The Witch of Siberia:
Memories of a Survivor from the June Deportation of 1941 

        In Siberia, there was health, and then there was death. Nothing in between. Georg learned that during the first month after his arrival in Siberia.
        He twisted from side to side on his cot, his stomach clenched as he vomited tar. To him, death, which always lurked nearby, now seemed to stand at his doorway.
        Georg was as lanky as an alder and had always been—a trait that proved advantageous and had kept him alive all these years logging trees in the Gulag, a forced labor camp. Like an alder, he endured the relentless pelting rain, scorching sun, swarms of mosquitoes, lightless months, and seasons when snow raged like a violent beast, biting at his nose, toes and now and then claiming men to its icy, eternal embrace. While men, wide as oaks and strong as bears, fell like flies in the unforgiving grasp of the taiga—the realm of dark, endless woods—Georg, the scrawny man with arms as thin as twigs, endured. He was forged to withstand toil.
        With a loud curse, Georg pulled himself up from his bed. With a muffled cry, he wrestled on his shuba, a sheepskin coat, and dragged himself out of the hut, which tilted to the side the same way local men did after a night in the warming company of vodka. 
        “There’s a witch in the woods,” Juris, his neighbor across the forest, had said when he visited two days prior. “You must see her, or you’ll die.” 
        They met in the Gulag years ago while standing in the queue for food. After his first day of logging trees, Georg was handed half a slice of bread, hard as a rock, and half a scoop of soup—a few strings of sour cabbage floating in clear water.
        “Why—” 
        The man behind him pushed him forward and then moved alongside him, carrying a slice of bread and one full scoop of soup. The gray work uniform draped over him like that of a scarecrow, and he had an ashen skull’s face—the face of nearly every man surrounding them. Georg guessed he was forty years of age but learned later he was twenty-seven. 
        “Silence is golden here; you’ll learn,” the man said in heavily accented Russian. “Also, the motto here is—he who works, eats. And if you don’t, you’ll end up there.” The man gestured with his head toward the treeline on the left.
         Georg saw towering spruces. The man saw death.
        Georg looked at the bruised hand he’d accidentally left between two felled trees—the injury that forced him to stop after seven hours of work.
        The man glanced at it also. “It doesn’t look broken. You’ll earn a full meal tomorrow.”
        Once they had reached out of hearing distance from the guards, the man leaned in again. “I’m Juris. What’s your crime?”
        “Georg. My father, August, was a police constable in Tapa, a small town in Estonia.”
        When Georg asked him the same question, Juris replied, “Russia is poor, and their men rot in the Eastern Front.” Some other times, Juris said, his father was a judge in Riga, Latvia.
        It was from him Georg learned that Germans had invaded Russia. Georg and the other deported felt hope for the first time.
        “They heard what Russians did to us. They came to save us.” That’s what Georg heard from that day on, men in the Gulag whispering to one another, night after night, during curfew. 
        But what they got was more work, longer hours, and less food as Russian men fell and the Soviet state hungered for more resources to rebuild itself. When Georg had served his time, and Juris had as well, they both were denied the chance to return home. To the Soviet Government, they were both traitors to the Motherland, and were forced to continue living in Siberia, Tomsk Oblast, in the village of Sabalinka by the Parbig River. Georg couldn’t tell whether it was an act of kindness to spare him from execution and allow him to live on in Siberia or it was the punishment.
        Georg knew that if he didn’t attempt to walk now, there would be no more walking for him tomorrow. The spring morning’s wind brushed his face as he leaned against the doorway, gritting his teeth. Melting patches of snow lay under the sweeping spruces, which stood shoulder to shoulder like dark sentinels. Amidst the yellowed grass, golden heads of cowslips peeked, basking in the bright sunlight. The day was young, but he felt ancient, not a man of thirty-six years of age. The twelve-hour workdays on food barely enough to feed a child and bludgeonings from camp guards and hardened criminals working among the political prisoners had left their mark. If anyone had happened to pass by, they would have indeed thought they saw a gaunt old man bent with age and labor, his nose nearly reaching his waist. Only the bright glint in his clear eyes betrayed his true age and revealed his burning thirst to experience old age—the white whiskers, the laughter of grandchildren.
