair and eyebrows, and similar noses and mouths. It’s an odd feeling, both reassuring and unnerving, to encounter such strong evidence of my gene pool. I think my three sisters share more with my father’s side of the family - he was tall and thin and blond with a narrower face. I am definitely a Berzins and I can see now that my son, Simon, has also inherited these characteristics.

Biruta, my mother Mirdza, my grandfather Alberts, and my mother's brother, Gunars

After lunch Arturs drives us to Valmiera. The trip is significant not only because my mother lived there for five years, but because I currently have work in an exhibition of diasporic Latvian art in the cultural museum. I have emailed ahead to let them know I will be visiting and the staff are waiting for me. Arija Pakere greets me and shows me around the exhibition, which has 94 works from all over the world, but mainly from America and Canada. The show is dominated by modernist paintings, but there are some more contemporary pieces as well. Mine is a digital print called The Truth Shall Make You Free and it’s on the second floor of the gallery. A number of different regional galleries have individually chosen about thirty five works each for touring over the next four years and I am delighted to be told my work has been selected by every one of those galleries!

Arija Pakere (on the right) and an assistant in the Valmiera Museum

Arija shows me around the museum and explains about the history of the surrounding buildings, which are all of historic significance. We visit the old pharmacy, which has been converted into a museum about the history of Valmiera and look at old photographs of the area on a digital display. Biruta tells Arija and the museum attendant that she is from Dikli and worked in the old building opposite the pharmacy during the Soviet era. A wonderful exchange then follows in which they all share information about their common acquaintances – this is local knowledge about local people who have lived in the area for many many years. The museum attendant (pictured) has my sister’s name, Indra, and she asks me lots of questions about Australia.

Arturs then drives us to Stacijas and Cesu Streets, where my mother lived with her mother’s parents – Anna and Toms Berzins. (My grandmother’s maiden name was Berzins, which means little birch tree, and my grandfather’s name was also Berzins, but of course, they were not related. Like Ozolins, Berzins is a very common Latvian name.) There is no sign of the original houses but I photograph everything that looks old in the hope that my mother will recognise something.

* * *
My mother’s family moved to Valmiera in 1928, because my grandfather, Alberts, could not find work in Riga. He was a casual labourer and found a job in Valmiera as a woodcutter in the forest. Marta, my grandmother, also worked in the forest, helping her husband to chop the trees, remove the bark and make the logs smooth. They lived with Marta’s parents, in two different houses. One was a wooden house named Eler Maja and later they moved to a log cabin. My mother got on very well with her grandparents and enjoyed living with them.

My mother (on the right) in Valmiera with rich friends

My great grandmother was very fond of the gypsy children in the local area. She would bring them home, let them play with her own children, wash them and put them all in bed together. There were lots of gypsies at that time, many who lived near farms in horse-drawn caravans, but others who also lived in houses. My mother describes them as very independent and uninterested in living a standard life. They told fortunes, played music and danced to earn a living. They were also accomplished thieves, but they never stole from those farmers that allowed them to stay on their property and provided them with food. There was an unwritten law of exchange with the gypsies.

My mother became very ill one winter in Valmiera. She was about four years old and had a terrible headache that made her sick for many days. She remembers being pulled in a sled to her grandparents house and feeling excruciating pain as it slid over the bumps in the snow. No-one took her to a doctor.

In 1932, when my mother was five and her brother was six months old, the family moved to Kandava to live and work on the Benjamin Estate.

* * *
From Valmiera, Arturs drives us to Smiltene, where my grandmother, Marta Berzins grew up. She also worked there as a maid for the owners of the largest bakery in the area - the Ozolins’ Bakery! This is probably also where Marta and Alberts first met. I have no addresses in Smiltene nor any idea where I should go to look for houses or significant landmarks, but Arturs and I walk around the centre of town and I take photos. At least I can say I have been there.

My mother as a young girl with her Aunt and Uncle Dombrovskis, in Smiltene.
Their son, Pauls, pictured next to my mother, was something of a photographer
and took the picture with a shutter release. I can't help wondering if there is some connection to Peter Dombrovskis...

The church in Smiltene

In the evening Biruta shows me old photo albums and explains what happened to different members of the family. My grandfather, Alberts Berzins, had three brothers and two sisters. Alberts was the eldest, and his sister Leontine was the youngest – she was Biruta’s mother and died at the age of twenty-seven from blood poisoning after an abortion. Biruta, her sister and her brother were raised by her grandmother, Emma. Her father remarried a sixteen year old girl and started a new family.

Edvards, my grandfather's brother, killed in his 20s, and Leontine, Biruta's mother, on her confirmation, who also died in her 20s.

All of my grandfather’s siblings died under tragic circumstances, but there are discrepancies between Biruta’s version and my mother’s. Biruta tells me that Peteris, the second eldest, was very fond of drinking and was murdered by a gang when he was in his sixties, presumably as a consequence of a drunken brawl, and that Edvards (pictured) was tortured and shot when he was eighteen by the Aizsargi, or Home Guard, for suspected but mistaken involvement with the communist party. My mother, however, tells me that Edvards was definitely involved with the communists and was twenty-seven when he was killed. Biruta claims that Janis died in his twenties when a stack of wood fell on him, but my mother tells me that he died of a rare skin condition called epidermolysis bullosa, or EB, in which the skin develops painful raw blistering at the slightest touch. While I would like to know which version of these stories is correct, in some sense it doesn’t matter because each is equally tragic. And then there was Anna, born in 1904, who died at the age of two from a childhood illness. Biruta says that her grandmother had believed Anna died as the result of a curse.

As I listen to Biruta I wonder how it is that I have managed to escape such a tragic destiny. I feel incredibly distanced from the terrible events she relates to me but extraordinarily moved by them as well. These stories are part of my story but my life seems like a fairytale in comparison. Of course, Biruta’s children have also transcended their parents’ history and have successful, comfortable lives, on a par with my own – but all the same, my life seems oddly disconnected from the main narrative.

Emma, Biruta's grandmother, and Biruta with her eldest daughter, Laura

During the Soviet era, Biruta and Arturs were employed in a brickworks. Biruta gradually worked her way up to be one of the managers and retired only a few years ago. She and Arturs tell me what it was like to live during communist times, recalling their early years together when they lived in an apartment with no electricity or hot water. There was never anything much in the shops and when there was news that something had arrived and was for sale, they had to queue for hours in the hope that it was something useful and that there would be some left when they reached the counter. Meat was a particularly rare commodity and only offal was for sale locally. Arturs talks about getting up at 4am to travel to a place in Estonia and wait for hours and hours to try and get decent meat. The best produce, says Arturs, was all sent to Russia or to those who were higher ranking within the system. But Biruta and Arturs explain that they have always grown their own vegetables and fruit and that they were able to get other items through a black market system of exchange and, because they worked in a factory, they would always get free fuel for their motorbike. I ask whether life is better for them now, and they say, yes, well, you can get everything now, but you need the money to buy it.

Arturs and friend in compulsory Soviet military service

I sleep soundly on the fold out couch in the living room opposite the wall unit that houses the best china, books, photos and other mementos, including a fantastic green ceramic candle stick holder. In the morning, after breakfast, which is similar to lunch but with the addition of home-made jam and mugs of unfiltered coffee, Biruta wraps my sprained ankle with the mashed leaves of a plant called Zeltā Stīga, (literally Golden Stick) and then binds it with bandages. Her bedroom window sill is covered with the plant, which apparently has amazing healing properties that can cure all kinds of ailments.

Then we walk to the community gardens. Biruta has told me about their garden and in my mind I have imagined a small plot, about double the size of her living room. We go behind the Soviet housing blocks into a small forest. ‘This is where we let the chooks loose every day’, says Biruta. And then, beyond the forest, is the remarkable world of community gardens. I had no idea they would be so beautiful and so very extensive. Biruta and Arturs grow all their own vegetables here, plus they have fruit trees, a strawberry patch, berry bushes, flower gardens, two hothouses, five beehives, eighteen chooks, and a small summer house. This is where they spend the majority of their lives. They get up in the morning, prepare some food to take with them, and then head for the gardens, where they work all day. The summer house is tiny but it has a small living room with couches where they can rest, a little kitchen for making preserves, and a storeroom. They only return to their apartment in the Soviet tower block in the evening.

