About this item

When Julija ukys was a child, her paternal grandfather, Anthony, rarely smiled, and her grandmother, Ona, spoke only in her native Lithuanian. But they still taught ukys her family's story: that of a proud people forced from their homeland when the soldiers came. In mid-June 1941, three Red Army soldiers arrested Ona, forced her onto a cattle car, and sent her east to Siberia, where she spent seventeen years separated from her children and husband, working on a collective farm. The family story maintained that it was all a mistake. Anthony, whose name was on Stalin's list of enemies of the people, was accused of being a known and decorated anti-Bolshevik and Lithuanian nationalist. Some seventy years after these events, ukys sat down to write about her grandparents and their survival of a twenty-five-year forced separation and subsequent reunion.



About the Author

Julija Sukys

Julija Šukys is a Canadian author of creative nonfiction. Her works include Epistolophilia: Writing the Life of Ona Šimait? and Silence is Death: The Life and Work of Tahar Djaout. She teaches creative writing at the University of Missouri.

To learn more about her, please visit http://julijasukys.com.



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