Truth Archive

Written mid-July 2020. There are others who know the details better and are more qualified to write this. But for now, this is what I’ve pieced together.

In early 2006 some of the workers and friends visited Zinaida and asked her to tell her story. They recorded her account, so I’ve listened to that and tried to put it into writing. I’ve taken a little liberty in how things are worded for the sake of coherency. It wasn’t always easy to hear or make out certain words. There are likely some mistakes. Zinaida had trouble remembering some of the details, names and dates. A lot of it isn’t necessary information to know. But it helped me understand a little better how the situation felt for her. Maybe you’ll find it interesting, too. Since we’re still in relative lockdown over here, there is plenty of time to read and write.

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Beginning of recording.

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[Zinaida speaking]:

My parents met in Odessa, Ukraine. My dad was a doctor there and my mother was a nurse. They decided to move back to Latvia, to the area where my grandfather owned land. Over time he had sold the land, little by little, and it became a village. They’d spend summers there and winters in the nearby bigger town of Daugavpils. Varya Pinka, who listened to the gospel in 1927-28, worked for my family as a cook but became very close to us, like a member of the family. There were no buses or convenient modes of transportation in those days. The only transport was by boat on the river, so that was how they brought food to their home. (Zinaida was born 8 January 1924.)

(Around 1928) One day some people came to the village. Two men. They asked, “Do you have a room that we could rent?” Mom told them, “We don’t have room right here with us but there is room on the second floor that you could use. There is even a separate entrance there.” They agreed and moved in. There were a couple of beds and some chairs and a table. I never was up there myself. We children weren’t allowed to go up to the second floor. I would have been about 4 years old at that time and my brother was three years old. The brothers would sometimes poke candies down through the cracks in the boards of their balcony, to give to us children. I remember Mother saying, “What strange people. They’re always writing, writing, writing. Sending letters all over the place.” Mother was Adventist. She started asking them more questions. What are you doing here? What are you writing? She had thought maybe they were spies. They told her that they were preachers, sharing the Word of God. Mother became interested, as the Adventist religion wasn’t satisfying her. There had been an unpleasant experience in the church where one woman had done something wrong and so the members of the church were asked, after a particular service, to write their opinion, to vote whether this woman should be excommunicated or kept as a member in the church. Mother found this so odd and didn’t think it was right that people would critique others in this sort of manner and decide to exclude someone from faith. During this time she also noticed how these two men would come into the kitchen and would cook some rather unrecognizable things. Mother talked to Varya and said, “Let’s cook for these men and feed them.” We had a small garden next to the house that gave us fresh vegetables. Varya was there, always cooking for someone, so it was no problem to cook for these men, too. Evenings we would sit on the veranda and drink tea. My grandma would come, too, along with her sister. My dad also came on his days off and listened in a bit, even though the relationship between him and mother wasn’t so good at this point. They had drifted apart, having different interests, due to mom being a Christian and he wasn’t interested in Christianity. I don’t remember exactly the very first workers but I do remember Jack Craig, Tom Alexson, Carl Leonhardt, Jack Annand being there those early years. So in the summers they all sat, drank tea and talked at length, sometimes argued, about faith. Mother felt very strongly about the sabbath and keeping the sabbath, so sometimes that was a point of discussion. The brothers rented a room in the town and had gospel meetings. Pihrags (Rody’s family), my mother, Varya Pinka, Zina (and Ilze)

Pinka’s father (Varya’s brother), and my grandmother’s sister went to these meetings. My dad didn’t go to the meetings as he had become more involved with yoga and Indian literature. Aina Kiece’s grandmother also started to attend. There was also an old German lady whose surname was Pfister who came to the gospel meetings, too. So, they went and went and went to the meetings, listened and listened and listened. Then the time came when the workers said in one of the meetings, “If there is anyone who believes this is the true way of God, please stand to make your choice known.” My mother stood. Pihrags, my grandmother’s sister and others made their choice at that time, also. We all were very much a family. Then, along with the gospel meetings, they also started fellowship meetings on Wednesdays and Sundays, in our homes. Sometimes it was at our home, sometimes at Pihrags. Mom and dad ended up divorcing during this time. Zina P’s father and mother had also made their choice but after a while stopped and went back to the Baptist church where they had been going before they met the workers. During this time the workers would make the rounds, spending time with each of us, coming for a meal and a visit.