I am stunned by the magic of this place. From their plot I see their neighbours working in their gardens, all a little different in layout, but essentially with the same elements. I now have a completely new insight into what it is to be Latvian under the Soviet system. I have seen these garden plots from the train and the bus near other Soviet tower blocks. While the tower blocks provide basic housing, it is the community gardens that offer the possibility of creating a miniature version of life in the countryside as it was before Soviet rule. The garden preserves the innate link with the land and with nature that is so very essentially Latvian.

Biruta (standing with plaits) and her sister, Anita, seated in front, working on her stepmother's farm in summer

I take lots of photos and then spend some time talking to the chooks, who have a small open run attached to a series of coops. I am amazed that the chooks walk about 200 metres down a small dirt road into the forest, scratch around for a couple of hours, and then return to their pen. Biruta says you have to herd them home, but they happily obey. I guess they know that life is not going to be any better for them out in the wild.

Biruta fills a big bucket with bunches of flowers which we take to Dikli Cemetery. Dikli is about 30 minutes drive from Lode and it’s where Biruta grew up and where my grandfather was born. The cemetery is very beautiful, as all Latvian cemeteries are, because they in the forest. The graves and headstones are scattered amongst the trees and every family has a small area separated off from the others by low-lying shrubs.

The plots here all have sandy soil and when we arrive the first job is to rake away all the autumn leaves. I help, using a child-sized plastic rake. Then the flowers are placed in vases, the plants are watered, the headstones are polished and Arturs does a final raking with a larger wooden rake that leaves a very neat trail of wide grooved patterns around everything. At the first plot, my great grandmother Emma Berzins is buried, along with her daughter, Leontine Adamsone, Biruta’s mother, and other members of the family in unmarked graves. To the left there are spaces for Biruta and Arturs. Emma’s headstone says:

Tavs mūžs kā ābeļu dārzs
Paliek tiem, kas tālāk iet

Like an apple orchard, your life
Remains for those who continue on

My translation is clumsy and fails to convey the poetic beauty of the lines.

We go through the same ritual of raking, watering and decorating for other family members in the cemetery – Arturs’ parents, and Biruta’s father, who is buried on his own. Biruta shows me where her father’s second wife is buried, and the memorials to Latvians who were supporters of the socialist regime. My great grandfather, Mārcis, died in Vilikie Luki in Russia in 1941, around the age of sixty. He left his wife and six children when in his 30s to join the communists. Edvards, who was killed in his 20s for aligning with the communists, has his name engraved on a large stone for those who died during WWII. Both of the memorials are unkempt, presumably now seen as reminders of years of oppression rather than socialist liberation, but there are some candles left near the WWII stone.

Near Biruta’s father’s grave, we meet another lady, also named Biruta, who is tending her family plot. Her husband died only a few weeks ago and the grave is still a large mound covered in layers of neatly arranged pine branches. I was unaware of this tradition, as all my relatives in Australia are cremated, and I ask Biruta if I can take a photo.

After the cemetery, we drive to the Dziesmu Svetki (Song Festival) Memorial. The very first festival was held here in 1864, atop a small hill in the forest. From 1973 onwards, it has been held in Mezaparks, in the northern suburbs of Riga. A group of other visitors climb the hill and spontaneously start singing.

Directly opposite the entrance to the memorial are some houses – a large older, dilapidated house that belongs to the church and used to be the minister’s manse, and some two storey housing blocks further back that were clearly built in the Soviet era. Nearby is a collapsed woodshed and sitting in front of it are a group of people, passing the time outdoors on a pleasant day. Biruta points to the minister’s house and tells me that another of my mother’s cousins lives there – Raimonds Upite. He is my great grandmother’s brother’s son and he is 94 years old.

We approach the group sitting around the collapsed woodshed. Biruta introduces herself and says she’s from Dikli. It turns out that she went to school with the man and they exchange information about their acquaintances, just like in Valmiera. Then Biruta asks about Raimonds, explaining that we are related, and the response from almost everyone in the group is that he’s mad, infested with fleas, never leaves his apartment and is aggressive towards strangers. But one of the elderly ladies, who introduces herself as an Estonian, asks if I would like to visit him. ‘He’s all on his own,’ she says, ‘and no-one visits him – let me take you to see him.’ I go with her and Biruta reluctantly follows. I am shocked that anyone even lives in the house because it seems so very run down, but the Estonian lady has an apartment in the front and Raimonds is her neighbour out the back. We go round the side of the house and the Estonian lady climbs the stairs and knocks on the door of Raimonds’ flat. There is no answer. She then knocks on the windows, but the house remains silent. ‘He could be dead in there, and no-one would know, no-one would know,’ she says. I ask when she saw him last and she said yesterday, so that is something of a relief. The Estonian lady keeps knocking on the door, banging her fist harder on the unpainted timber door, but Raimonds is not going to answer. My mother later tells me that his vision is very poor now but that before his sight began to fail him, she used to exchange letters with him for many years. I thank the Estonian lady for her trouble and we walk back to the front of the house and talk for a while. She fled to Riga as a young woman to stay with relatives back in the 1940s when all her family were killed by the Soviets. She is very interested in Australia and as I explain things to her about the weather, the landscape and the wildlife, I wish I had one of those tourist publications full of photos to give to her. A number of elderly people I have spoken to here have visions of Australia as an endless desert that is overpopulated with poisonous snakes, crocodiles and very large insects.

We leave the group by the woodpile and head for Dikli Palace, a beautiful old estate that was a Sanatorium during Soviet times but has now been transformed into a hotel and reception centre. A popular Latvian tv soap that Biruta, Arturs and I watched the night before, is filmed in the palace. We admire the paintings, the beautiful ceramic heating stoves and wander around the gardens. Biruta came here as a child to be treated for her lung infections.

Back in Lode we have a late lunch and Biruta and Arturs also show me their cellar in the basement of their apartment building. The shelves are stacked with preserved fruits and vegetables and there is a big box of potatoes that will see them through the winter. Biruta gives me three jars of jam and a big jar of pickled vegetables to take back to Riga with me.

On the way to the station, Arturs takes me to see Lode’s obligatory tourist attraction -– a sandstone cave called Hell’s Gate that is completely covered with engraved names, initials and other graffiti. Arturs and Biruta then see me off at the station. I take some last photos, climb up the steep stairs and I’m on my way back to Riga.

This time the carriage is a little quieter, but it’s completely packed by the time we reach the halfway point of the journey. Across the aisle from me is a roudy but happy family with four young children. They speak Russian, but occasionally break into perfect Latvian. Every now and then the father produces a big bottle of a pink milky drink that looks alcoholic from a shopping bag and pours it into a smaller bottle for his wife. In the seating behind them is a woman with a greyhound dog and directly opposite me are three young women squashed together, all playing with their mobiles and mp3 players. People also stand in the aisle.

When I arrive in Riga at 9.30 pm, I take the wrong exit from the station and end up at the back of the markets. It’s dimly lit and I have to walk through aisles of narrow, empty market stalls but I see some people up ahead and follow them. I pass by a drunken man who has collapsed on the ground, legs spread out in front of him, head hunched over his chest, repeating something over and over to himself. I am relieved when I get to my tram stop.

At home I take the bandage off my foot – it has been wrapped a little tight and there is an indentation around my ankle, but the swelling is not too bad. A couple of days later bruising appears and the swelling increases but thank god I am able to walk without too much discomfort.

The Last Bend and Lienas Iela

2008-09-28T13:26:00.000-07:00

On 9 October, 1944, my mother fled Riga by train with her parents and younger brother. She was seventeen years old and on the journey to the port of Liepāja, which took them three days, met a young man who gave her a book called Pēdējais Pagrieziens, which translates as The Last Bend or The Last Turn. My mother can’t remember the name of the young man, but they became fond of each other during their few days on the train together and corresponded for a while after parting in either Liepāja or Gdansk (how this was possible during the war I have no idea!). The book given to my mother was a romantic novel about racing car drivers and had been translated into Latvian, presumably from English. She enjoyed it very much and thinks it was written by Jack London, the famous author of White Fang. She also remembers that the young man who gave it to her carried with him a large sack which was full of books. Her family had one suitcase and a box of food with them, but this unknown young man was fleeing the country with a small library.

