ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and Totalitarian Regimeand so on. Fear was also the main reason why approximately 4000persons like Uldis fled by boat to Sweden. Escaping by boat demonstratesthe lengths to which people will go because of fear; peoplewere so frightened that they were willing to travel by boat in October,when the storm period had already begun in the Baltic Sea and Russianand German ships and submarines were all around. The peopletravelled by boat to a foreign country, not knowing if they would everreach the coast. The following example is from the story of a Latvianwoman born in 1920, interviewed by Mara Zirnite and Baiba Bela.She remembers this boat trip very clearly. She described her reasonsfor leaving and commented that anybody on board the boats wouldnot have returned to Latvia. She and her husband had made the decisionto kill each other should they have to return to Latvia. She said:We went to Roja (a small town on the western coast of Latvia), wherewe had to wait more than two weeks for a boat. When the boat came, wecouldn’t see it because it was dark. And what is more, the boat was too smallfor everybody who wanted to get on board. I remember I was praying, andeventually we got onto the boat, but we were the last ones. And we weresitting and thinking that we would not go back. Moreover, I was pregnant.And we decided to kill each other if the boat began to sink or turned back.The passage took 36 hours and was horrible. They had to throw awaytheir suitcases because of the storm, the floor was covered in urine,there was no food, and so on. There were 254 passengers on board aboat intended for 100. In the end, Skaidrite said: When we landed thenext day and saw that illuminated town, when we got warm bread and hotchocolate to drink, we thought we were in paradise.Almost every narrator in this community has a similar story.Unfortunately, we don’t have stories of those who didn’t reach thecoast. So-called boat narratives in this community are told as personalexperience stories. They are repeated in various situations and aretold again and again for various audiences, each time acquiring a moreexplicit artistic quality. In this sense, we can look at them as part ofimmigrant folklore.Stories about visiting Soviet Latvia are similar to boat narrativesand are one of the main narratives in the repertoire of Swedish Latvians.They include not only meeting family, friends, and acquaintances,217