Escape Narratives of World War Two Refugees from Latvia

Abstract

At the end of World War II, approximately 170,000 Latvians found themselves in Displaced Persons camps in occupied Germany. During this period they formed an exile ideology and started to think of themselves not as emigrants or refugees but as self-proclaimed exiles. As the UN official policy and Soviet accusations intensified the need to justify one’s actions, those versions of the escape narratives which served exile purposes the best were soon selected and developed into archetypical schemas. One group that offers a different perspective of escape narratives consists of those people who were youngsters at the time of escape: some of them took the flight to be an adventure. However, the majority of the ex-refugees depict the events of that time as tragic, regardless of their generation; this can be explained by the transferred perceptions and emotions which older refugees passed on to the following generations.