I am determined to try and find The Last Bend here in Riga. While the book itself may not be of any great literary merit, the title strikes me as being uncannily symbolic. I go to the National Library of Latvia in Elizabeth Street, where I spent ten days last year installing an artwork called SPOGULIS (mirror) on the ground floor windows. I register, am given a library card and then I see the Librarian. I ask about The Last Bend and explain the story of why I am trying to find it. The Librarian is incredibly helpful - she searches the online catalogue, gives me the card catalogue with all the Jack London entries and searches a range of online bibliographies. She tries various combinations of the title – perhaps my mother has remembered it incorrectly? Of course, this is a possibility and I also begin to suspect that she may have got the author wrong and that the book is not written by Jack London.

The Librarian takes my email address and phone number and sends me to the 5th floor to see another Librarian who may be able to help. I'm given a pass and make my way up the dark stairs. The lino is ancient and brown and the walls are painted to resemble wallpaper in brown tones with dark floral borders. There are old lifts with metal grills on every floor, corridors lined with closed doors or card catalogues, and on one level, beautiful stained glass windows. Earlier this year, the date was set for the opening of the brand new National Library of Latvia, called Gaismu Pils, The Castle of Light, which is scheduled to open on Latvian Independence Day on 18 November 2012. The building will be white and is shaped like a triangle pointing towards the heavens.

I reach the fifth floor and really have no idea where to go – I don’t understand the signs on the doors and how they correlate to the slip of paper I’ve been given - but I ask someone and find the right Librarian, who again is extremely helpful. She searches various hard copy bibliographies but is unable to find The Last Bend. She takes my details and says she will email me. I really don’t hold out much hope for finding the book.

I meet Armīns Ozoliņš at Osiris Café - he's the artist who helped me install SPOGULIS last year - and we walk to Krāsotāja (Painter) Street to a digital graphics company called Magnum TI who may be able to print some large scale images for me. About 200 metres before we get to Magnum, I notice a tree-lined street that goes off to the right with some rather dilapidated wooden buildings on the corner. This is nothing unusual in Riga – as you move further away from the centre of the city, the buildings tend to be less renovated and are more reminiscent of Soviet times. For some reason I feel oddly drawn to the view down this particular street and make a mental note that I should take a photograph next time I go by.

The Magnum company don’t have the particular fabric I wanted in stock and so I decide to get one image only, rather than three, printed on a different quality fabric as an experiment. I’m worried that the printing will be too glossy but I’m also keen to see one of the images at full scale. We do a deal and then Armīns takes me to a nearby Antique Bookstore where I might be able to find The Last Bend. We have to walk past that street I was drawn to earlier and for some reason I am once again struck by the buildings and the view.

The Antique Bookshop has a complete set of Jack London novels and short stories published in 1938, but The Last Bend is not amongst them. Either my mother has the title wrong or the author. I am almost tempted to buy the entire set of books just in case, but decide to wait for news from the library instead. I do buy about 10 journals from the 1920s, 30s and 40s and a novel about Emilija Benjamins, who ran the Estate my mother lived on near Kandava in the 1930s.

When I get back to the flat, there is an email from the library – they have found The Last Bend! I am stunned because I really didn’t think they would be able to trace it. The title is correct but the author is not Jack London – it’s H Richter - and it was published in 1944.

The next day I go to the library to see the book. I have to go to the third floor this time where I hand in a slip of paper with the book’s call number. It will take about half an hour to retrieve and I patiently wait in a reading room on the 5th floor. When I return the book has arrived. It’s a paperback with a murky dark cover and I can immediately see that it’s the right book because it has a picture of a racing car zooming down a tree-lined road and a silhouette of enthusiastic spectators on the cover. I feel overcome with emotion as I handle the book and turn its pages. The paper is thickish and brown from the acidic content. I get to the title page and it offers an extraordinary surprise – the book was translated from the German by M Berzins. My mother’s maiden name is Mirzda Berzins! I wonder whether this may be the reason the young man in the train gave this particular book to my mother.

I start to read a little of the book but I’m too overcome by its very existence to be able to concentrate on the Latvian. I turn the pages and find that it won’t let me get beyond a certain point because all of the pages have not been cut – the content of most of the book is thus inaccessible. I am reminded of my own art work and how so many of my projects present the viewer with book pages, documents or other objects that promise information and meaning but deny access to that information and meaning.

I take lots of photos of the book and then head for Magnum to pick up my print. I pass by that strangely alluring street again, and this time take a quick photo. At Magnum my print has turned out well and I’m really happy with the scale, even though I am not completely convinced by the surface of the fabric. On my way home I stop by that street again and take a couple more shots, but the shadows are very intense and so the pictures are not very successful. Then I look at the name of the street – it’s Lienas Iela. This is the street where my father grew up! I’m completely taken aback, overcome by a feeling that the street has been calling me to towards itself. I walk down, looking for number 8, and there it is, just a short way down on the right. It’s a big rendered apartment building with a large gate on the left leading into an internal courtyard. It looks as though it has not been touched since the 1940s. I take photos and feel tears welling in my eyes. My father’s family lived in apartment 14 and this is also where my cousin Mara grew up.

I’m not sure what to do. I walk back to Krasotaja Street and there is a small café directly opposite Lienas Street called Lienas Café. It’s very basic, with fake green onyx tables and a lone customer - a rather rough looking Russian worker - busily concentrating on a bowl of soup. I don’t feel I belong here, but I need to sit down and get over the shock of Lienas Street. The owner of the café emerges from the back room – he looks like an extremely weathered version of Michael Edwards, the directory of Contemporary Art Services Tasmania - and I order a Frikadelu (meatball and vegetable) soup with rye bread. It’s home-made and delicious and I enjoy every mouthful.

On the way home I stop at three Antique Book stores and ask for a copy of The Last Bend, but no-one has it.

Russian Contemporary Art, the Arsenals Film Festival and Riga Balsam

2008-09-28T07:27:00.000-07:00

On Friday 19th September I attend the opening of ART-Index, an exhibition of Russian Contemporary Art in Arsenals, the gallery with the amazingly steep and scary staircase I visited in my first week in Riga. The exhibition is part of a unique season of events celebrating Russian culture in Latvia. The place is packed and buzzing. After the speeches a very groovy band called Beat Retro Scratch start playing a fabulous mix of retro jazz, folk and contemporary music in the foyer.

In the main gallery a group of ballerinas wearing classical tutus are performing as part of one of the art works. It’s very crowded and I push my way through to see the rest of the art – sculpture, painting, photography, video – there’s a lot of work and my first impression is that it’s all very exciting. There’s a Russian aesthetic present here that I can’t quite define – it’s dramatic, strong, and confident. I’m taken by the ballerinas, a series of rather Dadaist reconstructions of military objects, a big pile of dirt that sits in the centre of one of the gallery spaces, and a bookshelf filled with loaves of rye bread. Some of the videos are also quite compelling. I join the crowds around two large cardboard boxes and peer into their open lids. Inside one is a projection of a miniature sleeping Lenin – but his sleep is is troubled and he tosses and turns in his formal black suit. Inside the other box is a projection of three people in a room – a naked woman on a bed, a man on a toilet and a man at eating at a table. The two men rotate their way clockwise around the room - eating, having sex with the woman and shitting - a comic little scene about the merry-go-round of life. I’m also drawn to a video of close-ups of raw eggs and spaghetti accompanied by Tchaikovsky; a series of large scale photographs of sausages, rye bread and cheese that have been arranged to mimic Russian Constructivist paintings, and a group of mysterious monochromatic landscapes.

As I’m taking photos of the landscapes, I hear someone call out my name and it’s Jegor Jerohomovičs, the journalist who interviewed me last year for an article in Riga’s main newspaper, Diena. Jegor speaks perfect English, Latvian and Russian and we chat for a while in Latvian, both agreeing it’s a great show and that we should keep in touch while I’m here. Then I watch the band for a little longer and meet their manager, Zoja. The band don’t have any CDs out yet, but there is more information about them on My Space.

