Oxidred

Art Gallery

 

Stalin's Justice

My Dad - Cornei Ravliuc. He was only 14, when his dad (my grandpa) was declared “the enemy of people” and sentenced to be shot by Stalin’s régime. Shortly before the war of 1941 the sentence was carried out. Automatically, my dad turned to be “a family member of the enemy of people”. However, he survived... not because he was too young to be shot, but because the World War II reached our lands.
Finally, the “long reaching hand” of Stalin's justice caught him in 1947 in Latvia, and he was quickly sentenced to death by shooting. He was closed in Riga’s prison were the sentence had to be carried out.

The Dream

One night he had a dream. A white shining Angel was descending a long stairway from heaven towards him. In one hand the Angel had a sword and in the other a bunch of keys. “Choose”, he sad to my dad, and that was the moment when he woke up. He started telling the dream to his cell-mates and that he decided to run away from the prison. He was advised to calm down because until now no one succeeded in doing it. The same day he was transferred to a one-man cell. It meant that the next day he would be executed.
That night he escaped from the Riga prison.

On the Run

With the help of the Latvian “woods brothers”, he started his journey home where he joined OUN (the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists). In the late forties, having thought his trace was lost in the vastness of the Soviet Union he returned finally home. Partially he was right – from the very beginning his appearance hadn’t aroused much interest. But the problems appeared from a side he had never expected to.

Sweet Home

When he was yet a kid, after a final quarrel, his parents separated. Slamming the door, his dad took all of his belongings away with him. In a desperate gesture his wife told him that in that case he should better take his son with him too. And so he did. And never gave him back, although the next morning mother was begging him to give her child back. So my dad remained with his father, but most of the time he stayed at his grandparents on his mother’s side, whom he remembered all his life. They were Anitsa and Shtephan Burac.
While my father was in prison, his grandparents died living the house to him. Being absent, the house was occupied by his aunt, and when he came back, in order to preserve the house, she turned him to KGB. He was immediately arrested and deported as a political detainee to Kolyma Concentration Camp of the Gulag, from where he returned only in 1961.

My Mom - Minodora Ravliuc

That is the time when my mom comes in. And although theirs happiness hadn’t lasted for a long time, because in ’62 my father was once again arrested, it was fairly enough for me to be conceived. And so it happened that I was given birth while my dad was once again behind the barbed wire of the Gulag.

Finally at Home

And that's me again, at one and a half years of age. This is one of the pictures sent to my dad while he was imprisoned. I had a difficult childhood, while dad was absent. Everybody was pointing at us calling us "banderovtsy" (a Stepan Bandera fighter or people belonging to his family). I was small and was always taking it close to my heart.
But strangely enough, after dad came home they stopped mocking us, probably they have understood it wasn't very fare from their part...
The first serious thing dad bought me after his arrival, was a three wheeled bicycle. Thus, from a goose I turned instantly into a swan. It was kind of my first public show with all the villagers gathered around...