Book & Author
Vilnis Bankovičs & Maris Roze: Driven West, Taken East — A WW II Memoir of the Eastern Front
By Dr Ahmed S. Khan
Chicago, IL
And what is war?... The object of warfare is murder; the means employed in warfare —spying, treachery, and the encouragement of it, the ruin of a country, the plundering of its inhabitants and robbery for the maintenance of the army, trickery and lying, which are called military strategy…absence of all independence, that is, discipline, idleness, ignorance, cruelty, debauchery, and drunkenness.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace (1865-69)
In his focus on Napoleon’s 1812 invasion of Russia, Tolstoy is foreshadowing and at the same time greatly understating the horrors of the 1941 invasion of Russia by Hitler’s armies. His observation does capture at least some of the elements of the later conflict, however, in a time when the consequences of war had become vastly magnified. World War II (1939-45) was the biggest and deadliest war in human history, involving 100 million people from 30 countries, and resulting in 70 to 85 million fatalities.
Driven West, Taken East is the English translation of a WWII memoir of events on the Eastern Front by Vilnis Bankovičs, a Latvian called into the conflict in 1943 at age 19. The memoir focuses on the human suffering of the war: how ordinary people and families were swept into the war’s devastations without their approval. As an African proverb indicates in “When elephants fight, the grass dies,” so in a global war the people of smaller countries suffer the most. Indeed, the book is a powerful testimonial to both human cruelty and human endurance and the instinct for survival.
The author has eloquently juxtaposed historical events with personal details. The language is infused with a controlled passion and a moral clarity. In a translator’s note, Maris Roze observes that Bankovičs’s memoir “provides an eyewitness-participant account of the war in Russia and Eastern Europe that has remained unreported in English and American histories focused on Western Europe and the Pacific. As such, Bankovičs’s account is authentic history, told in spare, straightforward prose, detailing the rush of events in the war’s latter half and several varieties of captivity in the years afterwards.”
To understand the suffering of the author, his family, and his nation, one has to recall the history of that era. In August 1939, the Hitler-Stalin Pact’s secret provisions agreed on the invasion of Poland and consignment of the Baltic states and Finland to Soviet control. In September 1939, the Germans invaded Poland from the west, and the Soviets from the east. England and France declared war on Germany, but not on the Soviet Union. In November 1939, the Soviet Union invaded Finland and forced a peace whose price included part of Finland’s Karelia peninsula. In June 1940, the German blitzkrieg achieved the capitulation of France. At the same time, the Soviet Union occupied and incorporated the Baltic states into the USSR. In June 1941, tens of thousands of people were forcefully deported from the Baltics to the USSR. Only a week later, in July 1941, Germany invaded the Soviet Union, abrogating the two-year partnership of Hitler and Stalin.
After the initial success of the German invasion, the drive stalled in the winter of 1942, most starkly in the ruins of Stalingrad. In response, Hitler ordered formation of Legions in the occupied Baltic states. All young men, aged 18-20, were called into the Latvian Legion, which was deployed against the Russians only. The Soviets, for their part, drafted Latvian youth into their army from among those who had retreated from the Germans in 1941 and from retaken Latvian territory in 1944-45. Latvian boys were forced to fight against each other as a result, notably in 1945 in the Kurzeme pocket that held out to war’s end.
Thus, the author was drafted into the German army at age 19. He trained with other Latvian units, was deployed to the front in western Russia, and in 1944 was sent to East Prussia (now Poland) to an anti-tank school. When the German army retreated in 1944-45, they used Latvian units to cover their withdrawal. The author’s unit was surrounded and captured by advancing Soviet forces. The reversal is described in dramatic terms:
I listen to a silence filled only with birdsongs. To the east, I note moving shadows as the sun rises. So the Fritzes have come to spell us after all…. I crawl back into the bunker to wake my sleeping comrades…. The Germans seem to have come closer, though they’re difficult to see against the rising sun. We call for the password but get no reply. Instead, bullets whistle overhead, and we hit the ground…. We hear indecipherable calls and more shots. They shoot and yell out but not in German! They’re Russians! The Germans have betrayed us. They have withdrawn toward Danzig during the night, leaving us to cover their retreat. The Russians have quietly circled our positions and scoured the forest behind us, while the front has shifted somewhere to the north.