Later I go to the K Suns Cinema to see a Belgian movie at the Arsenals International Film Festival. The movie has English subtitles but most of the people are wearing headphones through which they hear a Latvian translation. The next day Anda Klavina and I see another film, My Winnipeg, a fantastic black and white movie by Canadian director Guy Maddin, in which he recalls his childhood growing up in Winnipeg. Maddin employs actors to play his various family members and then merges his recreated memories with documentary footage of his hometown. The result is a humorous but deeply moving narrative of Maddin’s early life.

* * *

I am sick with some sort of virus for about a week. Anda suggests I take Riga Black Balzam, a mixture of secret herbs, roots, oils, berries and pure vodka (45% proof) that was developed in the mid 1700s and was traditionally sold in pharmacies. It’s black and very potent, both bitter and sweet in taste, and the day after I take my first dose, I magically feel much better. I take another dose the next day and continue to improve. The drink has won various international awards and when Catherine the Great of Russia visited Riga, she was apparently cured of illness after taking Riga Balzam.

Kandava Revisited

2008-09-21T14:33:00.000-07:00

My return visit to Kandava to visit the Benjamin Estate is successful. I catch the 8.10am bus from Riga central bus station (it has a fantastically decorated cabin) and arrive in Kandava at about 10.30. It’s drizzling and cold again, but this time I’ve come prepared, wearing two coats – a lightweight parka underneath a longer trench coat – so I’m quite warm. I have a couple of hours to kill before catching the bus to the Estate at Valdeki, so I go to the market and buy gloves, say hello to Ilze at the Tourist Bureau, and then wander up the hill to the Lutheran Church, in that hope that it will be open this time. I’m delighted to see a group of ladies chatting in the entrance. I buy a candle and ask if it’s ok to take photos. It is a beautiful little church, with a large oil painting of the Madonna as the altarpiece and fantastic wooden Baroque carvings. One of the ladies (pictured) asks me to sign the visitors’ book and tells me that they have a wonderful minister who is loved by the community and that people from all over the world have visited the church and admired the carvings.

The bus to Valdeki is smaller and less modern that the one that took me to Kandava and drops me off about half a kilometre from the entrance to the Estate. I feel excited and a bit nervous too – afterall, I’m in the middle of the countryside, there’s hardly a house in sight and I have no car.

I walk another half a kilometre down a long curved tree-lined road. I see some farm buildings in the distance to the right and catch glimpses of the Benjamin’s yellow house ahead, hidden amongst large trees. The grounds are lush and green and well kept. There are signs that say private property and a busload of people is just about to leave the parking area. I proceed on to the house. An old lady wearing a scarf and pushing a small cart walks by and I say hello. I wander around the outside of the main house, taking photos and looking for Inta, the housekeeper, who is supposed to show me around. I recognise the front and the back of the house from the photos I saw in the Kandava Museum. In the front of the house there is a large decorative pond and beyond that, behind a fence, an ugly Soviet style building. At the back of the house is a paved garden area and beyond that, to the right, a series of buildings that I suspect are the stables. Perhaps my mother lived close by here?

There is no sign of Inta and I feel a little overwhelmed about being here, where my mother ran about and played as a young child. I wonder if she was allowed to go into the big house. (Later, when I phone her, she tells me that yes, they went into the house every day to eat lunch in the big kitchens.) I keep taking photos and then go up the grand stairs at the back of the house. The door opens and Inta comes out and greets me. Inside, the house has been lovingly restored with as many items as possible from the past – Antons Benjamin’s desk, elaborate carved sideboards, and some original chandeliers that somehow survived Soviet times. The walls are lined with large scale photographs, a mix of images that show the Benjamin family when they lived here in the 1930s, and more recent photographs by Peteris Benjamins, a descendant of the family who is now part owner of this property. Antons Benjamins died in 1939, so he missed the War, but his wife, Emilija, was sent to Siberia on 14 June 1941 and died a few months later of dysentery on 23 September in Soļikamska labour camp.

Inta points out that during the Soviet era the house was a government building was so neglected that even the floors had to be replaced. After the tour of the house, Inta says I can wander around the grounds as I please. I ask if there is a taxi or car that can take me back to Kandava afterwards, but the answer is no. There is a bus, but it doesn’t come for another three hours. I’m a little worried about getting back to Kandava – even though I am very happy to be here, there is probably not more than half an hour of exploration ahead.

I take to the grounds. It is quiet here, the gravel crunches underfoot. I take photos of all the building I come across. I think the long grey building with a series of wooden doors might be the stables where my grandfather worked, looking after the horses. Antons Benjamins’ favourite horse was a black horse named Kangars, and whenever Benjamins returned from trips outside Kandava, my grandfather would meet him at the station with a carriage drawn by Kangars. The Estate's first horse was named Otilija and was a golden colour. My mother loved the stables and the dairy and remembers that the names of every horse and every cow were inscribed above their individual stalls.

I find the hot houses where my grandmother had worked, preparing seedlings, and where my mother loved to play boats with the seedling boxes. The hothouses are now in a terrible state, the glass broken and missing and weeds growing metres high inside. Inta told me that many of the hothouses had already been pulled down because they are too difficult to restore, but there were plans to renovate one or two for the sake of posterity.

As I wander the grounds, I keep taking photos, driven by an underlying anxiety – will I manage to take one that my mother will recognise? Perhaps the long white building with windows on the second floor, is where my mother lived? I wish she were here with me right now. Every now and then I catch sight of the old lady with the scarf and cart somewhere in the distance and I wonder if she is actually real - she almost seems like an apparition from the past. I walk to the dam at the back of the property. It’s surrounded by old trees and shrubs, with a small round brick building to the right. It’s very beautiful here, densely green, and I suddenly find myself crying. When I talk to my mother on the phone later, she asks me whether the dam is still there.

Not far from the dam is a building that obviously was not part of the original Estate. I’m surprised to find it’s a shop, and I assume it’s for the people who live here, in the various surrounding buildings which Inta told me are all rented out. Back near the main house I see a man in the garden. As I approach I smile and say hello but he reacts aggressively and barks something at me that sounds like, ‘Come here.’ I move away quickly.

I take some final photos and decide to walk the six kilometres back to Kandava. I’m a bit worried about how my feet will cope, because they have still not fully recovered from surgery earlier this year, but it seems a better option than staying here for another two and a half hours. I return to the main road and begin walking. It’s a long road ahead, lined with thick forest on either side, only an occasional car passing by, and not a house in sight anywhere. It all feels very David Lynchish and I take out my umbrella as weapon. I try not to think about the possibility of being dragged into the woods by a stranger… shoulders back, head high, confident stride. I contemplate hitching a ride, but that seems even more risky than walking.

It takes me an hour to get back to Kandava and I feel a tremendous sense of achievement when I get there - my feet hurt, but I’ve made it. I visit Ilze in the Tourist Bureau and she scolds me for not phoning her to ask for a lift.

Mezaparks, a Convent and the Hill of Crosses

2008-09-18T14:25:00.000-07:00

Mezaparks is a huge national parkland north of Riga that was established in 1901 to celebrate the city’s 700th anniversary. Today it has bike tracks, picnic areas, swimming on the banks of the Kisezers lake, children’s playgrounds, an outdoor theatre and a giant stadium where the Latvian Song and Dance Festival, Dziesmu Svetki, is held. I catch tram 11 out there, on my way to visit Ingmars Kulnieks, an old friend from Melbourne who dated two of my sisters in the late 1970s and early 80s. He was a law student back then and drove a bright yellow Karmen Ghia sports car. Ingmars moved to Riga in the mid 1990s after falling in love with a Latvian girl, Ieva, a paediatric opthalmologist. They now have three children - Kate, Karlis and Kriss. Ingmars practiced law for a short while, but disillusioned with the legal system in Latvia, began a wine importing business. We haven’t seen each other since about 1980.