Sister workers had also started to come to Latvia in those years. Anna Geck and Olga Hastings were the sister workers in our area for a bit. While the sisters were there, Aina’s grandma invited Marianna (Aina’s mother) to the meetings. Marianna felt like she couldn’t come to the meetings because she didn’t have anyone who could look after the children (Aina and her sister at that point). So they asked me to sit with the children, so Marianna could go to the meetings. Marianna was responding to what she heard and felt in the meetings but then her husband was transferred to Rīga. He worked for the railway company and was given a higher position thus bringing about the change in their location. The sisters then started meetings in Rīga. We didn’t go to Rīga but when the sisters were in Latvia, they spent a lot of their time having meetings in Rīga. I think they had the meetings mostly in German. After a few years, our landlord in Daugavpils refused to let us rent from them any longer. They said, “We will not allow you to rent from us any longer because you are having these strange meetings.” So we had to move to a different apartment. But we didn’t live there very long because World War II then started in 1939 in Europe.

I had been in the meetings for a long time by now but hadn’t been listening much at all. I was only there because Mother said that I must be there. I sat there hearing but not listening. I would simply drift off caught up in my own thoughts. But suddenly at one point, while Jack Annand was speaking, I began to truly listen. I realized these are such deep thoughts. I lost my peace. I started to feel that the Lord was wanting me to make some kind of choice. No matter where I went, room to room, with every step, I had this great battle between the flesh and the spirit, although I never said a word about it to anyone. My brother was also in those meetings. He wasn’t interested one whit. Ever. I struggled and struggled. So the time came, I was 15 years old, to make a choice. It actually was very good that that was how it happened because the war had started and the workers left within the year. Jack Kennedy (from Ireland) was a young worker there at that time. We had a lot of chats. He shared how he left his bride to be, his job and he battled it out before going in the work. He told how he felt that the Lord simply wouldn’t let go of Him and eventually he decided to obey the Lord. It made a great impression on my young life. At one point Olga and Anna came for a visit. They took Lessy Pihrag and myself to Rīga with them. They showed us how they lived, how they spent their time, what they cooked for lunch, and we had meetings together. After Lessy and I returned to Daugavpils, I went to the brothers and told them that I wanted to be baptized. I think it was Jack Kennedy who baptized me, but I don’t remember for sure. When I told them that I wanted to be baptized, they said, surprised, “You want to be baptized?” I hadn’t been taking part in the meetings, and hadn’t really expressed a lot of visible interest. They were a bit amazed. They asked “Are you serious about this?” I answered, “Yes.” They asked, “Are you sure that you will serve God?” I answered, “I can’t say anything about the future but today, now, I want to serve God.” Right after that moment, there was a call from Rīga telling the brothers

that they must leave Latvia. I remember the moments right before they left. Everyone was crying. We understood nothing about what was happening. It was likely the embassy that warned them that the war was going to reach Latvia very soon. They probably were aware of the pact between Stalin and Germany, and that soon the Russians would be invading the Baltics. So they left Daugavpils. But not too long after, they came back. Everyone was so thrilled! We asked, “They let you come back to stay?” They said, “No, but we came back to baptize Zinaida and Lessy.” (Around July 1939) That was it, they then left and we saw no more of them. I didn’t see workers again until Jack Craig and Carl Leonhardt came back as tourists several years after the war.

