Jānis Sproģis recalls childhood in Siberian exile

Lyric tenor Jānis Sproģis (1944–2022) is remembered by many in Latvia as Lielvārds in the rock opera «Lāčplēsis» by composer Zigmars Liepiņš and writer Māra Zālīte, created during the national awakening period. The Latvian Occupation Museum holds a five-hour video testimony he recorded in 2012 about his life, including his childhood in exile in Siberia's Omsk region. On 12 October 1996 he also shared fragments of those memories with SestDiena magazine correspondent Tekla Šaitere.

Deportation in 1949

Sproģis's family was deported to Siberia in 1949. There were six children, and Jānis was the youngest. His sister Līze was visiting an aunt at the time and stayed in Latvia; at the age of 11 she fell ill and died. His father had been arrested earlier, and a death sentence was replaced with 25 years of exile. The reason for the deportation was that the father had been a member of the Aizsargi, the Latvian volunteer guard organisation. The family owned a house and 16 hectares of land.

Life on the steppe

The family ended up on the steppe in the Omsk region, in a place called Molotova. The first period was extremely hard: they lived in a dugout, with little food and no clothing to spare. His mother, a weaver, traded the blankets she had brought for bread. Local children at first called the newcomers fascists and threw stones at them, but after he learned Russian they became friends. The dugout had a small pane in place of a window, and light came from a wick burning in a hollowed-out potato.

Return

After Stalin's death the father was rehabilitated, and the family moved from the steppe to the taiga, where the parents and brothers worked felling trees. A house was built, and the family acquired a cow, pigs and chickens, and gathered cedar nuts and cranberries. The family returned to Latvia in 1956. In Siberia Sproģis read the book «Zelta zirgs» (The Golden Horse), sent by an aunt, and later sang in an opera of the same name.