Ingmars greets me from a window of his top floor apartment of a house in the suburb of Mezaparks. The property is surrounded by giant pine trees, as are most of the houses in the area. We talk non-stop while Ingmars makes lunch and after eating go for a walk with the children. The area of Mezaparks is beautiful – most of the houses are huge, with fabulous gardens and high fences, but there are also more modest homes. Ingmars points out the owners of some of the houses – the Latvian Prime Minister has a place just a few doors down, the mother of the Latvian Olympic weightlifting champion lives around the corner, the German Ambassador a few streets away. Almost every house is guarded by a giant dog – I have never seen or heard so many dogs barking so loudly! In the evening I meet Ieva, who has been at the Arsenals International Film Festival. We drink coffee and talk and then I take a cab back to my apartment.

The next day Anda Klavina, the et+t residency project officer, takes me to visit her mother and grandmother who live in a small village, Valgunde, about 10 km from the city of Jelgava. Jelgava was almost completely destroyed in WWII and, with the exception of a huge palace, was rebuilt with Soviet style buildings. Anda’s family home has a big garden of flowers, vegetables and fruit trees and we eat lunch outside – broad beans, fried chunks of bacon, tomato salad and mushrooms, all washed down with kefirs, a type of buttermilk. Anda’s mother and grandmother ask me questions about Australia and I ask them questions about life in Latvia. Anda’s mother tells me that under Soviet rule her life was better - at least then she had a regular job and didn't have to worry about an income.

Later in the afternoon we walk to the nearby Russian Orthodox Convent, a branch of Riga St Trinity Sergij that has 65 nuns and somehow managed to survive during communist rule. It’s almost directly across the road from the house, but deep in the forest. We all put skirts over our trousers and take scarves to wear on our heads so we can attend the 5pm church service.

The walk into the forest is magical. The air is fresh and spicy and a deep silence descends over us as we move through the trees. We don’t go straight to the monastery, but first visit a small outdoor chapel in a clearing in the forest. There are paintings of angels and the Madonna, vases of flowers and a circle of simple wooden benches. We sit for a while and I stare up at the sky, which seems so very high above the trees. As we head towards the monastery, the church bells start ringing – the tone is light and gentle, completely different from the heavy sound of cathedral bells I am accustomed to. The grounds of the monastery house a number of beautifully kept buildings and a large cemetery that dates back to the 1800s, when the convent was first established. Anda’s grandmother lived here for about 3 years when she was a child after WWII. I photograph her in front of the building that was her home. We all put our scarves on and enter the small, dark green timber chapel.

Inside it is dark, a little cramped and somewhat confusing. The walls are covered with icons that gleam with gold, groups of parishioners stand here and there, a priest to the left of the altar calls out repetitive prayers, and several nuns wearing unusual habits with peaked headpieces walk back and forth through the space. I am not sure what to do. Anda’s grandmother gives me a candle and I squeeze past a group of people into a small area on the right where there is a beautiful painting of a Madonna. I light the candle here and then squeeze past again. The priest starts repeating the same word over and over again and the parishioners make the sign of the cross at regular intervals. We stay a few minutes longer and then leave.

The next day I continue the religious theme and visit the Hill of Crosses in Lithuania, a trip I book through the Baltic Tourism Bureau. I am picked up outside my apartment by Austris, the Bureau’s driver. He is 20 years old but very worldly wise. I am his only passenger for the trip today and we head off in the silver grey van. I sit up front and we speak English all the way. Austris drives fast, overtaking everything in sight and constantly watching out for the cops and talking on his mobile. ‘Don’t worry’, he says, ‘I have my licence now one month. I am careful driver. I don’t take risk.’ I am not so sure about this and for the first 10kms I fell very nervous, but after that, quite inexplicably, I feel oddly safe in Austris’s hands, even when he tells me about the two major car accidents he had as a rally driver at the ages of 15 and 16 (apparently you don’t have to have a licence to drive rally cars). In one of the accidents, Austris broke his neck and was hospitalised for 6 months and took a further year to fully recover. He was paralysed from the waist down but eventually regained the used of his legs. When he emerged from hospital and ran into his old friends, they were shocked to see him because they thought he had died.

Austris smokes, but not in the car. He gave up a number of years ago but took it up again recently after a series of dramatic events. In the space of eight months, his girlfriend left him, his grandmother died, his mother had a car accident, and then his father. As we drive towards Lithuania, Austris points out various dangerous spots on the road. He puts on a CD by Natacha Atlas and we discuss life, the universe and everything.

The Hill of Crosses is the most remarkable man-made memorial I have ever seen. It is in the village Jurgaiciai, in the Siauliai district, not far from the Latvian border and was apparently established in 1831 after a rebel uprising. People began to leave crosses there to commemorate the lost rebels. At the beginning of last century there were about 100 crosses - now there must be hundreds of thousands, if not millions. During the Soviet era, there were a number of attempts to destroy the Hill, but after each attempt it was resurrected. The site has now been claimed as a symbol of undeterring Lithuanian faith and hope, but pilgrims visit from all over the world, including Pope John Paul II who blessed all of Europe from there in 1993.

The immediate landscape around the Hill is rather flat and unremarkable, which seems to enhance, rather than detract, from the special aura that surrounds it. We drive up to the visitors’ centre where I buy a large cross for my Lithuanian colleague and friend Ona, who is recovering from major surgery back in Hobart. The stallholder gives me a marker pen and I write Ona’s name on the cross. Then Austris and I make our way towards the Hill. There are so many crosses it is almost impossible to appreciate them individually. Newer crosses line the various paths that lead to two summits within the hill and older crosses spread out behind them. In some places the crosses are so thick that the bulk of them are obscured. Dangling from one large cross, old amber rosary beads twirl endlessly and magically in a circle, yet there is no wind. An old lady sits with a begging bowl on the steps leading towards a statue of the Madonna and Austris and I each give her a coin. People also leave coins on memorial stones. I find a place for Ona’s cross near the blue Madonna and say a prayer for her.

Austris tells me he always feels very emotional when he visits the Hill and I can see it in his face. We drive back to Riga at top speed listening to Natacha Atlas again.

Riga, the Hospital, the Gulags and Kandava

2008-09-12T13:15:00.000-07:00

So many things have happened in the last week. I have met with relatives in a Soviet housing complex, have semi-mastered the trolley bus and tram system, have travelled to a small village in Western Latvia by bus, and am now the proud possessor of a renewed Latvian passport which makes me an official member of the European Union. Along the way I’ve met people who have been extraordinarily helpful, and others who have been extraordinarily rude. I have also completely fallen in love with the architecture of Riga – the mixture of old and new, crumbling and renovated, art nouveau and traditional wooden buildings, takes my breath away. Old Riga hugs the river Dauguva. It is a maze of cobbled stone streets and 13th and 14th century buildings that open onto public squares filled with outdoor bars, cafes and souvenir stalls selling amber jewellery and hand-knitted socks and mittens. From the old city the rest of Riga extends out beyond a bank of beautiful parklands along grand boulevards lined predominantly with art nouveau buildings, but every now and then you come across traditional old wooden houses, some completely neglected and other very beautifully renovated. Of course, there are vestiges of the Soviet era everywhere. It is all so completely different from humble Hobart and I can see that my love for this place is tainted with a bad case of fascination with ‘the other’ (even though I technically belong to that ‘other’). Part of me wants to live here because it is so very aesthetically compelling - but another part of me acknowledges that the reality of living here from day to day may not be so easy.

A few days ago I visit Riga’s First Hospital, which is where my mother, Mirdza Berziņš, was born in 1927. The hospital was originally established in 1803, but the rather gothic main building, which is now the emergency entrance, was built in 1873.

I take photos from the outside and then ask the guard if I can take a photo of the interior. He says I need permission and leads me up the stairs to the management offices - I feel a bit like a naughty schoolgirl being taken to the headmaster’s office. I am introduced to Iveta, the PR Manager, who is absolutely delighted to meet me. She sits me down, makes me coffee, gives me a book of Latvian poetry as a gift and asks me why I am interested in the hospital. We talk for over half an hour, exchanging life stories, star signs, and views on what it is like to be a woman in the world today. We discover that both of us were born in 1954, only a few days apart. I am not able to take photos inside the hospital, but Iveta showed me a small museum in the bowels of the building where there is a photo of the hospital’s nursery in the 1920s or 30s. We then go outside and walk through the hospital complex and she shows me the building where my mother would have been born. Iveta gives me permission to return at any time to take more photos. We have been emailing each other since our meeting.

