Meetings with Sandra Kalniete, author of the book With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows took place on 22 June in Warsaw (Bookstore Matras, Nowy Świat 41, 5:30 pm) and on 23 June in Kraków (Bookstore “Pod Globusem”, ul. Długa 1, 6:00 pm)
With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows, written by Sandra Kalniete, a Latvian politician and diplomat, is a memoir of the author’s family banishment from Latvia to Siberia. The author was born in Siberia, where her parents had been expulsed. When she was 5, the family finally could return to Latvia. The family history remained unknown, no questions were ever asked. Only in the 1980s Kalniete started her journey into the past, searching for the truth hidden under the fear, trauma and Soviet propaganda.
The book is not a simple family memoir, but it also tells the story of Latvia’s 20th-century history determined by a nation’s struggles with the twin plagues infecting Central and Eastern Europe: communism and Nazism. A personal narrative draws complicated family relations, everyday lives of the deportees on the canvas of war, terror, Gulag, tortures. It is a story of the extreme humiliation of man, but also a proof that the will to live and the desire to preserve human dignity manifest themselves in all conditions.
The book was a best-seller in Latvia and has been translated into several languages, including English, French, German, Italian, Japanese and Arabic. The Polish translation of the book is available for purchase at Znak publishing house website.
Sandra Kalniete was among the founders and leaders of the Popular Front of Latvia (LTF), the movement that restored Latvia’s independence in 1990. Between 1993 and 2002 she served as ambassador to the UN, France and UNESCO. After serving as foreign minister of Latvia (2002–04), she was appointed the first Latvian commissioner of the European Union in 2004. Since 2009 she is a member of the European Parliament, where among other duties she is chair of the Reconciliation of European Histories group. Sandra Kalniete is also a member of ENRS Advisory Board.