        Realizing his feet weren’t enough for walking, he grabbed the stick by his entrance. He hobbled forward, leaning heavily on it, the day growing brighter. He hadn’t made it beyond the front lawn when he started to wheeze. The air struggled to pass through his parched lips and throat, raw from vomiting. The fire blazing inside him seemed to burn anew with a fresh flame. 
        He spat out the acid in his mouth and murmured, “The witch will help me.”
        He let the cane carry his weight when he stepped forward, one wobbling step at a time. When he finally reached the village road, the ground vanished and reappeared beneath his back. For a while, he saw nothing and felt nothing. It was mercy. But when the sensations returned, bringing with them the throbbing pain in his gut, head, and limbs, he groped the ground beneath his palms. It was cold and slick.
        “Sea,” he muttered. 
        He was again a youth of age twenty-one and lay on the frozen sea—or so he imagined. 
        “Georg, get up!” his friend Otto yelled at him. “They’re almost here!”
        He hoisted himself up from the ice and glanced behind him. Shadows of men raced towards them, illuminated by the starlight. 
        “I told no one,” Georg hissed at his friend as he caught up with him. “How did they find us?”
        “My mom,” Otto moaned. “It must have been her. She thinks we’re going to die once we enlist.” 
        Georg had harbored hopes for such a death—fighting the Russians in the Finnish army. Six months prior, in June 1940, the Red Army invaded and formally annexed the Republic of Estonia into the USSR, dissolving its legally elected government and installing a puppet regime. That’s what had driven him to do what many young men were doing—crossing the frozen gulf of Finland at the height of winter. It was seventy kilometers of biting winds and the ever-present threat of the sea swallowing them whole in its frozen gut. The crisp air freshened their lungs as they ran and kissed their cheeks. The shouts behind them grew louder and nearer. 
        “Stop or we will shoot,” a man behind them threatened in Russian. 
        They both understood the warning yet kept running. 
        The Russians issued another warning, punctuated this time by a gunshot. 
        Georg stumbled and fell. Soon after, the Russians were on him and his friend.
        “Pigs!” Georg yelled, thrashing as he struggled to rise. 
        His stick proved useful in hauling himself up. The men in uniforms faded, and so did his waking dream. As he tottered down the path, the sun climbing higher and higher, he felt as though he was swimming against a heavy tide of water. His knees wobbled, arms quivered, and the force weighing him down seemed to pull even his eyelids and slack jaw toward the black earth. Minutes slowed their pace. Between each drag of his feet, hours seemed to pass. His head lolled from side to side, and his outstretched hand groped air for support, for the witch’s house he saw in his mind’s eye. The weariness of all the years he’d fought for survival in Siberia oppressed him all at once. It felled him.
        There he lay on a muddy road, staring upward. The long arms of spruces swayed overhead, the sun’s golden face peeking through the emerald hands. The gold melted into the greens, and another memory lifted its head, rising from its native dust.
        “Pauline isn’t the first woman to go mad after losing a child,” Georg heard the doctor say to his father. He was spying through a crack in the living room’s door. “A pregnancy will set her straight.”
        His mother in the bedroom screamed again, then wailed. She’d done so for months, since the night his little sister died. But what the doctor didn’t say was—she wasn’t going to be the first raving mad woman to die at childbirth. She lay now in the ground, next to her dead daughter and infant, a few headstones away from her mother, who followed her to death a short few days later. 
        Laying there, Georg saw in his mind’s eye all the things that were. Sometimes, he was again a little boy chained to a hard cot to straighten his back—doctor’s orders. At other times, he found himself back in his family living room on that fateful June morning. June 14, 1941.
        The first gray light filtered through the heavy lace curtains, and the six plates smeared with blueberry pie still lay on the dining table, awaiting their breakfast slice.
        “Your family has been selected for deportation to the Soviet Union,” announced a Russian man in military uniform, reading out loud from the paper he held in his hands. 
        Georg wanted to spit at him and fetch the father’s gun hidden under the floorboards.
        “To where?” August, Georg’s father asked. “And why? We’ve done nothing.”
        “To the Soviet Union,” replied the other man, a fellow Estonian in plain clothes. 
        “And what of our house?” August asked. 
        “You can bring all you can carry,” the Estonian responded. “We’ll sell the furniture and send you the money.”
        Ella, Georg’s stepmother, shook like a leaf. Like Georg and August, she wore nothing more than nightwear—and paper rollers in her hair. The urgent, sharp knocking on the door left no time to dress.
