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Juliana  ZARCHI


Juliana Zarchi was born in Kaunas in 1938 of a Lithuanian father of Jewish origin and a German mother. When Lithuania was invaded by the Nazis, her father fled to the east and was killed by the Einsatzgruppen. While still a little girl she escaped from the Kaunas ghetto and managed to survive the Nazi occupation.

In August 1945, as part of a purge of ethnic Germans, she was forcibly resettled by the Soviets with her mother in Tajikistan in Central Asia, and only returned in 1962. What made her suffer most when they arrived was not the heat or the hunger or the typhus epidemics but the fact that the village children called her a “Fascist”, whereas her father had actually been killed by the Fascists. On her return, she taught German at Vytautas Magnus University in Kaunas.

Her mother tried all her life to return home to Düsseldorf in Germany. She wrote hundreds of letters to the Soviet authorities but was never authorised to leave the USSR, where she died in Kaunas in 1991.

Since Lithuania has regained its independence, Julia regularly goes to Germany, where she is invited to give talks in schools to tell the story of her family and her experience of the two dictatorships.

The interview with Juliana Zarchi was conducted in 2009 by Marta Craveri and Jurgita Mačiulytė.

PDF (79.95 KB) See MEDIA
Fermer

The fate of her
father’s family (Original in Russian)

Audio available /
Fermer

Jews “saved”
by deportation (Original in Russian)

Audio available /
Fermer

Memories of her mother’s
despair 1/2 (Original in Russian)

Audio available /

Juliana’s mother fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and settled with her husband in Kaunas. She could speak neither Lithuanian nor Russian, which she eventually learnt, poorly, in Tajikistan.

During the interview, Juliana remembers how her mother felt foreign all her life, how she cried each time she spoke of Düsseldort. “We lived out of suitcases”, because her mother was always waiting for permission to go home. Juliana chose not to have any children for fear it would be yet another pretext for not allowing them to leave Lithuania.

 

Fermer

Memories of her mother’s
despair 2/2 (Original in Russian)

Audio available /

Juliana’s mother fled Nazi Germany in 1937 and settled with her husband in Kaunas. She could speak neither Lithuanian nor Russian, which she eventually learnt, poorly, in Tajikistan.

During the interview, Juliana remembers how her mother felt foreign all her life, how she cried each time she spoke of Düsseldort. “We lived out of suitcases”, because her mother was always waiting for permission to go home. Juliana chose not to have any children for fear it would be yet another pretext for not allowing them to leave Lithuania.

 

Fermer

Arrest and deportation (Original version in Russian)

Audio available /

Juliana remembers when the Soviet political police arrived at their house in Kaunas and her deportation to Tajikistan.

 

 

Fermer

Tajik children (Original in Russian)

Audio available /

In these two extracts, Juliana remembers how the Tajik children called the deported children “Fascists” and threw stones at them, her feeling of injustice and relations between the deportees and the Tajiks.

Fermer

Relations with the Tajiks (Original in Russian)

Audio available /

In these two extracts, Juliana remembers how the Tajik children called the deported children “Fascists” and threw stones at them, her feeling of injustice and relations between the deportees and the Tajiks.

Fermer

Identity and heritage (Original in Russian)

Audio available /

 

In this extract Juliana explains why she has felt different all her life and uses “they” to mean the Lithuanians, the Russians and the Jews. The only time she uses “we” is when she talks about the deportees.

Fermer

The day of
Stalin’s death (Original in Russian)

Audio available /