With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows
By Sandra Kalniete
Translated by Margita Gailitis
Dalkey Archive Press £18.99, 368 pages
FT Bookshop price: £15.19

Born in Siberia to exiled Latvian parents, Sandra Kalniete depicts her family’s “descent into hell” during Stalin’s mass deportations.

In 1941 and 1949 tens of thousands of Latvians had the dreaded night-time knock on the door and were herded into cattle trains. Some families would never see each other again; from departing trains they threw hasty farewell notes that “like white butterflies swarmed around the railway tracks”.

“Resettled” in Siberia, they endured hard labour, disease and starvation. One famine was so severe that deportees ate undigested seeds from their own excrement.

Though given to hammering her point home, Kalniete, until recently an EU commissioner, tells a moving story woven from memories, letters and KGB files. Her family returned to Latvia in 1957 but her mother still has nightmares. The deportees’ ordeal was, she writes, a “true genocide”, comparable to the Holocaust.