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"Apples don't grow in Siberia."

Lovingly made Self-Made-Hero book by Jurga Vile and illustrated by Lina Itagaki about a period of Soviet history. In 1941, masses of Lithuanians were forcibly relocated to Siberia. Ostensibly, they were opposed to Soviet intervention in their country, so were subjected to indefinite exile to a a freezing placed with little food and inadequate accommodations. Many starved or were killed. At some point an orphan train made it back to Lithuania, but before that the survivors faced very hard times.

The book humanizes the little known and easily forgotten episode of WWII history by focusing on one eight-year-old boy, Algis, whose family was given ten minutes to gather belongings for the forced trip in closed train box cars. Grim? Unjust? Surely. But the focus of the book is on what those there did to survive: A persistent sense of humor and spirit and creativity, embodied principally here by Algis's father's sister Petronella, who loved Japanese culture, and had been given a book of Japanese haiku and tried to instill the spirit of poetry in the world there.

The Apple Choir developed as a way to preserve the arts and Lithuanian culture and bridge the gap to local children and their families. Less a narrative than a series of fragments, poetic images of hope, we will recall images of frozen potatoes on which the families survived for days. "Stone soup" made from very little. One occasion when they had ice cream! Letters and journal entries that are traces of memory. A barracks nearby of Japanese prisoners of war who were delighted to read Basho haiku sent from the Lithuanians via Aunt Petronella.

Origami, the making of paper cranes. Whooping cough. Lice. Executions. Amputations. A woman mute from grief, her husband and child dead. Algis's grandmother Ursula, whose husband was executed and who herself was tortured and exiled twice to Siberia, to finally return to scream in her nightmares, night after night, only to wake and praise those Siberians who were kind enough to help her survive there.

And a persistent dark and quirky humor I associate with the human spirit of survival. And maybe something distinctly Lithuanian? Such a project! Let a thousand such scrapbooks of memory flourish! Off hand I know two (Chicag0-based) Lithuanian books, one by Daiva Markelis, White Field, Black Sheep: A Lithuanian-American Life, about growing up in Chicago, and of course The Jungle, the 1906 novel about the meat-packing industry focused on Lithuanian Chicagoans by Upton Sinclair. But add this to your Get to Know Lithuania Project!