We continued to have the meetings regardless of the events that were taking place. Then Russia invaded and occupied Latvia without any real battle (1940). After that, the arrests started (about the time the Germans were also approaching from the west). They arrested my father, took him right from work. We knew nothing about why they had taken him, where they had taken him or how. We never did know the reason. Several years later we found out that dad had been taken away (incidentally the president of Latvia was in the same company of prisoners), to Orenburg prison and he died there. One day at school, a girl who I studied with who always sat next to me didn’t come to class. I thought I’d go look for her, check on her and see if everything was ok. I knocked and knocked and knocked on the door. No answer. A neighboring door eventually opened and they said to me, “Enough. Don’t come back. They’re all gone. The family were all taken away last night.” Difficult times had begun. We had virtually nothing to live on. It was actually a good thing that the Russians couldn’t stand against the Germans in the first part of the war. Mom got a job as a bookkeeper which took her to Rīga, leaving me and my brother alone at home. Mom had a daughter from her first husband who had died in WWI. She came to us and said, “Why are you just sitting there, doing nothing, when a war has begun? You need to go gather the essentials for living!” So my brother and I scraped together what we had to buy a bit of soap, a few matchsticks… It’s funny to think of it now, what we decided to buy. But then mom came back and got things in order. Not long after that the bombing began in Daugavpils. The building where we were renting our apartment burned down. It was a miracle that we escaped. Mom had suggested that we go to the cellar for the night because the cellar was made of brick as opposed to the rest of the buildings in the area which were made of wood. My brother’s friend was also with us. We were in the cellar when we heard an incredibly loud sound like massive downpour. My brother’s friend decided to open the door and have a look. He said, “What you think is rain, is actually fire.” He jumped out and managed to escape. When I finally got up and was trying to get out I saw a Russian throwing grenades in the neighboring house, which went up in flames, and then in turn, our building caught on fire. We hurriedly started gathering up our things.
Well. What exactly did we have to take with us? It was a bit silly what I had decided to take. Mom had given me a little suitcase and told me to pack what I wanted to take with me. I put my school uniform in there and documents. I took nothing of value. Mom believed that God would save us and that nothing bad would happen to us. But things were happening. And now we needed to get out of the cellar and out of the fire. There were two boards blocking our exit by this time but my brother and I somehow broke the boards and we all got out of the place where danger was most imminent. We stood and watched as our building burned. We didn’t know where to go. We knew that Dad and his second wife had been living in a stone building. Even though they had arrested my father and taken him away, his wife and family were still there in that apartment. We tried to make our way through the burning, smoking wreckage… winding here and there, not knowing which end was up. We saw a big pit or a type of a trench where some soldiers had been hiding. It was covered with leaves, twigs, netting and branches, like camouflage. There weren’t any soldiers shooting though.
Nothing made sense. So we decided to crawl down in the pit or trench or whatever it was, too. The night was horrific. The whole city was burning. People screaming. Children crying. Dogs running about. And so much gunfire. Then the morning came. In the morning we heard this

rumbling. The rumbling stopped right in front of our trench. I decided I wanted to see what this was. So I got up and made my way out to take a look. I saw a young German soldier sitting on this big tank holding a chunk of cheese, his meal. He looked at me and asked, “And what are you doing here?!” “Our house burned down and we ended up coming here for the night,” I explained. The soldier was dumbfounded. “You spent the night in a trench? That’s exactly where they throw the grenades!” “You want a bit to eat?” he asked in German, referring to the cheese. I answered in German, “Yes.” He cut me off a big chunk of cheese.
So that was nice.

