Leave Your Tears in Moscow

Leave Your Tears in Moscow

Barbara Armonas and her infant son, John, were caught in a deadly vise of World War II in Europe, sparked by Adolf Hitler and Josef Stalin through their infamous Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939. Hundreds of millions of lives were upended and well over 50 million were to die.<br /><br />Instead of being able to rejoin her American husband and daughter, who had to return to the United States when the Soviet Union forcibly annexed Lithuania in 1940, Barbara, a native Lithuanian, was deported with her son to Siberia with tens of thousands of her countrymen.<br /><br />She suffered additional punishment of a 25-year prison sentence for allegedly being “an American spy.”<br /><br />Her husband, John, and daughter, Donna, tried unsuccessfully for 22 years to have her released, until Donna managed to confront Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev during his visit to the United States in 1959, pleading for the return of her mother and brother. Faced with the glare of live, national television, Khrushchev relented and the family was reunited in 1960.<br /><br />Barbara Armonas’ 22-year ordeal in the soviet concentration camp system—the dreaded GULAG—is a rare and straightforward story, related with candor and underlying hope that the human spirit can survive any hardship—even the clamps of a vicious totalitarian system.<br /><br />This 50th Anniversary Edition commemorates Barbara’s unbreakable spirit, memorializes her extraordinary life—she died three days short of her 100th birthday—and harkens us to actively nurture our freedom—because there still exist forces that challenge it every day.<br /><br />Her account is particularly relevant today as more and more documents of the Stalinist years and the Soviet Union in general become available for public view and historical scrutiny.