Baltic Countdown: A Nation Vanishes

by Peggie Benton

  By now, the Finns had withdrawn from Petsamo on the Arctic Circle and settled into defensive positions on the Mannerheim Line. North of Lake Ladoga, the Red Army was said to be experimenting with ‘asphyxiating gases’. The Russian Air Force was engaged in intensive, but not very accurate, bombing of Hanko, while the navy was blockading the Gulf of Bothnia which separated the southern part of Finland from Sweden. Our efforts to clothe the Polish refugees not having been successful, it was now decided that the ladies of the Legations should sew for the Finns.

  News sometimes trickled through from the Balts evacuated to German Poland, though to our distress there was no word from Tante Hella. ‘It was wonderful,’ wrote one particularly insensitive Baltic Hausfrau to a former neighbour in Riga. ‘When we arrived everything was ready in the house, beds made and food in the cupboard and even a kettle boiling on the stove.’ The former owners, evicted at a moment’s notice from their home, had presumably trudged away, empty-handed, through the snow.

  But all letters were not so ecstatic, and as the German censorship tightened up, messages became cautious and cryptic. One drab little postcard was signed in Russian, ‘Zhivoi Trup’, or living corpse. Another said, ‘I wish I could be with Cousin Ernest now.’ Cousin Ernest had died a few weeks before. The British Club in Riga was old-established and very popular with the British residents, though not with their wives.

  On the first Thursday of every month the members met for dinner, which was rich and excellent. Behind each chair stood a waiter ready to replenish the Kurländer, or king-size vodka glass, set before each member. Once a year the wives were invited to a dinner consisting of hash and a rather negative pudding. Whether the motive for this was economy of club funds, or an ostrich-like belief that the wives would think they were missing nothing at the other meetings, was never clear. Since the supply of vodka on ladies’ nights was strictly limited, the whole festivity was in a low key and the men went away relieved that it was over for another year, while the wives resented even more the makeshift meals most of them ate on the other eleven occasions.

  On the outskirts of Riga there was a small zoo where two of the more popular exhibits were an English fox terrier and a Hereford bull. One lunchtime, on the way there, we saw approaching us through the trees, a strange beast drawing a snow plough.

  ‘Is it? It can’t be ...’ I said to Kenneth. But it was. A camel, which the thrifty Latvians could not bear to see idle, was swaying towards us, planting its great splayed feet with an air of extreme distaste on the newly fallen snow. Apart from the risk of frostbite and the camel’s reluctance to use them, his feet were as well adapted to soft snow as to the sand for which they were designed.

  Christmas was approaching, and for a time our anxieties were dissipated. The sleigh horses, their blue blankets flying and the strings of bells on their harness jingling wildly, raced one another spontaneously, regardless of what deal the passenger might have made with the izvozchik. The women who swept the lawns in summer now used huge wooden scrapers to push and pile the snow. The policeman opposite Schwarz’s stood on duty between two tall Christmas trees, while someone had put a stuffed reindeer in the police box at the interception of the Aspasia Boulevard and the Kalku iela, the main shopping street. The sentries outside the old Russian barracks were now dressed in bearskins right down to the toes of their valenki, the felt boots which peasants pull over the rags used to bind up their feet in winter—and which other people wear over their shoes in very cold weather.

  In the square by the Russian church a Christmas Fair was in full swing. The pale blue booths were bright with painted toys and spicy cakes and twinkling lights. Opposite them, a forest of Christmas trees glistened under a light powdering of snow. We bought a little one and took it home.

  None of our Christmas mail had arrived, since the Bag bringing letters from home was lost. As the prospect of returning to England dwindled and communications became worse, letters from home were even more precious.

  On Christmas Eve we made a detour past the Castle and walked along the bank of the Daugava to the office. The sun was just rising, filling the air with soft pink light and all the spires of Riga glistened green and bronze like the necks of a flock of doves.

  At lunchtime we closed the office and hurried off to finish our Christmas shopping. By three o’clock it was dark, but the lights caught the frost spangling the trees of the boulevards and the icicles fringing the eaves to provide Christmas decorations much more brilliant and appealing than the cardboard stereotypes used in our cities today.