* * *

When I was in Riga in December 2001, I was taken to the First Hospital by ambulance from the Hotel Latvia. I was having trouble swallowing and my breathing would often stop for a brief period of time when I ate solid food. I was becoming increasingly distressed by my symptoms and after an episode in the Hotel’s café, asked if there was a doctor in the house. They called an ambulance and it was suggested I see a specialist at the hospital. My niece, Antra, accompanied me for moral support. I vaguely remember the interior of the ambulance – it was dark and the equipment looked dated and unfamiliar.

When I arrived at the Hospital and was led inside, I felt as if I had entered a 1940s black and white movie. There was a lone woman sitting at the reception desk, bathed in a dim wash of yellowish light. A short woman with red hair led Antra and I down a long corridor. She wore a white lab coat and knee length leather boots and there was an almost military precision in her stride. In the distance ahead, I could see someone standing in the otherwise empty corridor, looking in our direction. As we approached, the person's face became visible – it was lobster red and extremely swollen, the eyes mere slits, the skin shiny and peeling in places. Our eyes met briefly. As we progressed down the corridor a voice inside my head began repeating 'Take the first available flight to London if you have to have a procedure, take the first available flight to London…'

At the end of the corridor, Antra was made to wait outside while I was led into an examination room. The red-haired woman with the boots instructed to me take off my coat and pointed to a seat against the wall next to a trolley of medical instruments. There was a small Christmas tree covered in decorations on a table at one end of the room and traditional straw mobiles hung over the large examination table in the centre. The woman sat down at a table opposite me, opened a large ledger book, picked up a pen, and held it poised over the page, ready to write. She maintained this position without moving. Clearly, she was not the specialist.

After 5 minutes or so of waiting, the ambulance officer arrived and said, ‘Well, you must be feeling much better now that you are here, in the hospital. The specialist will be here shortly – he’s seeing someone in the other building who is bleeding profusely.’ When the doctor arrived he burst into the room in a great flurry wearing a full length padded floral dressing gown and a fur hat. I immediately thought of Groucho Marx. He removed his outfit and discussed my case with the ambulance driver and the red-haired assistant. They seemed more interested in the fact that I could speak Latvian and lived in Australia, rather than the nature of my condition. Eventually I was examined. The specialist asked me to open my mouth very wide and depressed my tongue with a wooden paddle. Leaning over his shoulder, also staring down my throat, were the ambulance officer and the assistant. The specialist stood back for a moment, then moved his face very close to mine and said, in a quite loud voice, ‘Completely healthy woman, completely healthy woman, completely healthy woman.’

‘So why am I having trouble swallowing?’ I asked. ‘It’s your nerves,’ he said. He prescribed a herbal tea, donned his floral padded dressing-gown and hat again, and left. I drank the herbal tea, but the problem didn’t ease. I ended up seeing a Harley Street specialist in London who explained the how the dysphagia had started and concurred that there was actually nothing wrong with me – it would just take me time to learn how to swallow properly again. The condition eventually passed after I finished my PhD.

* * *

The next day I collect my renewed passport, dutifully sitting with others in a waiting room until my number is shown on a digital screen. The girl who stamps my papers and hands the passport over to me is young and attractive, probably in her twenties, but she is extremely dour and serious. I ask her if that’s all there is to it, and she almost smiles back at me. As I leave the building I am surprised at how elated I feel about new the passport and wish I could celebrate with someone. I end up going to Latvian Art Academy, which is just nearby, where I have a strong black coffee in their rather dingy underground café and then visit an exhibition by a Japanese architect in a massive upstairs gallery.

Afterwards I buy seven yellow roses from the flower stalls near the freedom monument and catch trolley bus number 17 to Unijas Street, where my mother’s cousin, Jānis Petersons lives. It’s about 20 minutes or so out of Riga’s centre, in a Soviet housing area. Anna, Jānis’s partner, meets me at the trolley bus stop and we walk to their building. I would never have found it without her. Last time I was here all the buildings looked exactly the same because everything was covered in snow. This time, it is green and lush and Anna shows me the back of her building where her balcony is visible, covered in flowering pot plants. We walk up four flights of stairs to the apartment. The stairwell is dank and badly in need of painting, and the concrete stairs are cracked and dirty, but the flat itself is warm and cheery, decorated with Anna’s handcrafts. The living room has a huge wall unit filled with knick knacks, a couch, a wardrobe, a small table covered with plants, and a big wide screen television.

Jānis greets me and I present him with a bottle of Asti Spumante. We drink instant coffee and eat cake. Jānis makes his drink with about five grains of granulated coffee and 3 spoons of sugar. We talk and talk, reminiscing about the time I was here with Gerard in 1992. Anna shows me photo albums of her grandchildren in America - and then Jānis tells me about his time in the gulags. I had no idea that he had spent three years in gulags in Azerbaijan – for some reason I always thought he had been sent to Siberia. I have trouble understanding everything he says, because he speaks very quickly and uses words I am not familiar with. In a way, this is a blessing, because I don’t think I want to know all the details. He tells me that he progressed through a range of labour camps, working his way up to the salt mines in Baku, which were the best place to be because at least there you were outside in the fresh air. Food rations were one cup of gruel in the morning and 250 grams of bread per day. Fifty to sixty men slept in one small room, not much bigger than Jānis’s own living room, on wooden sleeping racks that lined the walls.

There must have been opportunities to do extra work and earn extra money while in the gulags and Jānis tells the story of agreeing to build a stone fence for an Azerbaijani for a specified fee. Jānis had never built such a fence before, (of course, he didn’t tell his client this) but subcontracts a team of other inmates who have some knowledge of building stone walls. They construct the fence to the specified dimensions and the Azerbaijani is very pleased with the result. A few days later, however, he approaches Jānis and says he has decided he would like the fence to be even higher. Jānis agrees – no problem, he can make the fence higher. He consults his wall making team again but they say if the fence is made higher, it will be unstable. Nevertheless, they build the wall higher, the Azerbaijani is happy and Jānis gets paid. A few days later, he hears an almighty crash and finds out that the entire fence has collapsed into rubble.

Jānis has many more stories to tell but I have had enough for this visit. Anna walks me back to the trolley bus stop and we agree to meet again soon.

The next day I make my first big trip out of Riga and catch the bus to Kandava, a small village in Kurzeme, or western Latvia. My mother spent several years living on a huge estate about five kilometres from the centre of Kandava, moving there in 1932, when she was five years old. The property was owned by Latvian millionaire newspaper mogul, Antons Benjamins, who developed it into a model estate. He employed staff to work in the stables, the dairy, the gardens and the hothouses. My grandfather looked after the horses, and I think my grandmother worked in the gardens. My mother remembers her time there with great fondness. Her family was provided with a two roomed apartment that was completely white – white walls, white furniture, even a white stove in the kitchen. It was here that she tasted grapes for the very first time in her life. It was also here that she first used an indoor flushing toilet. There were not many children on the estate, but my mother remembers often inviting them all to her apartment, where they played games and made a big mess eating swedes by scraping at the sweet flesh with spoons. She also played in the hothouses, using seedling boxes as toy boats. I’m not sure what the estate was used for during the Soviet era, but today it has been reclaimed by descendants of Antons and Emilija Benjamins and is available for hire for wedding receptions, conferences and special events. The tourist bureau in Riga told me it is open to the public and has a small museum about the estate’s history. Naturally, I am very keen to make a visit.

The image shows Kandava Sunday School in 1936. My mother is third from the left in the front row. Her brother, Gunars, is second from the left.

It is cold and rainy when I arrive in Kandava - not a heavy rain, but a light, persistent drizzle. I wish I had worn warmer clothes. I walk up a hill toward the town centre. This is a very small village, with old stone buildings and a few wooden houses. There is a café and hotel which has recently been refurbished, and I go there for coffee. The girl behind the counter is very friendly and tells me the tourist bureau is back down at the bottom of the hill I just climbed. I ask her the best way to get to the Benjamin Estate and she says the only way is by taxi. She phones several times for me, but the taxi driver seems to be unavailable. I leave for the tourist bureau and the girl in the café tells me to come back if I have no luck there – she may be able to find someone who can drive me there.

