This year marks the 85th anniversary of the June deportation. To commemorate this, the KGB Cells Museum is hosting the Latvian exhibition ‘Children of Siberia’, which chronicles the stories of Latvian children deported to Siberia. The travelling exhibition was curated by the Children of Siberia Foundation of Latvia, an organisation dedicated to preserving the history of the 1941 and 1949 deportations and to collecting and disseminating information about the victims of communist terror. The exhibition is presented in English.
On 14 June 1941, 15425 Latvian residents—including Latvians, Jews, Russians, and Poles—were deported, including more than 3750 children under 16. Men were separated from their families and sent to Gulag camps, where fathers and brothers perished from starvation and disease. Women and children were sent predominantly to villages in the Krasnoyarsk and Tomsk regions. For them, the initial period of deportation was particularly harrowing. As the Second World War continued, many women and children succumbed to forced labour and illness.