  In the evening we put the boys’ photographs beside the tree, lit the candles and exchanged presents—this to please Lotte, who was accustomed to the Continental timing of the Christmas ritual.

  Lotte had remembered my mother’s lesson in making bread sauce for the turkey, but she couldn’t resist enlivening it with pickled cabbage and gherkins in sour cream. To cheer our grass-widower guests we opened the last two bottles of champagne, which sparkled against the small scarlet tulips, lilies of the valley and golden stars on the table.

  In the evening there was a party at the American Legation where some of the guests attempted a Cossack dance, while the Japanese sat and played mahjong with hushed concentration. By the end of December the Finns were holding the Russians on the Mannerheim Line. Finnish HQ at Rovaniemi reported that they had destroyed two Russian divisions, but Finnish towns were suffering heavy bombardment from the air. The indomitable Finnish women were joining the Lotte Svard Brigade, which took on all sorts of auxiliary duties and even fought alongside the men. Volunteers from all over the world were going to the help of the Finns.

  As a small token of solidarity from the British in Latvia, the car which had brought the staff of the Danzig Consulte-General to Riga was sent off to Finland to help with the war effort. The Baltic States, still eerily inviolate, declared once more their neutrality. With so much suffering all around us, a sense of unreality tinged our feelings of guilt. It was like looking through a sheet of glass at people struggling desperately against a high wind, the effects of which one could see but not feel.

  My sister had sent us from Stockholm a Julbock, the Christmas goat of pagan origins, twisted from a handful of straw and equipped with horns, a beard and a tail. He was quickly involved in a dark complicity with Lotte, who retired on New Year’s Eve to make her usual magic. The Julbock’s influence was benign, however, as instead of piles of skulls, corpses and effigies of death which she generally saw on these occasions, Lotte announced that in a dream Sam and Mark had come to wake her, dragging an enormous castor oil tree whose branches were sprouting with a wealth of three leaves. Next day the lost Bag arrived with all our Christmas mail. It had been in Berlin. We decided not to eat the box of chocolates it contained.

  Chapter 13

  In the first weeks of January 1940 the thermometer dropped to –30°C (fifty-four degrees of frost by English reckoning) and the streets were empty of children. On Saturday afternoon we took a bus to Milgravis. It was so cold that although there was a full load of heavy-breathing passengers, ice was standing a quarter of an inch thick on the inside of the windows. We turned back and made for home, but within twenty-four hours, following a warm wind from the south, the temperature had risen above zero Centigrade. Water ran in the gutters and as the milder air hit the chilled masonry of the buildings they became coated with a thick jacket of frost so that the whole of Riga looked like a prize exhibit in a confectioners’ competition.

  After the cold of the preceding days it felt positively balmy and people relaxed and walked briskly, sniffing the milder air, but by evening the roads were smoothly glazed with ice, so that little boys got out their skates and darted about, adding to the hazards of the slippery surface.

  The new year started in confusion. The Germans had told the Swedes that they would shoot down any plane carrying Polish passengers, but Russian planes would accept Poles provided they had obtained permission to travel from the German Legation. Internat
ional relationships were becoming incalculable. The Russian troops continued to be confined within the base at Liepaja, not out of consideration for Latvian feelings but in order that they should remain unaware that the local standard of living was so much higher than their own. Penalties for a service man seen talking to a Latvian were severe, nevertheless a story was going round that a Russian soldier had asked a Latvian worker whether he was able to buy as much food and clothing as he wished. When the man declared that he could, the Russian replied, ‘Oh, I see that you have to put up with the same beastly propaganda as we do.’

  By the beginning of February the cold, the most severe within living memory, was so intense that the Baltic froze over and it would have been possible to walk across the sea to Stockholm—a distance of three hundred miles. Refugees fleeing over the ice from Finland to Estonia were hunted down by Russian planes and machine-gunned, or bombed and drowned as the ice broke beneath them.

