ORAL HISTORY: MIGRATION AND LOCAL IDENTITIES - Academia

Migration and NarrationThe physical settings themselves are an indication of what messageseach of the documentaries wants to relay to the world. Thougheach documentary is based on life stories, each portrays the past ina different way. Māra Zirnīte, who is founder of Dzīvesstāsts in Riga,an organization that records the life stories of Latvians throughoutthe world, produced and created in 2002, together with a teamfrom Dzīvesstāsts, the documentary “Ordinary Lives in ExtraordinaryHistory.”From the very beginning the documentary gives central importanceto “history” and an emphasis on the role that World War IIplayed in peoples’ lives, because the “scars” of history continue toaffect them. The narrator explains: “War did not damage the fortificationsof Liepāja, but it did scar the generation born between the twoworld wars.” This statement affirms that the wounds of war have notyet healed and are still entrenched in common memory. It is the mainpremise of the documentary and one that assigns responsibility forpeoples’ present-day “scars” and situations to events that happened inthe past.A sense of place constitutes one of the troublesome “scars” fromthe past: leaving and entering, fleeing and hiding, being forced toabandon one place to look for another. A chain of circumstances ledeach of the storytellers to make up his or her mind whether to pick uproots and place them elsewhere, or to keep roots where they are andendure the consequences of a changing political climate.A change of place is often preceded by a crucial moment ofdecision. A number of stories hang around this moment of decisionthat steers the storyteller down one path rather than another. Māraemphasizes this as well in her proposal for this documentary whereshe intends to “understand the complexity of Latvia’s 20 th century historyby revealing how individuals made decisions in complicated situations.”Australian immigrant Kārlis creates this decisive moment intime in his story that finds himself sailing on a boat in the Baltic Seavery close to the Swedish coast in the early 1950s:When we crossed the Baltic Sea, we were looking for the rightweather conditions to get closer to the Swedish coast. It was very dangerous—Sovietpatrol boats watched very carefully because this was83