        “Please, bring a blanket to your wife and wake up the rest of the children,” the Estonian requested, and August complied.
        For an hour, amidst the wailing of Georg’s three younger brothers—Aksel, Matti, and Heiki—Ella cried, insisting that she wasn’t going anywhere. The two men remained polite, assuring them that communism was the world’s best, most prosperous, and most organized system ever seen. When Ella calmed, so did Georg’s pulse beat drumming in his ears. This wasn’t an arrest—they didn’t cuff them and were rather polite. They promised to provide them with a new home and a job. Georg imagined a nice apartment in the city and a job where he could wear a suit. For the next hour, the Russian and Estonian helped them pack, constantly guiding them on what to take. 
        “The food will be provided,” they repeated each time Ella or Georg attempted to pack up some provisions from the pantry. 
        En route to the train station in an open van, he sat beside his neighbor. She clung to two floral dresses and a pair of high heels, her face alight with anticipation. Then Georg was in the cargo wagon, enveloped by a dense throng of silent men. Some were as young as he was, barely twenty, but the older the men, the glummer their faces were. Haggard elders lay on the cots fitted to the walls, only their slow blinking eyes betraying there was still some life left in them. Echoes of women and children screaming and wailing in the wagons nearby were the only sounds filling the space. 
        “She’s a week old—please, please let me leave her with my sister!” one woman screamed over and over again amidst the sea of wailing.
        He stared at the hole in the wall, fitted with a drainage—a primitive toilet—and then gazed at the small barred window under the ceiling. Streaks of buttery sunshine poured through it. When the train jerked and began to creep away, he thought it started to snow. A stream of white flakes soared past the barred window. Then, in unison, those silent men rose, one after another, to stretch toward the barred window and let the wind carry small notes they had hidden in their sleeves. 
        The images of a modern apartment and him in a smart suit died, and a sharp, hollowing ache began twisting his insides. It’s just temporary; we’ll be back home in no time, Georg reassured himself. 
        He repeated this mantra over the next four weeks as the train dragged deeper into Russia. He repeated it when those old men beside him stopped breathing, when Russians stopped handing out free bread, and when food became something he mostly saw in his dreams. He shuddered seeing large cities where slow-moving people in colorless rags droned between ghostly buildings, their faces pallid and sullen. And when he witnessed dirty naked kids running alongside the train to scavenge the rotten scraps of food the deportees had thrown out the windows and fighting over them, the ach within him became unbearable.
        “We’ll be back home by Christmas,” he said to the man beside him or himself—he did not know.
        Little did he know, but when he glimpsed his father being led to another wagon on that radiant June morning, it marked their final farewell. August, an enemy of the socialist state, was executed ten months after arrival at a Sevurallag prison camp in Sverdlovsk oblast in Siberia. He was shot by a firing squad and lay without a casket or clothes in a mass grave alongside other policemen, politicians, ministers, judges, mayors, and municipality workers spanning from Ukraine to Finland, as well as people whose only sin was their disability or old age. If Georg had known what was yet to come, he would have run, even if it meant being shot then and there. 
        When the wailing dimmed, he became a boy, gazing at clouds amidst a wavering sea of gold, a ripening wheat field. If he were to get up and sprint home, there would be a fresh rhubarb pie waiting on the table. His sister Marie would be under it, playing with her doll. The white puffs of clouds in the shapes of dogs and birds faded as the gnawing pain in his stomach intensified, and another shadow of memory rose.
        Hunger, it’s the hunger pang, he thought, then mumbled, “I need food, Udo. I won’t last longer on sawdust.” 
        It’s what they called the bread they’d mixed sawdust and ground moss into to increase its quantity.
        “We all do,” Udo replied, dropping a handful of verdant moss into his basket. He was a young Estonian man with straw-colored hair, ten years younger than Georg, but with hollowed cheeks and sunken eyes, he looked at least a decade older than his age. Georg had met him a few months ago in the woods while hunting for twigs for a fire. 
        “Alone?” Udo had asked him. 
        “I’ve spent years logging trees in the taiga,” Georg had replied.
        “But never alone, eh? That’s how you’ll die. That’s how a woman in the village died last month—met hungry wolves.”
        From that day on, they went together if they had business in the forest.
        “The ice has freed the river,” Georg said, gazing at the silver thread sparking through the green shoulders of spruces. “I have an ax.” 