I don’t remember exactly how it happened but somehow the brother of my father’s second wife was also with us in the trench that night. He and my brother, Oleg, decided to go and find out how Dad’s second family were and if their stone apartment building was still in one piece. On the way, there was a gunshot and the brother of my dad’s second wife caught a bullet in the stomach and was killed instantly. Somehow Oleg made it to the stone apartment building and found that it was still standing with everyone inside alright. He told them about everything that had happened. Dad’s second wife was a decent lady indeed, and said, “Come. Come and stay the night with us.” So much of the town had burned up. Pihrags’ and Zamyatninas’ homes had burned too. There were now a lot of empty buildings because when the Germans came into the city, many of the Russian soldiers abandoned ship and ran. Many of the Jews had been gathered up and placed in ghettos by the Germans. Dad’s second wife was quite the go-getter, so she was able to get work for both me and my brother. At that time both Lessy and I started to work for the city government.
Because we were working for the city, they gave us apartments first. The apartment we ended up getting was in a stone building, completely furnished with dishes, furniture, bed linen, and other things from the former occupants who had left everything in their hurry to get away. It looked like it had been Soviet people living there previously. My great aunt (grandma’s sister) who was a homeopathic doctor had been living with Dad’s second wife, but then moved in with us. We were very close already and of course we understood what each other believed, so it made sense that she would live with us. We also continued to have meetings in that place. Then the Russians came back and there was intense bombing in Daugavpils. We had no idea what had happened to my dad. Only his wallet and some documents were found, and all sorts of things were being said, like him being taken to prison and executed. We decided to leave for Rīga. My great aunt decided to stay in the area and go to a small village a little ways out of Daugavpils. Others of the friends left for Riga also: Pihrags, Zamyatninas, basically everyone left because the bombing was so bad. The Lord was guiding us. A friend of my mother’s daughter had left for Germany and told us, “You can live in my apartment” When we all arrived in Rīga, we all went to Marianna’s but there wasn’t room for everyone to stay there. Mother, my brother and I ended up living not very far from Marianna and meetings continued at her home. Marianna’s husband had also been arrested by that time, evidently because he was guilty of being a manager in the railway company. At that time they had five children and it was an extremely difficult time for Marianna. They had also been bombed and their building destroyed. Marianna’s mother had decided to go check on her son who was in another part of Rīga but was killed by a bomb at some point during that quest. We heard that the Russians had quickly taken Daugavpils and were now marching toward Rīga. Then one day a German soldier appeared at our door and warned us, “If you don’t agree to leave now with the provided transport, you will be chased down by us on foot.” I had a friend who was friendly with a German official and he was able to get us tickets on a boat to Germany. We had decided that we must leave on the proffered transport by water, as being run out on foot by the Germans didn’t seem to offer much in terms of a future. I remember the boat was a rather utilitarian vessel for hauling some kind of cargo like cattle.

There were no amenities on it whatsoever. Just some mats and straw for us to sit on. It was maybe late 1941 or early ‘42, I don’t remember exactly. We were headed for Germany. We got there and from there they sent us to Konets. It used to be part of Poland but was given to

Germany in an agreement. They placed us refugees with families around that city. We ended up living with a woman who was Russian. She didn’t speak a word of German. I went to look for work in the military hospital. They asked me what I could do. I told them that I only knew how to type, along with being fluent in German. They gave me work as a typist in an office there, since I was fluent in Russian, German and Latvian. After some time I talked to mom and said, “Why don’t we go to where there are friends? Let’s leave and go to the friends.” My mom told me, “Yes, I have one address of some friends here in Germany but [as she understood] Pihrags are already there. They are a family of six.” She felt like it would be too many people to impose on the friends at such a time. We didn’t have any other information of where to go, so we just stayed there. I worked in the military hospital office until frontlines of war again came to our city. They then started to evacuate us. They evacuated the military hospital and all the service personnel in the town. We were taken to another town, Kühlungborn, on the northern coast of Germany. We again found work and continued working there. At last one day we heard that the war had ended. We didn’t yet know what side we had landed on when they divided Germany.

We ended up staying there for a time because Mom needed to have an operation.

