She escaped the Soviet deportation trains to become leader of her country

Three weeks and three days after my family left the shores of Latvia, my little sister died. We buried her by the roadside, but we were never able to return or put a flower on her grave," Vaira Vike-Freiberga remembered. "And I like to think that I stand here today as a survivor who speaks for all of those who died by the roadside, some buried by their families and others not."

By general consent, the speech by the President of the small north European nation of Latvia was the most poignant moment at a recent summit meeting in Geneva attended by 156 countries which pledged to strengthen global efforts to help millions of today's refugees.

Vike-Freiberga, together with her parents, fled Soviet-occupied Latvia in 1944 when she was seven years old. The family meandered through Poland, Germany and French Morocco before, by a simple twist of fate which can radically alter a refugee's future, headed toward Canada.

"We were 20 people to a room in double-tiered bunks" in one camp, she recalled. "You get to know people very intimately in such circumstances. Friendships are kept up and our fellow refugees wrote us saying, 'Life is hard in Canada. But if you work hard, you can get ahead. So why don't you come here?'"

She did. She became a leading academic, travelled the world as a lecturer, returned to her homeland to head a newly launched Latvian Institute and within a year became the country's president.

Millions of women have survived 'the refugee experience.' The great majority eventually return home to continue unheralded, often harsh existences. Vike-Freiberga's experience underlined that with the right help, a little bit of luck and lots of resilience, anything is possible.

DEPORTATION OR FLIGHT

"When the moment comes to leave your home, it is a painful moment," Vike-Freiberga told the Geneva delegates. "My parents had a choice to stay behind and risk the deportations they had already witnessed... being put into cattle cars after having been awakened in the middle of the night and shipped off to Siberia or to just walk out of their homes with what they could carry in their two hands, walk off into the unknown."

A harrowing experience awaited. "It is always a painful condition not to know where you are going to lay your head, to look at the lights shining in distant windows, to think of people living their normal lives, sleeping in their own beds, eating at their own table, living under their own roofs.

"And later when you come to refugee camps... you are living outside of space and of time, you have no roots, you have no past, you don't know whether you have a future. You have no rights, you have no voice, you have nothing to participate in, you are not a citizen, you have no papers, sometimes you haven't even got your name. You have to pinch yourself to reassure yourself that, yes, I am alive, I am me, I am a human being, I am a person."

Millions of civilians continue to suffer today. "They are out there in the tents, by the roadsides, starving, freezing, waiting, hoping for someone to extend a helping hand," the Latvian president said, hovering between "being a human being with dignity or being less than the beasts of the field, trodden under in the dust of this world.

"I don't know whether we can do it in the next five years or 50 or 100, but I do know we have no choice," she said. "We must act. We must do something."

Source: Refugees Magazine Issue 126: "Women – Seeking A Better Deal" (April 2002). Download the complete issue (pdf, 1.3Mb) here