Re: “I wish the 58% of Russians who support Putin could have met my Russian-born mother” [March 18, A1]:
As you look at the face of a frightened little girl in Ukraine grabbing her mother’s hand, pushed around on a train station platform, you see my face. Except back to 1944, when my mother, my little brother and I fled from Russian soldiers who at that time brutalized my Lithuania. Russian planes bombed the fishing boats, filled with us refugees, and then bombed and bombed the trains that led us to the perceived safety.
My father, Juozas Bertulis, was also gone, forced to dig trenches on the Russian front. Would we ever see him again? Even when we had reached Austria – more bombing, hiding in bunkers, burning buildings, charred bodies, hunger and the ubiquitous hatred of us refugees from the East, these damned “subhumans”.
The end of the war, all hope of ever returning home, now Soviet Russian, disappeared. And the little Ukrainian girls today, what will be their future? What scars will they wear? For how many years? generations?
Mother Bertulyte Bray, Seattle