I was pretty enough to attract the attention of one of the doctors there. He wanted to take me out but I declined because mother had just had an operation and I needed to be with her. Somehow that was enough to quash his interest and he never paid any more attention to me. So there we were, waiting.
Eventually we understood that we were in the Russian zone. We didn’t know where Pihrags were at this time but they, too, had wound up in the Russian zone (eastern Germany) but made a harrowing escape to the American zone and from there they eventually left for Canada, where they started a new life. My father’s second wife and children also ended up in Germany during the war and eventually moved to California. Somehow they must have ended up in the American zone too during that time.

Then they started to tell us, “Ok, time to go back to your own country.” But where to go back to? We didn’t know where to go. We were registered anyway, then were hauled by trucks and trains, sleeping on our suitcases, back to who-knows-where. We traveled through Poland. Stayed for a time in some barracks and camps along the way. Even were shot at by Polish soldiers. Eventually we arrived at the Russian-controlled border. There they separated the men from the women. The men, including my brother Oleg, were sent to northern Russia (Ukhta) to a labor camp there. These men had been in other countries during the war (in most cases it was for reasons out of their control). Therefore the Soviet government automatically found them guilty of some sort of treason or espionage. Therefore they could not be trusted and were sent as prisoners to labor camps for a time.

Mother and I didn’t know where to go. We decided to go back to Daugavpils. We had to pay our own way. We sold bits of produce that we had taken with us, eventually getting tickets for a place in a cattle car. It was there that our last sack of food was stolen. It was so dark in there, you couldn’t tell who was coming or going. Eventually we arrived at Daugavpils to find most everything burned. The only option left was to find my great aunt who had earlier chosen to go live in a nearby village. I don’t remember what we
managed to sell in order to get tickets. Eventually we got on a train and were off. A woman got on and sat next to us. We were chatting and she was asking about our situation. So we told her. She offered us a place to live, a big empty house of her son’s, while it was unoccupied.
We lived there a bit but then a woman who had been in a German concentration camp returned with her two sons. One had been in the Russian army, the other in the German. It was complicated. They had some sort of claim on the house and wanted to live there.
They offered us a smaller house to live in that was nearby. They were actually really good neighbors. They had a horse that we could use. They taught us how to fell trees and chop wood. My great aunt moved back in with us. Because she was a homeopathic doctor

and helped people, they brought her eggs, milk, sour cream, and such as payment. She held onto her faith through it all as well.

Eventually it was my turn to be interrogated, mainly because I wanted to get a passport. Because we still had our birth certificates and we were considered simple farmers [not intelligentsia, therefore considered acceptable and trustworthy by the government at that time], they gave both me and Mother passports. One day my great aunt received a letter from my brother Oleg asking if she had any news of us, how we were. We were overjoyed to hear from him and from that point we would write back and forth. In 1948, Oleg invited us to come up there to live. He explained that it was mostly a big labor camp in that area. There were a lot of opportunities for work as there were very few free people there. It still was mostly prisoners. That way we could be in close proximity. One day a couple arrived from Ukhta. They both were chemists who had been considered “intelligentsia” and thus placed in a labor camp. They had served their sentence and were given leave for a holiday. My brother gave them our address and suggested that they come to us. So they did. They were very kind people who helped us in many ways. I ended up going to Ukhta to see how things were. I liked it there. All the educated intelligentsia of various ethnicities were there. I was there with my brother for a year and found work as a copyist and eventually met my future husband. My husband’s father was a Russian Orthodox priest. My husband read and read and read. He read so much that he stopped believing in God. He said he needed more evidence that God existed. He also had been a prisoner there for a few years. Eventually mom moved up there too. My great aunt had died by the time mother and I decided to move up there to stay.

