CHAPTER 19

At the end of January 1941 the Pioneer organizations in Riga were preparing for an amateur drama, music and dance groups' contest. The auditions took place at the city party committee offices and I, as a non-tenured instructor of the schools' section, was a member of the selection committee. A few days later I was called to come to the committee office and was informed that I have been placed in charge of the Pioneer activities at the Riga Pioneers' Palace. The news came as a complete surprise and I felt so reluctant to leave my school that I really felt like crying. I also found it hard to understand how it all happen. It transpired that A.Petrova, Head of the Activities' Section at the Pioneers' Palace, who attended the amateur contest auditions, had "taken note" of me there. She was the one who insisted on my appointment. I requested very persistently to be allowed to finish my Pioneer instruction work and my teaching at school by the end of the school year, but was told that if in my present job I have been working in one school only, in my new one I shall be able to help many schools in their work. I was very sorry to leave my Pioneers. I have been preparing the older ones for their Komsomol membership and there were many things I still wanted to do before the spring came, but nothing helped: I had to follow the orders and "start a new life…"

I tried to visit as many schools as possible, conducted seminars for Pioneer leaders and, in addition, took part in the preparations for the festive opening of the Pioneers' Palace that was due to take place on the 23rd of February 1941. Suddenly one day, just before the opening was due, I fell ill. I remember very well how it happened. I had worked in a room that was a through-pass. The heating was too high and the drafts never stopped. A day or two before the opening I had very high temperature and had to stay home. Of course, I was very disappointed: the festivities went on without me. I came back to work only some three weeks later.

The amount of work that had to be done was increasing all the time. Soon they organized the first courses for Pioneer leaders and I was asked to present a series of lectures on Pioneer activities. I worked hard to prepare my lectures, writing them all carefully down. It was the first time that I was to lecture in Latvian. It was something new for me, but I managed well enough.

Iren was taken daily to Bertochka Gollender, who was also taking care of her nephew Yasha. I worked on Sundays and Bertochka wanted to her Sundays off, so I had to take Iren with me to the Pioneers' Palace on Sundays. There we made our acquaintance with the little Regina Klempner, the daughter of one of the members of the Palace staff. Now Regina Shabashov (her name after marriage) is our doctor; she is an ear,throat and nose specialist.

I have quite a few friends whom I had met during my work at the Palace. Zigi Skuinsh, who was a 13 years' old Pioneer then, worked with me after the war in "Padomju Jaunatne", one of Riga's newspapers. After he turned into a real writer he used to send me copies of all his new books. Another boy I met there was Ottomar Rikman. He is now a poet. He still calls me his Pioneer leader although I had never been one in his Pioneer group. My former Pioneers from School No. 72 used to come and visit me at the Palace office and tell me their woes, it seemed that nothing was as before at their school anymore.

In the meantime my little girl was growing up and developing nicely. These are pictures of Iren in the spring of 1941. There pictures were in my handbag by chance and they remained there when I left Riga. This is how they survived. Iren was three years and eight months' old when they had been taken.

Then we got busy with the preparations for May Day. The well-known Soviet children poetess Agnya Barto came to Riga to take part in a special radio program for the All-Union Radio. It was to be broadcasted from our Pioneers' Palace. I was "attached" to her to assist her. One day I accompanied her somewhere and she invited me to her hotel room. We started talking and I told her that I have a little girl. She gave me a little book by her as a present for Iren. It so happened that this little book was also left in my handbag and therefore it had survived the war too. Many years later I gave it to Iren. The book of verses called "The Little Skipping Rope" has an inscription "To little Iren from A. Barto" on its back cover.

I have a few other memories from my work at the Pioneers' Palace. When many years later they marked the 50th anniversary of the Young Pioneers' Organization I told a correspondent of the newspaper "Rigas Balls" ("Riga's Voice") that the actress in charge of the Drama Studio at the Pioneers' Palace in 1941 was Felicia Ertner, the People's Artist of the Latvian SSR, who is now in her 80's, and that the well-known Latvian opera singer Elfrida Pakul, who was later called "the Latvian nightingale", used to appear at concerts at the Palace. So, "Rigas Balls" duly interviewed them both in connection with the 50th anniversary celebrations. The late theatre director Eduard Smilgis, after whom a street was later named in Riga, was also one of the directors of the Drama Studio there.

Later on the Pioneers' Palace started to prepare for the "decade of Latvian art". A special Pioneers' summer camp was organized by the Palace and I served there as a sort of a "Pioneer chief". Dida, my cousin, Sashen'ka and Dida's friend Eva Vater joined the staff of this summer camp as Pioneer leaders and little Iren was "added" to the smaller children, the children of the Palace staff, who also went there. Since Sashen'ka and Dida were working in the camp I was completely confident that Iren will be safe there when I had to leave the camp to go to Riga. Iren hardly remembered anything about the camp, she was only about four years' old. By the time she was four she had already left Latvia. Soon the war turned everything upside down…

I left Riga for Moscow four days before the war started. I was to accompany a group of Pioneers who were travelling to the summer camp of Artek in the south of Russia. I could not come back to Riga because the war broke out. This is how my life as an evacuee had started. I thought I was alone in the whole world, not an easy feeling at all. Later I learned that my husband Misha Turgel fell in battle. I kept hoping to be able to meet Father and Tusya, but I had no news about them. I had one letter from Sashen'ka after the single meeting we had in the beginning of the war. I was so happy when Zyama had found my address and kept writing to me regularly. I travelled a long road, together with Iren, until we were able to come back to Riga. More about that later…

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