The Schäfer family from the small town of Skrodeln (Lithuanian Skrodliai) in the Memel region were deported to Siberia in March 1949, when son GerdHelmut was barely a year old. About 90,000 individuals from Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania suffered this fate. They were arrested as ‘enemies of the Soviet Union’ and taken by train to remote regions. Among the deported were Germans like the Schäfers. The family was barely given time to pack a few essentials. After a fortnight-long rail journey, they arrived in Irkutsk oblast and were housed in a so-called Special Settlement. The family was assigned to a kolkhoz (a collective-owned farm) in which the parents had to work in the timber mill. Their banishment was openended, and so for almost a decade they lived in a state of complete uncertainty as to whether they would ever be allowed to leave Siberia. In common with all other deportees, the Schäfers were subject to the orders of the garrison headquarters, had a prescribed abode, and had to report to the police at regular intervals. Life in Siberia was full of hardship and privations. Nevertheless, GerdHelmut Schäfer later remembered that his parents managed to give him a relatively carefree childhood. Starting school at the age of six, he soon had better Russian than his parents and could assist them with writing VERNERS STARASTS AND HIS DOG TOBI Medze, Lithuanian SSR (Soviet Union), 1949 In 1948, Werner and other boys were rounded up in Chernyakhovsk/Insterburg and put on a freight train headed for Latvia, presumably just to be rid of these orphans. Werner found shelter with a farmwoman and helped her on the farm. As it was illegal in Latvia to shelter Germans, she saw to it that the boy got a new, Latvian identity, and so Werner Kascherus became Verners Starasts. In the 1970s, the Red Cross helped Verners Starasts trace his mother, who was living in West Germany. They met in Moscow in 1974, thirty years after they had been separated. He made several attempts to emigrate and join his family in West Germany but found it hard to prove his German descent to the German authorities. Therefore he remained in Liepāja/Libau in Latvia.
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