        “And I have some rope,” Udo replied, already guessing Georg’s idea.
        After constructing a raft sturdy enough for the two of them, they let the water carry them downstream of Parbig river, their eyes keenly scanning for any signs of movement. 
         “My three sisters are there,” Udo said, breaking the long silence between them.
        “Where?” Georg asked.
        “Right there.” Udo pointed at the clearing between the dark trees. Rows of fresh mounds of dirt peeked from the yellowed grass. “When the first winter arrived, hunger claimed them one by one. My mother is also there. One night, she sat up, sighed, and that was it. She had been logging trees for a year by then. Why is it that Russian officials appoint women with multiple children to logging positions instead of to positions at kolkhozes?”
        Georg had heard plenty about kolkhozes—collective farms. 
        “Because they wouldn’t starve to death there,” Georg replied. 
        “But why do they hate us so much?”
        “If you’d never seen anything other than this cursed land, wouldn’t you hate every living thing also?”
        “My sisters were two, four, and seven years of age. What did they ever do to deserve this?”
        “They existed,” Georg replied, echoing the grim words he had heard so many men in the Gulag say in response to that same question. “My brother…” Georg slowly began, feeling guilty about his abruptness. “He couldn’t take the hunger anymore. He left to return to Estonia. I don’t know if he made it, if he’s still alive. But I dream of him, that he’s at home, eating steaming rye bread, coated with dripping butter and slices of ham as thick as my thumb.”
        They sailed in silence for the next two hours, their stomach groaning like spring frogs.
        “Do you see what I see?” Udo asked, bolting up from the raft.
        “Sit down,” Georg ordered. “I do. We must be quick. We must be silent.” 
        With his thin limbs spread out, Georg climbed off the raft onto the river bank on all fours. He crept from one shadow of a bush to another. Before the sheep could react, Georg pounced on it. The rest of the herd fled, bleating. His limber arms gripped it and dragged it down to the riverside. 
        The sheep thrashed and bleated wildly.
        “Silence it,” Udo whispered. “Quickly now, or they’ll catch us.”
        Georg seized its neck and twisted, but it kept bleating. He twisted it again and again, the fire burning in his stomach, and wetness pooling in his mouth. Finally, the bleating ceased, and the sheep’s head fell onto the grass, rolling down the slope. He tossed the limp body onto the raft and grabbed the head lying in reeds. After an hour of poling upstream, Udo could no longer wait. They secured the raft to a tree and kindled a small fire. Within minutes, they tore flesh from the carcass, skewered it on a thin branch, and let it sizzle over the flames. 
        “The last time I ate meat was two autumns ago—Ivan’s old workhorse died,” Udo said, drying his mouth with the back of his hand.
        Georg stared at the flames licking the strips of sheep. When was the last time he ate meat? Two years ago? Three? It was always that tasteless bread or plain potatoes—that’s when he got lucky. The usual fill for his hunger was sleep.
        A moment later, they both lunged for their skewers.
        “Slow down, Udo!” Georg warned, “Slow down, or you’ll get sick.” He even tried to take the meat out of his hands.
        Udo snarled and drew away, still gobbling it down like a hungry wolf. 
        Georg, on the other hand, took small bites and stopped while his insides still growled for more. He knew the pain of hunger well; it had been his daily companion for years by that time. Georg awoke the next day to journey back with the carcass, but Udo never did.
        Then, Georg’s waking dreams took on a different hue. He saw things yet to be. A life he would steal by escaping back to Estonia. In his mind’s eye, he saw a woman with rye brown hair, a girl with darkling eyes, and golden fields plowed with horses—not cows or bulls like in Siberia, a practice reserved for the poorest peasants. He saw bustling crowds in clean streets: men in smart suits, women in sunny dresses—things of his youth, not the gaunt, ragged people in black and grey he witnessed from the border of Russia to Leningrad and all the way to Siberia. 
        “I shall not die in Siberia,” Georg mumbled, “Anywhere else but Siberia. I will have a wife, a life, and color.”
        Georg rolled onto his stomach, extended his hands, gripping the soil, and began to crawl. One laborious arm pull at a time, he moved like a snail, with the sun crawling down from its peak alongside him. When her red face sank beneath the horizon, the gray light grew around him, and so did the shadows. He still crawled, no longer feeling his fingers or legs caked in mud. Just before the darkness could cloak the world, he reached the lonely house in the woods. Georg didn’t need to knock or cry for help. An old woman with a headscarf tied under the chin and a ruddy face marked with deep lines appeared at the door. 