The author was sent to a prison in East Prussia in conditions more dangerous than the front lines he had left:
The overpopulation in the cells could not be sustained. Indeed, a solution to the problem arrived, though not the kind we had been waiting for. In the second half of May the lice attacked, then typhus, and then death…. The lice carried the infection throughout the prison…. The epidemic spread so fast that the orderlies could only manage to deal with the needs of the prison staff. No one gave a thought to the prisoners…. A deadly harvest began.
The epidemic is finally arrested when “death began to visit the administrative corps and the guards.”
At the end of his prison stay and after a series of nighttime interrogations, the author is loaded into a cattle car with other prisoners and endures an 80-day journey that takes him north in Russia to a point above the Arctic Circle. He and other prisoners build their own Gulag encampment in the middle of the Arctic forest. Here is his description of their arrival:
Climbing down or, more precisely, falling out from the wagon, we found ourselves in meter-high snow. The sky was clear and cold and filled with stars. The prisoners from all five wagons were herded together into one spot so a guard perimeter could be set up…. We were to spend the night in place right here. The Russian prisoners taught the rest of us to dig down into the dry, powdery snow, or we would freeze like cockroaches by morning. We paired up, scooped out holes in the snow, and crawled inside, squatting back to back and pulling as much snow as possible over our heads. So we spent the first night drifting in and out of sleep…. The silence of the Arctic night was broken only by the guards calling to each other from their campfires. The prisoners were silent as though having lost the power of speech. It was New Year’s Eve.
Next morning the guard commander leads the prisoners deeper into the forest and points to a clearing: “Here we will build our camp.” And so the prisoners build their own Gulag encampment, surrounding it with barbed wire. The author worked in a logging gang in the surrounding forest, suffering cold, starvation, and physical injury. He was inducted into a Soviet construction battalion in 1947 in Narva, Estonia, and demobilized to Latvia in 1950.
Vilnis also narrates the story of his first love Velta, his high school sweetheart. Velta’s family was caught up in the mass deportations of June 14, 1941— all except her mother died in the Gulag. In the chaos of occupation and the uncertainty of the war, Velta urged the author to evade the Legion callup and stay with her, but Vilnis felt that his duty was to stay loyal to his country and to friends and classmates who had also been called up. As the tide turned against the Germans, Velta managed to escape to Sweden in a boat. In a Swedish refugee camp, Velta met and married a Latvian man, one who had evaded the Legion callup and escaped to Sweden in 1944. The news reached Vilnis during his confinement in the construction battalion in Estonia.
Vilnis and Velta met 60 years later in Riga, and Vilnis published “Velta’s Story” in 2016 in a Latvian literary journal. Reflecting on the sweeping events of the war, the author observes:
If the war had not separated us…who knows how fate would have guided our paths. I thought about those decisive times during the war, when Juris [Velta’s husband] and I each chose our course of action, if not quite our fate—how this choice brought us both losses and gains. Against my losses I could set the eventual regaining of my homeland, even living to see its own regained independence. My biggest gain after the war was a harmonious family life with my wife, my children, and now even my grandchildren. In my twilight years I also met Velta again and experienced a bright reflection of our youth’s first love.
Taken West, Driven East is an absorbing narrative of the triumph of the human spirit in the face of crushing circumstances. In an ending note, the translator observes: “The book draws its power from [the survival story] and the gradual revelation of an even more significant kind of survival—preservation of the author’s own integrity and humanity despite the trials he undergoes. As the book shows, Vilnis Bankovičs remains the thoughtful, generous, sociable person he was before his ordeal began.”
Translator’s Interview:
Q. When and where did you first meet Vilnis? And how did you discover his story and decided to translate it into English?
A. I met him in 1991, the year I first went back to Latvia (after an absence of 47 years). I read his book after its initial publication a few years later, was strongly affected by the story, and when I heard that his siter was looking for someone to translate it into English, I volunteered.
Q. What were the challenges in translating the story from Latvian into English?
A. The two languages are fairly similar in syntax and other grammatical aspects. For me, the challenge was in rendering Vilnis’s prose into current, idiomatic English while remaining true to his 1940s outlook and to the core of his Latvian identity. In the process, I also had to absorb the Latvian idioms of the time.
