Dalia Grinkevičiūtė

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Dalia Grinkevičiūtė (born May 28, 1927 in Kaunas , Lithuania ; † December 25, 1987 , Kaunas, Soviet Union ) was a Lithuanian doctor and writer whose memories of the Gulag are now considered part of Lithuanian national literature .

Life

Grinkevičiūtė was born on May 28, 1927 in the then Lithuanian capital Kaunas.

As a result of the Hitler-Stalin Pact of August 1939, the Soviet Union occupied Lithuania in the summer of 1940. On June 14, 1941 a few days before the attack of the Wehrmacht on the Soviet Union , Grinkevičiūtė was with her mother and brother in a camp of the Gulag in the Altai region deported . The father, considered by the Soviet authorities to be part of the Lithuanian intelligentsia , was abducted separately; he died in a Soviet labor camp in 1943. In 1942, Dalia Grinkevičiūtė, her brother and mother were “transported” - as the NKVD used to express it - in the far north of Yakutia to Trofimovsk , an inhospitable region in the estuary of the Lena . In 1949 she and her mother fled back to Lithuania, where both were staying illegally. The mother died and Grinkevičiūtė had to secretly bury her in order not to be discovered. She was arrested in May 1950 and imprisoned in Sukhobesvodnoye prison (near Nizhny Novgorod ). In 1953 Grinkevičiūtė was deported to Jakutsk .

In 1954 she was released from Gulag detention and began studying at the Omsk Medical Institute . In 1957 she returned to Lithuania , where she continued her medical studies at Kaunas University from 1960 . From 1960 to 1974 she worked at Laukuva Hospital , where she mainly looked after former deportees and their property and memories. As a result, she was persecuted by the KGB , released in 1974, and her apartment denied. In 1977 the Soviet authorities rejected her application to emigrate to France .

She died in 1987 in Kaunas at a cancer and was buried in the cemetery of Eiguliai.

Writing

Shortly after her escape, as a 22-year-old, she made notes of her experiences in the Gulag. She then hid the notes in the garden of her parents' house, where they were only found after her death. Around 1974 she reconstructed her lost memories and noted them down in abbreviated form; they then circulated in samizdat .

In 1979 her reconstructed Gulag memories with the title "Lietuviai tremtiniai Jakutijoje" (Lithuanian expellees in Yakutia) were published in Russian by a Moscow publishing house . In 1988 a translation into Lithuanian followed, it was published under the title "Lietuviai prie Laptevų jūros" (The Lithuanians on the Laptev Sea). In 2002 an English and a German translation followed.

In 1991, after Lithuania gained independence, the first version of her Gulag records was found by chance, and in 1997 both versions were published under the title “Lithuanians on the Laptev Sea”.

In 1996/97 her memoirs about the time of Soviet-occupied Lithuania with the title "Gimtojoj žemėj" (In Homeland), which she had also written in 1979, appeared. Her works combine documentary and fictional elements.

Grinkevičiūtė's memories of the Gulag are considered part of the canon of national literature in her home country .

Works

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  • Lietuvos gyventojų genocido ir rezistencijos tyrimo centras (Lithuanian Genocide and Resistance Center): Dalia Grinkevičiūtė , PDF file

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Lietuvės istorija iš Sibiro šiurpina vakariečių odą (interview with Vytenė Muschick, who did the German translation). Delfi , May 20, 2014.
  2. ↑ Regina Mönch : I live with beings that used to be people. Report from a death factory according to a Soviet plan: The Lithuanian doctor Dalia Grinkevičiute documents how she survived a prison camp in the polar winter . In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung of February 18, 2015, p. 10.
personal data
SURNAME Grinkevičiūtė, Dalia
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lithuanian doctor and writer
DATE OF BIRTH May 28, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Kaunas , Lithuania
DATE OF DEATH December 25, 1987
Place of death Kaunas , Soviet Union