From Latvia with Love
As we celebrate Christmas in July in Australia (a concept that will no doubt be incredibly difficult for our friends across the seas to understand!!), this story from far away in Latvia will warm your heart … In the lead up to Christmas we usually hope for a miracle, we hope for something brighter – it is a time of expectation. In December 2013, at the history museum of Kraslava High School in Latvia, we had a moment brighter than we could have hoped for. An Angel’s touch reached us from across the ocean, from the continent of Australia.
Completely unexpectedly, we had a visit from Ludzites Veronika’s daughter Amanda. Amanda’s Mother (now a resident of Glengarry), graduated from our School in 1940. Amanda was visiting in order to acquaint herself with relations, and the place where her Mother was born and raised. She had little hope of finding out much about her Mother’s school days.
However, the years of work put into compiling the history of our School have not been in vain. There were some welcome surprises for Amanda. As she perused the three history books of our School, she found her Mother’s name in the list of graduates, along with photographs and the School chronicle photographs that included her Mother. This was the first time Amanda had seen these, as her Mother was not able to take these with her when she left Latvia in 1944.
All of the photos were scanned and photographed and so Veronika will be able to see her School roots that go back 73 years.
In turn, the School museum had an opportunity to find out a bit about the fate of one of its graduates – and so another bit of information is added to the ongoing compilation of history, which includes documenting the lives of those graduates we have been able to contact.
We express sincere gratitude to Amanda, who received all of the existing information we had with a great interest, and gave us very positive feedback and expressed her amazement at our work. This was another reaffirmation of the importance of our historical research.
Janina Gekisa.
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