  At these low temperatures one is conscious of the fragility of human life. The cold induces drowsiness and it is tempting to fall asleep and never wake up. Either one must be cocooned in wraps or keep constantly on the move. Out of doors, energies are concentrated in an effort to get from A to B. People walk hunched up and drawn into themselves and the world seems to narrow down to the tiny will to live in each individual.

  Canadian visas for the de Roemer family had been granted and the Countess set out with the three younger children, telling her husband that by the time he reached Quebec she would have found sitters for her portraits and there would be money waiting.

  We met the Count one day as he was leaving the Legation. ‘Come down to Rezekne next Saturday and spend the night,’ he called. ‘It is five hours by train and we will meet you at the station. Put on your warmest clothes. You won’t need to undress. I shall expect you on the Pskov express.’

  As we reached the Moscow Station the train bell was already clanging and the engine muffled in a cloud of steam. Peasants were shouldering their way on to the train, which smelt stiflingly of badly-cured sheepskin, home-made sausage and stale clothing. Rezekne was situated near the Russian frontier with Latgale, the most primitive of the Latvian provinces.

  We settled with our books and sandwiches on the hard third-class seat. The railway lines connecting Riga with the west were of European gauge. Those running eastward conformed with the broader Russian gauge. The few extra inches gave the rolling-stock a pleasant roominess, but in the case of the slow trains, little extra comfort, since the plywood seats lifted up to allow bundles to be stowed in the enclosed space underneath. Each time a passenger entered or left the usually congested carriages everyone had to stand up while the seat was lifted. Fortunately, our train was an express and only stopped between stations.

  Owing to the bitter cold, fuel consumption had risen alarmingly, and as coal could no longer be imported, the trains were running on peat. So, every few hours they had to stop and fill the tender and then get up steam once more. Even the small compartment at the end of each carriage which used to hold a supply of coke for the stove, was now stacked with peat.

  The lower part of the windows soon frosted over with fantastic patterns which sparkled in the sun and gradually turned dim and blue as darkness drew down.

  As we climbed out of the train at Rezekne the thermometer on the platform showed –41°. Curiously enough, Fahrenheit and Centigrade meet at this point and the readings are identical. Inside the crowded waiting room we found de Roemer, bizarre amongst the bearded peasants, with his lean and mournful crusader’s face and drooping moustache, his long sheepskin coat like some heraldic garment.

  ‘I have brought you two bearskins. You will need them, and a piece of rope to tie round your waist.’

  We were already wearing many layers of clothing, topped by my smart sheepskin and Kenneth’s fur-lined overcoat, a papacha for him and in my case, a fur-edged hood. Out in the yard Christophe, the elder boy, was holding the horse which was to draw our sleigh, a sort of rough-hewn double bed on runners, filled with straw on which one lay covered with what looked like a pile of slaughtered sheep.

  De Roemer pushed the rucksacks under the driving seat.

  ‘Pas assez de place? Mais c’est pour toute une famille.’ Like the cosmopolitan aristocracy of Tsarist days the de Roemer family talked French amongst themselves. What had been an affectation was to prove an invaluable aid to refugees on their way to French Canada.

  A room had been booked for us at the hotel, but de Roemer suggested that it would be more amusing to go out to the estate, if we were not afraid of a little discomfort.

  ‘It’s primitive, even dirty, at Janopol and we have made no preparations, but that doesn’t matter. You can return to Rezekne to sleep if you wish.’

  The horse moved quickly, shaking off the deadly cold. As we drove down the main street I searched for any trace of beauty. They have nothing to fear in Canada, I thought. No prairie town could be uglier than this.

  Soon we were out in the country, silent and featureless in a pervading frozen mist. One big star hung overhead where the sky was clear. From time to time the sledge gave a leap forward then pulled up abruptly. One’s head jerked forward, the horse’s haunches strained agonisingly to get the heavy vehicle moving again, and then it toiled on.

  ‘Only a depression in the snow,’ explained de Roemer. ‘At the beginning of winter they are just small hollows, but each sledge scoops out a little more snow and by the spring they may be several feet deep.’

