In Israel, on June 14, an event was held at the Latvian Embassy in honor of Dzintra Geka’s book “Shalom, Siberia!” to come out. The book tells about the deportations of Latvian Jews to Siberia. Participants of tragic events gathered at the embassy. Story by Eleanor HRISMAN from http://www.isrageo.com/2020/06/22/shalonsibir/
The meeting in Tel Aviv, which took place almost 80 years after the tragic events of 1941, was launched by the Latvian Ambassador to Israel with a story about her father, who met his majority in a freight train, taking him to an Siberian exile:
– On March 25, 1941, my father was put on a train bound for Siberia, and on March 26 he was 18 years old. So gloomy was his coming of age. In that year, not only Latvians were expelled, it affected the inhabitants of the country of all nationalities, and one of the largest groups to be expelled was Jews – 1,500 families. The NKVD lasted one month to bring the “party decisions” to life, and you are living witnesses of those tragic events. The book “Shalom, Siberia!”, The publication of which was made possible thanks to the efforts of Dzintra Geka and the Children of Siberia Foundation, contains the memoirs of Jews deported from Latvia to Siberia in 1941 and 1949, and is another documentary evidence of the tragic events of Latvian history 20- century.