Q. What part of Vilnis’s story touched you the most?
A. I was touched by the story of his captivity at the end of the war and afterward. He was (and is today) a good-hearted person who was swept into a conflict he never sought, but which he refused to evade, feeling an obligation to his peers and to his country. His suffering did not make him bitter, as he found consolation in his post-war experience, which included marriage, family, and even the liberation of his country a half-century later.
Q. Which part of Latvia did you grow up in?
A. I didn’t really grow up there. We fled the country in 1944, when I was 5 years old. I was born in a medium-sized town in southern Latvia, where my father was Chair of the Forestry Department at the University of Latvia.
Q. How were you affected by WWII? Were you forced to migrate to other countries? How were families affected by WWII?
A. We fled Latvia in 1944, along with some 100,000 other Latvians, and lived for 6 years in Displaced Persons’ camps in Germany, before emigrating to the US. My family, like many others, fled because of the threat of repression and deportation, which thousands of Latvians had experienced in 1941, prior to the German invasion.
Q. How was life in the Displaced Person’s camps? How did adults and children spend their time in the camps? Would you like to share any special memories of living in the camps? How did the Germans treat people in the camps?
A. Life for kids and for adults differed markedly. Kids in my age group (ages 5 to 10) accepted the camp experience as “normal” and adapted quickly to the conditions. We also benefited from activities organized for us – school, scouts, sports. Adults felt much more strongly the loss of their native land, their careers and positions in that society, the lack of jobs in the post-war environment, uncertainty about the future. My father did some work in the camp administration but found nothing commensurate with his previous academic career.
One of my memories, soon after our arrival, was of a rock-throwing engagement with German boys on the other side of the railroad tracks demarking our camp boundary. It was a relatively harmless action, but indicative of the tensions between the two sides. I was struck on the chest by a German rock, but felt no pain thanks to the thick padding of my coat, and heaved the rock cheerfully back to the other side.
Q. How did you come to the United States? How did you start your life in the States? What were the challenges and how did you manage them? What cultural differences and similarities did you observe between Latvia and the US?
A. We were able to emigrate to the US because of sponsorship by a Latvian colleague of my father’s at the University of Latvia who had emigrated a year before us. We came to the Chicago area for job reasons, and initially my parents went to work on factory assembly lines. They took night courses and improved their job situations a few years later. My brother and I supplemented our income through part-time jobs. Learning English remained a challenge for my parents, but came quickly and naturally to us children.
Language remained the lingering challenge for both my parents, who also found 1950s America somewhat alien, because of its noisy, direct, and “uncultured” ways, which were also a product of our landing in a blue-collar town, in contrast to the upper middle class social circles of their experience in Latvia. Our family was also welcomed and helped by generous people during our transition into American life, but my parents never developed close friendships with such people and quickly gravitated to the local Latvian community. As kids (now 10+ in age), we quickly formed friendships with our American peers and picked up the language quickly.
Q. Who are your favorite poets and writers? Would you like to share some titles of their works?
A. This is too broad a question to answer in a focused way, so I will just mention some of the writers’ names: Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Jonathan Swift, John Donne, Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Wordsworth, W.H. Auden, T.S. Eliot, James Joyce, Faulkner, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Hemingway, John Updike; in translation, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Montaigne, Goethe, Schiller, Thomas Mann, Ibsen, Kafka; in Latvian, Rainis (a poet), Māra Zālīte, Inga Gaile, Jānis Jaunsudrabiņš, Leons Briedis, and many others.
Q. What kind of intellectual activities did you pursue in the US?
A. I read widely, followed art and music, dabbled in politics (largely as an observer), completed my education to the doctorate.
Q. What projects are you working on currently?
A. I am now the editor of a Latvian monthly journal (Chicago News, in translation), which absorbs a lot of my time, am in several book clubs, and plan to get more actively involved in the fall election campaign.
Q. Would you like to share any observations/comments for South Asian readers?
A. Just that I hope one day the subcontinent of India-Pakistan will be inhabited by populations that are governed democratically, respect religious differences, and focus its priorities on education, economic development, and environmental sustainability.
(Dr Ahmed S. Khan - dr.a.s.khan@ieee.org - is a Fulbright Specialist Scholar - 2017-2022).
