Surviving the Storms: Memory of Stalins Tyranny
by Helen Dmitriew
Category: History

Surviving the Storms: Memory of Stalin's Tyranny is the story of courage and tenacity. Certainly, it is an account of punishment without crime - the first-person chronicle of life under Stalin in the 1930s and the Nazi invading army in the 1940s. Declared "enemies of the people" during the Stalinist purges, the eleven-year-old Helen Dmitriew and her family were forced from their home in the Smolensk district, stripped of their belongings, and transported in closed railroad cars to Siberia, where the family was separated. Dmitriew and her sick mother eventually found their way back from the Siberian wilderness, hiding in friendly homes or railroad cars, sleeping in dangerous forests, and concealing their "social origins" when interrogated by Soviet authorities. Although life in the general vicinity of Minsk returned to "normal" and Dmitriew earned her teacher's credentials and married, it was still characterized by deprivation, malnutrition, and sickness. She was reunited with her father in Leningrad only briefly, then never to see him (or ultimately any of her family members) again. During the Nazi invasion, when the Soviet armies fled in its path, her first husband was fatally shot by drunken German soldiers during "target practice". The next month she gave birth to her only daughter, whose survival today is hardly short of a miracle. Yet Dmitriew never gave up, never stopped helping other innocent victims of Soviet barbarity and Nazi cruelty, and eventually found herself assigned to a labor farm in Bavaria, which was eventually liberated by the American army. Here she also met her second husband, the survivor of two death sentences at the hands of the Soviet government. Together thisfugitive family successfully escaped the certain death of Soviet "repatriation", a program initially supported by the western allies, and managed to immigrate to Canada, where they began life again. Today Helen Dmitriew is a professor of Russian in Fresno, California, and her daughter is an insurance agent in Los Angeles. At a time when the former Soviet Union faces economic and social uncertainty, Dmitriew's life story of nerve, compassion, and survival is a living testament to Russian character and endurance.