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0000017c-60f7-de77-ad7e-f3f73a140000WMUK's weekly show on the literary community in Southwest Michigan. Between The Lines previously aired on Fridays during Morning Edition and All Things Considered.

Between the Lines: Erna's Life

Dawn Cochran

Erna Roberts was only 22, and expecting her first of four daughters, when she watched Soviet tanks roll down the streets of Latvia’s capitol city, Riga. In the coming days, she would lose her home, her family would scatter, and the life she had known would be gone forever. Her mother, grandfather, and 16-year-old brother were captured and deported to Siberia. Her father went into hiding in the woods. Erna and her husband became refugees overnight.

The slim biography, Erna’s Life, by Janice Whelan, is the story of Erna Murmanis-Roberts, a 98-year-old Latvian woman who came to the United States during World War Two as a refugee from the Soviet occupation. Roberts now lives in Adrian, Michigan, where she met Whelan.

BTL-ErnaLatvia-Full-Web.mp3
A conversation with Janice Whelan and Erna Murmanis-Roberts

“Erna lives in an apartment building three houses down from my home,” says Whelan as she describes why decided to write the book about Erna Roberts’ memories. “I was a high school friend of her youngest daughter, Inara. Then I became adult friends with her third daughter, Zaiga. While Zaiga encouraged the writing of the book, eldest daughter Astride spearheaded the project. The girls had always asked their mother Erna to tell her story. But Erna didn’t want to talk about it.”

Credit Janice Whelan

Roberts’ four daughters were persistent. They convinced their mother, then 95, to tell her life story, and they convinced Whelan to transcribe it. A retired Adrian Public Schools language arts teacher, Whelan knew a good story when she heard one. She agreed to write the book for Roberts’ family, but found it that it held interest for other people too.

“Growing up next to Erna and her family, I had had no idea what they had been through,” Whelan says. “Erna didn’t want to talk about the good times, either, because it made her very sad to think about all that she had lost.”

“It wasn’t easy,” Roberts agrees. “But when I started, I just started at the beginning and step-by-step, told it to the end. Nothing flowery or made up, I just told it as it was.”

Roberts grew up in a well-to-do family. Her father was the very successful owner of a construction company. He was also a philanthropist, building schools and churches in his town. By the time Roberts was ten, her father was bringing her into the office, teaching her how to keep the books using an abacus. She learned skills that would help her later in life, as a newly-emigrated young woman in Tecumseh, Michigan, looking for work.

When the war began, however, Roberts had only recently married. And during the war, and the following refugee years, when she lived with her family in DP (displaced persons) camps in Germany, Roberts’ marriage began to fall apart. She says her husband, torn from his roots, felt lost and without purpose. He looked for it instead with a mistress and abandoned his family. Roberts had to raise her children alone. The couple reunited in outward appearance only in order to be allowed to immigrate to the United States, then parted ways again.

Roberts found a new life in southeastern Michigan, where she met her second husband, and has lived there ever since. She was eventually able to visit Latvia and was reunited with her mother decades after they had been separated.

“You live next to someone and think you know them,” Whelan says. “But I just knew her as my friend’s mom. I came to see a whole different side to Erna and about a part of the world I had known nothing about.”

Listen to WMUK's Between the Lines every Tuesday at 7:50 a.m., 11:55 a.m., and 4:20 p.m.

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Zinta Aistars is our resident book expert. She started interviewing authors and artists for our Arts & More program in 2011.
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