        “What do you want?” the witch demanded, her puckered lips moving as though she was chewing on something. 
        “It’s my stomach…” Georg groaned. “Please… I have nowhere else to go…” 
        The witch knew it. The first person with any medical training was days away on foot—assuming the weather and woods wouldn’t play tricks on them. 
        “I cannot help you,” the witch replied and began to close the door.
        “That boy is dying,” a voice coming from the house said. A man’s voice. “Wherever he came from, he won’t make it back there.”
        “Humph,” the witch grunted, “I have a cow to milk, the potatoes to peel, the pork to salt—”
        “Take the boy. I’ll handle the rest.” The door creaked open.
        Georg lifted his heavy lids for a moment and gazed at the old man. 
        He had a long white beard and hollow eyes, misty from age yet glowing with the same flame that lit Georg’s eyes. The thirst for life.
        The witch considered his words for a moment, then grunted at Georg, “Come.” 
Georg braced himself in his arms and pushed forward. A moment later, the witch grabbed him by his armpits and began to drag him. She moved with the eager nimbleness of a girl. Georg’s legs lifted into the air when the old man grabbed him by the ankles. He moaned, unsure what hurt him more—his stomach, his back, or his limbs. 
        The old couple carried him into the small hut, a sauna, next to the main building and laid him on the long wood bench. After they’d undressed him, Georg let his eyes close. 
        Moments later, the bitter scent of smoke and the sweetness of burning wood filled his nose. Then, the heat began to caress his frozen limbs. He shifted in and out of consciousness, hearing the witch bustling around. He woke to something nipping at his stomach. When his lids rolled back, he found a glass cup lying on his stomach, sucking at his belly button. The witch hunched over him and dropped something round and cold, like marbles, in his ears. 
        He lifted his hand to touch it, but the old witch swatted it.
        “Berries,” she mumbled. 
        Hot sparks of pain shot through Georg when the witch began to knead his sunken stomach. He thought his nameless illness was agony, but what that old woman did to him sent him in and out of consciousness purely from pain. He moaned but never begged her to stop. In his mind, the disease was like a leech fighting to keep its teeth in him, and the witch was the instrument loosening it.
        With a great pop, the glass cup jumped into the air and clattered on the floor. Georg felt as though all the burning pain had been sucked out of him. He bolted up, his head suddenly feeling clear and sober. 
        “For three years, you cannot lift heavy weights,” the witch said, “If you do, you’ll undo everything I did.”
        He met her gray, watery eyes. “I’m… I’m healed,” he mumbled in disbelief. “Witch, what sort of craft was this?”
        “Witch?” the old woman asked angrily. “A witch? I did nothing more than follow instructions left by my great-grandmother.” She held aloft a yellowed book with a cracked spine, its early Cyrillic script revealing insights into ancient Chinese medicine. 

Georg was allowed to return to Estonia in January 1958. 
He survived 17 years in Siberia.
He died at age 99 and lies in the embrace of his homeland.
He did get himself a wife and a daughter.
On June 14, 1941, more than 10,000 Estonians, a country with a population at the time of 1.2 million, were violently deported to Siberia by the NKVD, the Soviet secret police. 
Most of them never returned. 
In the March 1949 Deportation, more than 20,000 people were taken from Estonia. 
Ninety-five percent of people who ever entered prison camps were killed within a year.
Over 14 million people passed through Gulags— forced labor camps. 
Officially, 2 million perished there from exhaustion, starvation, disease, or execution.
The real number is suspected to be much higher.

.

This narrative depicts the journey of my grandfather, who was violently deported from his home in Estonia to Siberian Gulag (forced labor camp) in 1941 during the June Deportations as a political prisoner. It is a true story of his grit and determination to survive and see his homeland once more, as well as depiction of the brutal ethnic and political cleansing inflicted upon Estonia and other states by the Russians. All elements of the story are based on his memories. He survived 17 years in Siberia before being allowed to return to Estonia. He lived to age 99, a few months shy of 100.

Anneli Marks was born in Estonia during the turbulent times of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Restoration of the Republic of Estonia. She is a graduate of VIA University College, Denmark, where she earned her BA degree in Marketing and International Sales. She lives now in Denmark with her fiancé.