The tourist bureau officer, Ilze, is equally friendly and helpful. She too, is unable to contact the one and only taxi driver in Kandava, who is normally parked outside the bureau, waiting for potential business. She then arranges for me to visit the museum, which holds information about the Benjamin Estate. On the way, several people give me directions, one even stopping his car, winding down the window and explaining how to get there. I feel as though everyone in Kandava knows where I am going.

The museum is a large freestanding brick building at the top of a hill with a dimly lit double entrance. There are no exhibits to speak of – just some Soviet memorabilia in a back room which I discover later on my way to the toilet.

The extremely helpful museum officer is expecting me and has taken out a pile of folders about the Benjamin Estate. I am really delighted – there are photos of the property in the 1920s and 30s, including members of the Benjamin family, the main house from various perspectives, what I assume might be the stables, and the hothouses. Antons and Emilija Benjamins were great philanthropists. There are copies of old newspaper articles about them and also more recent ones that feature their descendants returning to Latvia to reclaim their property after the end of Soviet rule. I take photos of the documents and discuss them with the museum officer. She kindly phones the Benjamin Estate for me, only to find that it is not possible to visit today because the housekeeper is out of Kandava. It seems I am just not meant to see the estate in person today.

I have lunch back in the village and then wander around Kandava for a while. I climb up the hill to visit the old Lutheran church, built in 1736, to see its baroque wooden carvings, but the doors are locked despite the sign that says it is open until 4pm. Back down in the village, in the street that leads towards the gallery and cultural centre, there is a very poignant sign outside one of the buildings that says ‘New York’. It’s a vertical light box, white with blue lettering on one side, blue with white lettering on the other. The shop sells jeans and other contemporary clothing but it’s closed, as too are the gallery and cultural centre.

I return to the tourist bureau, where Ilze makes me coffee and miraculously manages to get the housekeeper of the estate on the phone. I arrange to visit next Wednesday at 1pm, but the negotiations are laboured. Is it possible to visit the estate? It is possible. When could I visit? Not today and not tomorrow. Could I visit next week then? I suppose so. Which day would be convenient? You can’t visit in the morning. Ok, I’ll come in the afternoon, but which day would be suitable? Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday? You can come on Wednesday. Great, I’ll come on Wednesday – what time? Not in the morning, only in the afternoon. Ok, what time – 2pm, 3pm? No, come at 1pm, I have a tourist group coming then. I wonder why she didn’t suggest this right at the beginning!

Ilze gathers information for me about the other places I will be visiting in Latvia and then I catch the bus back to Riga.

The journey starts

2008-09-05T01:43:00.000-07:00

The start to the journey is not smooth. I leave my glasses at home, my flight to Singapore is delayed by four hours, and I am overcome by a totally surprising level of anxiety. I wonder whether the forgotten glasses and flight delay are bad omens. But I’m wearing something for good luck - the bracelet my mother gave me when I first left home. It was given to her when she was confirmed at the age of sixteen in Riga. It’s a Nameja bracelet, based on the Nameja ring, traditionally worn by men and made from three separate bands of silver twisted together and joined by a fourth fine braid. Namejs was a Latvian warrior who fought against the German crusaders in the early 13th century and his ring symbolises the unity of the three ancient tribes of Latvia.

In the special lounge for delayed passengers I phone my sister who lives in Sydney. I don’t tell her I’m anxious but she reminds me that at any time I can change my mind and fly back. I drink cups of tea, eat free snacks and go to the toilet too many times. I check my email. The Japanese man in the internet booth next to mine alerts me to a news announcement on the television about a problematic Qantas flight and then comments on the many mechanical faults the airline has experienced in recent months. At the gate, the flight is delayed another three times as final checks are made on the engine. At each announcement the passengers groan but there is spontaneous applause when we finally get to board.

I get to my hotel in Singapore at 5am. After a few hours sleep, I go shopping for a new camera and buy it almost too quickly - the salesman is incredibly convincing and I’m too tired to make endless comparisons. I eat delicious Chinese food in a tiny café, visit a Buddhist Temple and a Hindu Temple and get caught in the rain. I feel a bit de-realised the whole time I’m in Singapore, as if I’m watching myself from a slight distance outside my body. I go to the airport a little early and have a foot massage before the long haul to Frankfurt. I’m feeling more relaxed now, but during the flight I develop a new anxiety about which passport to use when I arrive in Germany – Australian or Latvian? Last year I used my Latvian one all over Europe and passport control was very simple because of Latvia’s EU status. But Latvian passport legislation has since changed and all passports have to be renewed to be valid. I make a sensible decision to use the Australian one, but when I arrive at Frankfurt I do the exact opposite. I feel both daring and terrified at the passport counter. The officer takes a long time checking my details but I get through, no questions asked, and make my way to Terminal 1 and my Lufthansa flight to Riga.

At the gate lounge I sit next to a Slovenian woman who was born in Belgrade but now lives in Singapore. We talk non-stop for about an hour as we wait for our respective flights. There is something about her face and her general demeanor that has an inexplicable effect on me – she is a complete stranger but I almost feel as if I know her. Perhaps it is her beautiful dark eyes and her features, which remind me a little of my mother.

After the war in Belgrade the Slovenian woman lived in Saudi Arabia for a number of years and she explains what it was like to be a woman there. She tells me about the women’s room. Apparently men have the right to build a special room in their houses where female members of the family can be locked up if their behaviour is considered inappropriate. The room has no windows and only a small slot through which food is passed. This is true, she says. No-one talks about it, but men may build such a room in their houses. We shake hands and exchange names when my flight is called for boarding.

In the plane I sit next to an elderly Latvian couple from San Fransisco. I manage to hold a conversation with them without letting too many English words drop in. I listen to Leonard Cohen on my ipod and that feeling of de-realisation sweeps over me again.

A strange thing happens at Riga airport when I arrive – I get lost. Instead of going straight down to passport control and to collect my luggage, I end up at the entrance to departures. I am asked where I am travelling to and I explain that I have just arrived. The officer points me in a particular direction but I end up in the general shopping area. It then occurs to me that I could slip out of the airport without anyone checking my status. I’m now feeling quite anxious about claiming my luggage and wander down a very long sloping floor, thinking this might lead to passport control but no, I am wrong again. The officer at the end of the sloping floor directs me back up and around the corner. He calls out after me and tells me my Latvian passport is not valid. Eventually I find the escalator that takes me down to baggage claim. No-one checks my passport.

I catch a cab into Riga. The driver is Latvian, rather than Russian, and we chat all the way. He tells me he has relatives in Adelaide but has had no contact with them at all since his grandmother died. I stare out the window - I have been to Riga four times since 1992 but this time feels like the first time. The architecture stuns me, reinforcing that I am in Eastern Europe and I wish I had my new camera with me but it’s in my backpack in the boot. We stop in the traffic near a very run-down Art Nouveau building that is decorated with a huge and elaborate relief of a witch riding on a broomstick. The windows and doors are like something out of Handsel and Gretel. The trip is slow and I am sure the cab driver is taking the long way round to get to Ausekla Street. He seems to be doing a huge circuit around the old city, but I am too jetlagged and not confident enough to argue with him.

Anda Klavina, the Project Officer for the Electronic Text + Textiles Residency, is waiting for me. I gasp quietly to myself when she opens the door and lets me in to the apartment – it is superbly spacious, minimal and modern. The studio is so big you could run dancing classes in it. After Anda shows me around we go to a little café around the corner. Waves of jet-lag wash over me and I struggle to maintain my Latvian – I am surprised at just how much concentration it requires not to break into English.