In the late 50s I was in Rīga a bit, studying, doing a course. While I was there I could go to the quiet meetings at Marianna’s. Stalin died in 1953. A few years later under Khrushchev’s leadership they started allowing foreigners to come to the USSR as tourists. The brothers returned to Latvia for the first time in the early or mid 60s. It was Carl Leonhardt and Jack Craig. I was told that they were coming, so I was able to take my vacation time and go to Latvia while they were there. My husband was always okay with this. We eventually worked out an agreement that he would take his vacation at the Black Sea, and I would go to Rīga. It was fine that way. We didn’t know the exact dates that the brothers were coming but had a general timeframe. So I went and stayed at Marianna’s. But then we waited and waited and waited. I was telling Marianna that I would soon need to leave to go home because I’d be expected at work in a day’s time. Suddenly then they arrived! I was in touch with my boss and explained that I had been delayed in Latvia, had complications with tickets and I’ll need to stay a few days longer. So I got to stay a bit longer with all of them.

When I saw the workers again, I cried. It had been a little over 20 years since seeing them. I asked Carl why they took so long to come. What happened that delayed them? He answered, “You know, we very much were ready to come but we simply didn’t have the means to make the entire trip. We prayed that the Lord would open the way. One day an envelope arrived with the needed provision.” It was very expensive to make the trip and pay for all the necessary tours and places to stay, as they were required to do while visiting the country as tourists.

(Someone asked the question if they had their bibles through all of this): No, our bible burned in Daugavpils. But we did have meetings, so we must have had access to at least one bible. Maybe we all shared one when we were together. I can’t remember that part.

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End of the recording

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Another story Zinaida told us a few times… I’m not sure where this happened— if it was when she and her mother were still in Latvia after the war or if it was in Russia. She told about two men, officials (I suppose KGB officers), showing up at their home one evening. They “offered” her a position as a type of a spy. They told her they’d be back the next day for her answer. Since she knew three languages, that made her good espionage material. It was a desperate moment because even though they presented it as “an offer”, she knew that really there was no choice. She either had to accept or decline and be suspected of some sort of treason. She told us that she was desperate. She wept and prayed and prayed and prayed that night about what to do, asking God for help. She then told us, “You know what? Those men didn’t come the next day. They didn’t come the following day. They just never came back. I know that was the hand of God interceding for me.”

Zinaida lived for many years in Ukhta, in northern Russia. Eventually she and her husband moved back to Voronezh, where her husband was originally from. Voronezh is about 320 miles/515 km from Moscow. I don’t know how able Zinaida was to travel other than get to Moscow for the annual gathering there. But then the time came when she was no longer able to leave the apartment, let alone travel. I think that her last time at a convention was around 2004 or 5. But if one has a massive heart, it’s not going to be confined to being alone in an apartment in a big city. She kept in touch by letter and by phone with so many. The workers and friends, mainly from Moscow, would try to visit her once a month. It was always meeting first and then the meal and visit. Otherwise she had no meetings. Fellowship to her was priceless and as a result our fellowship with her was priceless. She taught us that the bigness of heart will conquer the bigness of any other barrier or difficulty. The bigger the heart, the more it can and will hold.

I first arrived in Russia in late summer 2009. I got acquainted with Zinaida on a Skype phone call. I was with Joyce in St. Petersburg and that autumn Joyce encouraged me to use my very limited, basic Russian to try and chat with her a wee bit. Usually it’s kind of torturous to speak on the phone in a language you are just learning but I’ll never forget what a tonic it was to speak with Zinaida. This was after a couple of months in Russian Language boot camp. Various weekly classes. Relentless barrages of unidentifiable sounds. Unclear-in-meaning voice inflections. Attitudes of “you mean you STILL can’t speak Russian clearly?” And the acute awareness that America was not the most beloved country over here. She was an island of peaceable normalcy and acceptance. I recognized this spirit. The connection was instantaneous because of that Spirit. She herself spoke slowly and clearly. She also gave courage to the feeblest of efforts to communicate. And was discreetly long-suffering with the butchering of words and sounds. She was kind, patient. She wanted us to use the informal you, instead of the formal You that we usually use when speaking to older folks or strangers.
From that first visit she became my dear babushka and friend, like she was to so many others.
She loved all of us because she loved the Gospel so much. —ST