Memoirs of successive evacuation trails

After the Winter War, in 1940, large numbers of residents of Karelia, the eastern border and the bombed cities were transferred to the countryside for civil protection reasons. In order to settle the Karelians, in the spirit of the Winter War unanimity, a Law on Rapid resettlement was enacted, by means of which tens of thousands of evacuee families started farming in new residential areas. During the peace, return and reconstruction began in ruined Karelia. A large part of the migrants returned to their home communities, even though they would also have had the right to remain on their settlements. The resumption of the war in June 1941 also brought military political nuances to the settlement of Karelia.

An Anthology of Wartime Children written by writers born in 1933-40, paints an intimate picture with emotions such as longing, empathy, prejudice, a sense of inferiority, adaptation, or indifference. The writers depict different ways in which children have reacted to fear and threat during the war and later in life – even for generations – and how imagination has given them wings in difficult times. Professor Laila Hirvisaari, who was born into a rural homestead, narrates about how she had to leave her home after the outburst of Winter war:

“I looked at the gate and cried. It was three years since Dad was on vacation. When he left, he turned twice from the gate into the living room and back. It was hard for him to leave mom and me, his only child, when returning back on the front. From that road, my Dad never returned. It felt so woeful, too, when going past that gate… I looked at our house, sauna and barn. I looked at three birches, my friends who were afraid of war as well.”¹

Hirvisaari writes about the evacuee trail:

“Eating supplies on the way was such that everyone offered each other bread, lard, butter, and then it was as if the supplies were exchanged. ‘Eat, my love, eat… my dear child, eat now!’” … … “But during that night it was warm. I remember it well, because I always held my hand under my cheek. For some reason, I had slept in the following cattle wagon. In the morning I woke up to Aunt Mari Tuuva clapping her hands and shouting loudly: My dear Lord, that baby is lying next to cow shit… Oh boy, wasn’t there laughter for some time.”

In the memories by Hirvisaari she was under the protection of a big family capable of sharing with a sense of humour that acted like a buffer. And they had the luck to meet with house-lenders capable of empathy, too:

“There I sat on the steps of the Minor house of that Jäppilä farm and cried a little while I thought about the war. And I got this wondrous feeling when all the people in that yard cared about us. The women of the Minor House always stroked my hair and hugged awkwardly.”

However, Ulla Savolainen, a researcher of oral history, writes about memoirs as a source of the past, emphasising the memory narrator’s ability for self-reflection: “Therefore, idyllic writings, for example, cannot be seen as reflecting the author’s understanding of reality directly”. This can be applied to Hirvisaari’s humour-inspired evacuation recollections, which fit the stereotype of cheerful Karelians. An autobiographical recollection of a woman from a farm-owning family who was evacuated as a young wife, on the other hand, is more realistic:

“We lived day by day as visitors within foreign gates, in poor conditions, trying to buy the most necessary household and clothing for us, our apartment was so cold that in the winter the water froze inside the bucket but in springtime it was warmer inside as it was warm outside, too. The people at the house were kind to us, and they gave firewood to us so we could keep the fire in the little stove during the day, but the room was flimsy, and cold at night when the stove was not heated. Life was distressing when we knew from the news that our home had been lost and everything, had to try in those circumstances, there was no choice. My husband was released in the spring of 1940.”

A more lasting resettlement of the evacuated population was organised after the Continuation war. The Moscow armistice (signed between Soviet Union, Great Britain and Finland), that ended the war in most of Finland, was signed on 19.9.1944. The aim was to place the population evacuated from Karelia in as uniform an area as possible. Still, the winter of 1944-1945 was spent by part of the settlers in temporary accommodation housed and catered by the maintenance organisation. The same farmer’s wife reminisced:

“We were able to move into a still unfinished house on November 5, 1945. Everything was unfinished but living right there left more time to craft and fix up the place. During the construction, a temporary stove was made between the stones so that I could cook food and heat drinks for the family because the way to our lodging was rather long, I took care of the livestock and milked the cows. In the rain we kept rain under a big spruce, to the apartment we went just for the night.”²

The move to the actual resettlement area did not take place until the resident board had appointed a settler to the farm applied for or until access to the farm by voluntary transaction had become possible. The main consequence of the implementation of the resettlement plan was that the agricultural population of Karelia generally remained more tightly together than the population of industrial municipalities. It was considered important that the old neighbourly relations were kept alive and that the conditions of the new home and farm corresponded as much as possible to the natural, linguistic and religious conditions prevailing in the surrendered area. Southern Finland, and especially Southern Tavastland became the core resettling area of the migrants. The lives of migrant population who were not protected by the rules and quotas of the those protected by Resettlement law became very harsh, as the author Raisa Lardot wrote about the evacuation trip and the apartment of her family who had moved from behind Petrozavodsk:

“After the war, the name refugee camp was not yet used. Like many others, we were placed in immigrant camps. But we had escaped for our lives, that is clear. Our father was a traitor in the eyes of the Red army, because he had changed sides and became a soldier in the Finnish army…” … “It can be said that the early years in Finland were a miserable time for us. Our mother tried to support six minor children as a single parent. At first, there were not even child allowances yet. We lived in a kind of construction site hut. In design, it was an ordinary house, but built for workers working in a sand pit. A few Karelian families also lived in the house with us.”³

In Raisa Lardot’s memoirs, she uses third person consistently, when talking about Karelians. She had an ingrained notion of difference in her childhood, and as a writer she has also boldly highlighted her suffering as a refugee displaced from her home, and stages it differently from the ‘great story’ of Finns who persevere no matter what. Her suffering was of a refugee displaced from her home and whose father had been returned back as part of Finland’s post-war extradition treaty with the Soviet Union. In that respect, Lardot’s father’s fate is reminiscent of the fate of Russian war captives, who had been placed to work on Finnish farms around the country, and who were afraid of being returned to Russia where they were treated as deserters. War captives were not the only ones who lived under surveillance, during the war. After the Moscow armistice, so called ‘susceptible people’, citizens of Germany and Hungarians had to be gathered into camps, where they lived until 1947. Many of these camps were situated in Southern Tavastland. The local Finnish inhabitants, however, felt pity for the interned people and tried to ease their life with small supportive actions.