For our project “Gulag. Witnesses”, we met and interviewed a charming gentleman Jack Neuhausen who immigrated from the USSR decades ago and lives with his family in Canada and the USA.
Being a native Latvian and born in 1948, his childhood was in post-war Riga, the Latvian capital city which suffered its heavy share of Stalin maniac repressions.
Jack says that he belongs to the last generation of Gulag witnesses – people who were either there themselves or communicated directly with those who suffered from the Gulag camps.
Our interviewee is a detailed storyteller and his memory preserved the vivid childhood impressions of all the people he came across who had experienced the Gulag meat grinder.
In our interview, Jack told us about a quiet woman Sarah, their neighbor from the apartment building, whose husband and only child died in Siberia, about a seventeen-year-old boy who was sentenced to 10 years in Gulag camps for breaking the bust of Stalin in the school corridor, about a man who spent 20 years in Gulag camps but still kept the blind devotion to the cause of communism.
All those people were mentally and physically crippled by the repressive Stalinist system and their stories should be a forever reminder for the free world about how dangerous and cruel the autocratic regimes are.
You can watch the Russian-speaking version and read the translated English version of these interviews with Jack Neuhausen on our website gulag-witnesses.com/
