The Iron Heel

It happened during the first year of World War II, but the story of the Soviet rape of the Baltic states has never been fully and publicly told. Wisconsin's Republican Representative Charles Kersten, chairman of a special House investigating committee, last week began putting on the record one of the grisliest stories of this grisly century.

The historical framework: the Baltic nations of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia broke loose from Russia after 1917's Bolshevik Revolution, became thriving little democracies (total population: 6,000,000). In June 1940, Soviet troops, cops and commissars invaded and occupied the three nations. Driven out by the Germans in mid-1941, the Russians returned in 1944. Since then, the Lithuanians, Latvians and Estonians have lived under the Communist heel.

At hearings in Washington and Manhattan last week, a string of Baltic refugees told the Kersten Committee what life was like after the 1940 invasion.

Torture. Masked to protect relatives behind the Iron Curtain, a Roman Catholic priest testified that in early 1941 the Communist police arrested him and many other Lithuanians for failing to vote in a phony election. In the prison "the other inmates and I were subjected to brutish and utterly inhuman treatment . . . My head was slammed against the wall [until] I collapsed into unconsciousness. My jailers alternated torture and interrogation. All told, I was questioned 18 nights from 10 o'clock until 4 in the morning. During these periods I was always stripped naked and brutally beaten. [One stretch in solitary confinement] lasted for eight days, during which time they gave me neither food nor water ... On another occasion, I was stripped to my underwear and locked for 20 hours in a room half filled with ice."

Voldemar Ludig, an Estonian lawyer-businessman, was arrested in December 1940 and accused of being a British spy. The police interrogated him daily for six weeks. Before each session, the jailers softened him up by making him spend two or three hours in a tiny concrete cell in which he could not sit down, stand upright or lie down. "The box," said Ludig, "was illuminated by a very powerful bulb. [It gave] you a headache, and you were kind of blind after it."

Mass Deportation. A woman who asked not to be named in the press because her husband might still be alive and in Communist hands, told the committee that soon after the Russians marched into Lithuania they began shipping men, women and children to Siberia by the carload. Separated from her husband, she spent 17 hungry, nightmarish days traveling eastward in a cattle car packed with 40-odd deportees, 15 of them infants. In Siberia she lived in a crude barracks, worked twelve hours a day in a construction gang.

As in Lithuania, so in Latvia: Mrs. Zenta Vizbulis never saw her husband again after she was arrested in the Latvian city of Talsi. She, too, was hauled to Siberia in a crowded cattle car. The Communist slavers put her and other women to work on collective farms. Now & then she saw work gangs of Latvian men from a nearby slave-labor camp. "They were just like skeletons," she said. "They were young men with deep black eyes."

A Lithuanian doctor-farmer, Mykolas Devenis, was shipped to an Arctic labor camp after spending a year in prisons. "I was assigned to work as a physician," he said, "[but it] was just sham practicing, because there were no drugs and no facilities ... A physician's duties were just to find out whether a man was able to work." On a diet consisting largely of millet-seed soup and bread adulterated with sawdust, many prisoners died of scurvy and pellagra. Sturdy men in their 20s would sicken within a few months, lose their teeth and break out in unhealing sores. "The only thing I could do," said Dr. Devenis, "[was to try to extract vitamin C from] pine needles and pine cones. So I used to cook them in a big kettle, and all the prisoners' were given a glass of that concoction to drink every night. [It] was not enough to cure well-developed scurvy."

Murder. Another doctor, Edmund Leetaru, testified that after the Wehrmacht pushed the Russians back, he served on a commission that investigated Communist executions in Estonia, where the late Andrei Zhdanov was the Red overlord. The commission found some 200 corpses buried in the prison yard in the city of Tartu. Most had been shot in the back of the neck. But "several didn't have any bullet holes at all; their heads had been crushed."

The Russian boss in Latvia during the 1940-41 occupation was Andrei Vishinsky, now the Soviet Union's chief U.N. delegate, whom one Latvian witness last week branded as "the greatest murderer in the world." After the Russians retreated in 1941, Latvians in the capital city of Riga set up a commission, headed by a jurist named Atis Grantskalns, to document Vishinsky & Co.'s murders. Last week Grantskalns told of finding 979 bodies of Latvians killed by the Communist conquerors. The victims, he said, included intellectuals, teachers, army officers, government officials--"the leaders of our communities."

In the garden of a large house that had been occupied by the NKVD, the investigators found 113 bodies in ten graves. At the bottom of each grave were two corpses with bullet holes in the tops of their skulls; the other victims had been shot in the skull from behind. Said Grantskalns: "The only explanation we could make was that . . . two were chosen to dig the pit and then shot when they had finished, [and the rest] were shot at the edge of the pit."

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