That evening I go to an exhibition opening of work by Eriks Apals that Anda has told me about. It’s in a very beautiful little gallery not far from the apartment. In the first room, walls painted a rusty red, is a series of smallish paintings on canvas - the two I remember most vividly are a rabbit in a snowstorm and a forest of fir trees in the night. There is also a slide show of stills from a U Tube video, projected beneath a small stairwell. In the second, larger gallery, painted white, is a minimal installation. Against one wall leans a smallish fir tree with many of its branches chopped off and scattered around its base. On the wall next to the tree is a crudely painted blue outline of a human figure. At the other end of this room a DJ is playing eerily distorted Latvian folk songs. The whole exhibition evokes the idea of a fairytale gone wrong. I watch people arrive. Everyone is very smartly dressed. One very groovy couple arrive with a boxer dog on a leash. Drinks are vodka shots or water. I wait until Anda arrives, say hello and then leave – the jet-lag has taken over.

On my second day I have two main objectives – to find a bank that will allow me to take a largish quantity of money out of my Visa card, and to renew my Latvian passport. I dial information on the landline in the apartment and get a number for the Department of Citizenship and Migration but every time I ring there is no answer or the line is engaged. I try about eight times but then the phone tells me that the line is busy and stops working all together.

I walk into Old Riga, following the waterfront. It’s raining lightly. I listen to voices in the street – Russian and Latvian, German, Dutch - no English. I feel strange, alien, a little unreal. My sense of self is not the same as my sense of self in Australia. Here I speak differently, without a true command of language. I realise how significant this is – to have command over language. With that command, you have command over yourself; without it, you become powerless. The idea is nothing new, of course – it’s one of the key principles of post structuralism –and as I have travelled to a number of places in the world where I don’t speak the language, or very little of it, the experience is not new to me either. But today my understanding of the concept that language and power go hand in hand is epiphanic. I think of my early childhood, of speaking Latvian at home and English at school. I don’t ever remember not understanding what was being said to me, but I do remember occasions when no-one understood what I was saying, no matter how determinedly I tried to explain myself.

I arrive at the The Occupation Museum. It is a stark grey oblong building on the waterfront, very modernist in design. I was here once before in 2001 with my mother, my sister and my niece and nephew. There are many enlarged black and white photographs of the Soviet and Nazi occupations, a life-sized model of sleeping quarters in a gulag with a detailed description of the Parasha or toilet barrel, and collections of objects displayed in black cabinets. I am particularly struck by the shoes woven from rope and the hand sewn floral padded face mask worn to protect the wearer in minus 40 degree working conditions. I don’t want to stay long today – it’s all a bit overwhelming and I am confused about my motives for the project and my ability to undertake it.

I wander the streets of Old Riga for while, and eventually find a bank that can sort my money issue. Then I feel determined to take steps to renew my passport. I have the address of the head office but it’s some distance out of the main part of the city and I’m not sure whether to take a trolley bus or a taxi. I make my way down Brivibas Boulevard past the Freedom monument, towards the Reval Hotel Latvija where I stayed with my partner, Gerard, in the mid 1990s. It is now an incredibly swish hotel, but back then it had a classic soviet 1970s interior - I particularly remember a bar with large orange swivel chairs on pedestal bases and corridors on some of the floors painted in black gloss. During the Soviet era it was where all foreign visitors had to stay. I was also here in December 2001, having a coffee in the bar. I had a disturbing medical condition at the time and the hotel arranged for an ambulance to take me to Riga’s Hospital Number One. I found out earlier this year that my mother was born in the same hospital.

In the lobby I hear someone call out my name – it’s my cousin’s daughter, Baiba, coming towards me! It is such a wonderful and totally unexpected surprise to see her. She works in the hotel and is able to quickly find out where I have to go to renew my passport. The office is just around the corner and it’s open until 4pm. I go there immediately and after some initial confusion, which takes me up and down the stairs twice, I get to see an officer. Her name is Indra, the same as one of my sisters. She speaks incredibly fast Latvian and I have to ask her to repeat most of her questions. I fill in some paper work, have my photo taken and then I’m asked to read a statement out loud that declares the information I have provided is correct. I decide to pay LVL25 to get a fast track passport. It will be ready next Wednesday.

On my third day I visit the Arsenals Museum to see a big exhibition of art made during the Soviet era – it’s called Mythology of the Soviet Land and features propaganda paintings, sculptures and videos. The videos are extraordinary. I’m particularly disturbed by one that shows a group of Latvian women folk-dancing in traditional costume, accompanied by a full orchestral rendition of traditional music. The dancers wear perfect smiles and their movements are perfectly co-ordinated. The message is that Latvian culture has been both preserved and celebrated under Soviet rule. Of course, the opposite was true.

There is also a smaller exhibition of art made during the Soviet era that was considered subversive. The staircase that leads to the gallery is one of the most extraordinary pieces of design I have ever seen. It is ridiculously and hazardously steep and I have to brace myself to tackle climbing it. I cling to the wall where the steps are widest and by the time I get to the top I am trembling. The exhibition itself is much smaller than I expected and all I can think of is how I'm going to make my way down that staircase!

Later in the afternoon I meet Zane Berzina, one of the Directors of the Electronic Text+Textiles Residency. We meet at Osiris Café, the place to be if you are associated with the arts. We talk about our respective art practices, my residency and some practical things, like finding a suitable site for the exhibition that will result from my project. Zane studied at Goldsmiths College of Art in London, specializing in textiles, and has just landed a professorial position at an art academy in Berlin. She invites me to join her and some other friends in the arts for drinks in the evening.

I have dinner with my cousin Mara – it is great to see her and Viktors and know that I have some close family here. She feeds me mushrooms and schnitzel and then I head off for the Wine Studio, on the other side of town, to meet Zane and her friends. It is a very pleasant evening and I feel a great sense of rapport with the new people I meet, especially Vineta, a painter based in Riga who has had residencies all over the world. Vineta and Zane were teenagers when Latvia gained independence in 1991. We talk about what it was like to grow up during Soviet times and Vineta explains how even as a very young child, she was aware of unspoken rules for speech and behaviour in public and private life. But she also says that there was an ever-present sense of hope that things would change one day and recalls the time of independence with great fondness - but also nostalgia, claiming that the idealism of the early 1990s is now completely gone. I leave after midnight, not because I want to, but because I can barely stay awake. (Zane is in the centre in the first image, sitting between Frank and Karl (from Ireland); Vineta is first on the left in the next image.)

Itinerary

2008-08-15T18:52:00.000-07:00

Here is a list of the places I'll be visiting during my trip. Some of the dates are approximate only.

1 Sept: Depart Australia
2 Sept: Singapore - Frankfurt

3 Sept-17 Oct: Six week Electronic Text+Textiles Residency in Riga, Latvia. During the residency I will visit all the places outside Riga where my mother and other members of her family lived: Valmiera, Dikli, Strenci, Smiltene, Aluksne, Kandava and Jelgava. I will also visit Velikie Luki in Russia, where my great grandfather died, and I'm planning a brief visit to Moscow.

17-25 Oct: Liepaija, Latvia to Gdansk and Leszno in Poland. This marks the start of my mother's journey from Riga to Australia.

26 Oct-17 Nov: Berlin, Teltow, Gusten, Dresden, Leipzig and Hannover in Germany. My mother spent nearly four years in Camp 2715 'Accu' Garbsener Landstrasse in Hannover-Stöcken. In 1949 her family went to Fallingbostel Transit Camp before heading for Bagnoli Camp near Naples, Italy. They travelled to Australia on the Fairsea. I will make some diversions on my way south.

18-20 Nov: Paris (possibly)
21-23 Nov: Geneva
24-28 Nov: Naples and Pompei
28-30 Nov: London
1 Dec: Honk Kong
2-8 Dec: Tokyo and Naoshima
9-12 Dec: Melbourne
12 Dec: Hobart

The journey ahead

2008-08-09T23:38:00.000-07:00

On 1st September 2008, I'm heading for Europe to follow my mother's journey from Riga to Australia at the end of WWII. My mother, Mirdza Ozolins (nee Berzins), was 17 when she left Riga with her parents on on 9 October 1944 and she was 22 when she arrived in Australia in June 1949. She travelled through Poland, Germany and Italy, spending most of her time in Displaced Persons' Camp 2715 'Accu' in Hannover, Germany.

This blog will document my attempt to follow my mother's footsteps and how I plan to turn my experiences into an exhibition of art work. While the story is personal, my project is about the broader themes of cultural displacement and its impact on identity.

My project is made possible by the 2008 Qantas Contemporary Art Encouragement Award.