  The journey seemed to stretch into a numb eternity. When de Roemer pointed to a darker streak in the mist and said, ‘La forêt,’ it required an effort of will to seem interested.

  And then the track forked off into an avenue of ghostly trees, skirted a barn with a fallen roof, and passed a huge pile of stones. De Roemer waved his whip. ‘That was once the mill.’ All the buildings which, with their many functions, had made the great estate as self-sufficient as a village were now neglected or ruined.

  ‘Voilà Janopol.’

  A great house, built of wood in the Palladian style, stood pale and silent in the faint light of the rising moon. All over the Baltic States one came upon the classical beauty of such houses, variations in miniature of Tsarskoe Selo. Some had been turned into schools or sanatoria. Others still sheltered the owners who struggled to maintain a few rooms inside the main fabric. Empty ballrooms served to replace lost store houses, or even to shelter the hens in winter.

  ‘During the cold months we live in one room and use the old servants’ entrance,’ explained de Roemer. The door opened and a girl of about sixteen appeared, her face lit by a small oil lamp. Long fair plaits hung down over her sheepskin waistcoat and her leather belt was studded with brass nails.

  ‘My daughter Jola,’ said the Count. ‘Is there anything to eat?’

  ‘Mais oui, Papa.’

  The girl curtsied shyly and hurried to brush us down so that the snow should not melt with the warmth of the fire into our felt valenki and then re-freeze.

  ‘Entrez, entrez.’ De Roemer held up the wavering lamp and showed us into the kitchen. Three narrow beds lined one wall. The air was pungent with the smell of leather and wood smoke. As high as a tall man could reach the walls were studded with the accretions of years of creative family activity—whips made from roe’s feet, ozier baskets, spurs, ikons, wooden whistles, peacock’s feathers, a bundle of maize cobs, stirrup leathers, a rosary and shelves of books. In one corner a cupboard of blackened wood held crockery and cooking pots. A cracked jug and basin stood on a chair beside it. Hiding one of the beds—Jola’s we supposed—was a sixteen-panelled screen painted in black and terra cotta.

  ‘I made this myself,’ said de Roemer. ‘Each panel holds a fleur-de-lis. Ici le lys de France. Ici le lys de Florence.’

  The idea had come to him from the illustrations of historic tiles in a book on Belgian church architecture. ‘Look, I will show you.’ He lifted a small leather-bound volume from the shelf, bru
shing away the dust to reveal the title.

  ‘Each of these designs is different. When I could find no more I invented them myself.’

  On the other side of the screen each of the panels showed an animal surrounded by a pattern of dull green leaves. The beasts had a naïve and secular jollity, particularly the waddling bear and a bitch with a dozen stylized teats to add to her armorial grace.

  ‘Come, I will show you the house,’ said de Roemer. ‘But it’s sad. It’s desolate now. You will see.’ He turned up the wick in a small china lamp, lit it and led the way up a narrow service staircase. The cold struck one like a blow.

  We were in a large bedroom with an open fireplace and a massive chimney breast graven with a coat of arms and the motto ‘J’y suis, j’y reste.’

  ‘I carved that motto myself, using a nail. I just scratched away at the stone.’ It was a primitive but effective technique. In one corner of the room was a four-poster of fluted mahogany with curtains of patterned blue and white. Beside it, a curiously shaped majolica stove, a piece of equipment from the eighteenth century, installed long before the Victorian anachronism of the baronial fireplace.

  ‘You see, the room is stripped bare now ...’ But small objects were crowded on the dressing table. He pointed to a coffin-like chest, six feet long and two wide. ‘I had this made. There are six altogether. We can pack them and take them with us, and if we have no beds we can use these instead.’ He ran his hand over the smooth wood. ‘Comme lit c’est parfait.’

  In the dining room another stone chimney piece clashed disagreeably with the eighteenth century elegance of the delicately stuccoed ceiling. Here and there the lamplight caught a pane of coloured glass let into the windows, an ecclesiastical accent which blended as uneasily with the classic Palladian house as de Roemer’s rigid asceticism with his wife’s cosmopolitan temperament.