Customer Reviews

Sentence Siberia: A Story of Survival

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The book is a personal account of Ann Lehtmets' deportation from Estonia (not Latvia) to Siberia in 1941. It accounts from the time she was taken from her home at gun-point by the NKVD (KGB), and for her first 2 or 3 years of her 17-year stay in a Siberian labour camp.

As a foreign-born Estonian, I took particular interest in this book- as my family chose to flee the country rather than to risk suffering the same fate (the second round of mass deportations happened in 1949).

In all, it was an interesting book. However, it was "slow" at times and I felt the ending was sort of incomplete. Her leaving Siberia and being re-united with her family after 17 years was barely mentioned in a breif 3 pages.

But a remarkable story none the less, and a highly reccomended read for all people of Estonian heritage.

I bought this expecting it to be about life in the gulag labor camps. That's not exactly what it was, but it didn't matter. I really enjoyed it regardless. It is the story of a Latvian woman who is taken from her home, sent to a village in Siberia, and forced to work at backbreaking jobs to survive. Not forced at gunpoint, but, rather, in order to earn enough food to eke out a subsistence (barely) level of survival. She manages by sheer courage, creativity, wits and backbone, while many others starved and froze to death around her. Read it if you want a story of what people can do to survive, if the have the will and the strength. An amazing woman with an amazing story.

The author was a friend of my grandmother's. The three of us would play the card game 'Bismark' together when I was a teenager. I wish I would have known to ask her questions about her life. She was a sassy, strong, lovable woman who enjoyed her cigarettes at a precise intensity. I always remembered her saying that she was worked so hard in Siberia that the bone of her leg had almost no skin on it.