When the German-Soviet treaty was signed I was a priest in Riga...When the Soviets entered the Baltic Provinces, so at the beginning everything was all right, but later they gradually began to harass us. First people started disappearing; it turned out that they were arrested, and later already at the end of the Soviet power people in large numbers were taken away somewhere to the center, deep into Soviet-Russia...when the Germans came, one could not notice particularly the German pressure on the church. But subsequently the German civil authorities as well as the Latvian authorities started, to poke their nose everywhere...when the Soviets started to transport Latvians...The Latvians became friendly toward the Germans...And to the end, all the time there was a great bond between them and the Germans, a big friendship...And a Latvian army existed with the same rights as the German /army/.

And I had very many acquaintances among Jews who were in the ghetto, mostly intelligensia...I and my wife, we used to get up very early in the morning especially with the purpose only to see them when they were led to the work...And so we greeted them on the sly and they used to answer us in the same manner in passing. Because if the Germans would only have noticed our greetings...would have put us in the ghetto...In the end result...in 1943, there were comparatively few of them who were led to work in the mornings.

When the Germans started leaving Latvia...everyone of us had the feeling that to remain in Riga means to be for sure annihilated by the Soviet authorities because we happened already to be enemies of the Soviet power insofar as we did not leave together with the Soviet troops when they departed...At the same time one didn't feel like leaving Riga going somewhere into the unknown and so with the Germans whom we already had learned to know...a nation which is exclusively dedicated to aggression and enslavement of mankind, and were compelled kind of, to choose the lessor of two evils. But we had no chance even to do so since the Germans in a compulsory mannermade everybody join the evacuation; and after having embarked us in the lagers, and in order that we may not escape from these lagers fenced around by a triple wiring, they hanged on the chest of everybody his own number and the number of the lager and photograped us...

It was not permitted to leave the quarters of the very lager, and even if they let one go out to the city once in a month or two, for an hour or two one had no right to ride on a streetcar or on a bus but had to walk in the middle of the street, in the middle of the street on foot.

...I lived in Berlin until the arrival of the Americans...On the ninth of February I left for Auerbach to join my family, and there I was met by the Americans...The sixth of April, 1945...There the Americans gave me the possibility right away to organize an Orthodox church, placing at my disposal a little Catholic Kirk...I have a magnificent church equipped by our own efforts...We had no icons, but we ourselves are drawing here /our own/ and our icons will enviously compare with the ancient...I too had the opportunity to see here at the homes of some German acquaintances when I happened to meet them, I too saw Russian icons and they used to show them to me...they did not give them up because they consider them of financial value. And in most cases the Germans used to tell me that these were sent as gifts by their relatives who were in Russia.

Tell me this, you used to meet Germans and all kinds of people, what did they think about the war, and what are they thinking about it?
             In my opinion the Germans were aggressors for centuries...I am not a politician but I think German always thought of how to enslave Europe...and if they right now to a certain extent are silent because they were utterly defeated, nevertheless as soon as they will have materially recuperated they will start again holding speeches claiming that they are a pure Aryan race and that all the others are /Untermenschen/ -- sub-men...in my opinion if there are repenting Germans they are in small number, a small percentage. They look at us even now as an extraneous element, an element unnecessary for them. Though they are guilty in all misfortunes and in all troubles they whose government had forced us to leave our fatherland. And still they don't give us here a chance to enjoy full rights. At present, though they don't show it openly, in all their actions, in all their movements, in all their behavior one can see how they hate us. It is sufficient that if you take a streetcar...If I enter in my religious attire none of the Germans will ever offer me...a seat. But if at the same time, my deacon in "regular" clothing is traveling with me, the Germans taking him for a German immediately offered a seat. However, when he without sitting down started offering me the seat in Russian, they seeing that he too was a foreigner occupied again the seat and did not give us a chance to sit down. These are the kind of trifles they show in everything; not only toward Russians or Poles, toward Jews, but even toward those Germans who now left Poland considering them as people who have already become more or less "easternized".....

I would like to say /he speaks in a raised voice, passionately after a long pause/ Our brethren in Christ, save us, save us from the abuse /he sobs/ to which we are subjected already for twenty-seven years. We suffer, we smart, we lost our fatherland, we /many of us/ have lost their families, we lost all our property, we are now given our piece of bread like alms thrown to beggars. Regardless of that--that thousands of us belonging to the intelligensia, thousands of engineers, thousands of professors sit around without utilizing their skill, and how much benefit could they have brought to mankind? But that is not all, one ting more, which is in store for us, and that is the most terrible; we got used already to all deprivation, but to go back to our fatherland, to go back to the "Father of Nations", to Stalin, that threatens us with inevitable death. And if you, our brethern in Christ, if you won't help us if you won't redeem us from here, if you won't take us over to your lands, then you must know that many more of us will have to die there, on their native soil. Our request to you is--save us...Oh, redeem the ruins of that Russia, which for twenty-seven years now is navigating without sails and without rudder on the great ocean of sorrow and blood. Amen!