This study is about the Karelians who were forced to leave their homes in World War II. In 1939 -1941 Karelians had to leave their homes, as a result of the Russian invasion in Finland. It was winter war between Russia and Finland, and those Karelians were living near the border with Russia in East-Finland. When the war broke out all the people living by the border were evacuated to other parts of Finland (West of Finland). These people belonged to Karelia and were called Karelians.
What makes the situation differ from other people who immigrated in Finland is that these Karelians were Finnish people, even though they were linguistically and ethnically their own group of people hav-ing their own culture and way of speakhav-ing. They felt that they were Finnish and assimilated with the closely related Finnish people. In that time Finland was very much of an agricultural country.
When the fi rst invasion happened in 1939, the winter war began in November and everything happened very quickly. The Government had been giving an order that people near the border should leave their homes as soon as possible by railways. It was the time of World War II and it all happened following the unsuccessful negotiations on Russians territorial demands. Karelians did not think that they would leave their homes for good. They thought that after leaving they would come back to their homes and continue living their lives.
This is also what they were told. The emergency Settlement Act (pika-asutuslaki) was enacted in July 1940, to settle the refugees in other parts of the country.
By the time the peace treaty ending the winter war in March 1940 happened, Finland ceded about 10 percent of its territory to Russia. All the people believed that the war was over. Karelians were eager to get back to their homes at once. On June 1941 Finland joined Germany’s attack on Russia. By the end of August the Finnish parliament declared that the ceded areas were reunited to Finland
again, after the Finnish army had had a change to get back part of Karelia in the battle.
About two thirds of the Karelians returned to their homes and saw the destruction. Most of the homes were in very bad condition or completely destroyed. Because of their hard will and eagerness to feel that they were settled home again, they started to rebuild their homes and plant wheat and vegetables in their fi elds. In spite of all, it was wasted time, because unfortunately in the summer 1944 the Red Army pushed the Finnish troops back the same line of defence they had held at the end of the winter war. All the Karelians were evacuated and forced to leave their homes in Karelia again. Some of Karelians stayed there as long as they could, but the Paris peace treaty with the Allied forces in 1947 restored the borders of the 1940 peace treaty with some additional areas ceded to Russia. In the end, Finland lost Karelia to Russia and the rest of the Karelians had to settle in other parts of Finland.
Refugees from each Karelian village were settled in to designate targeted municipality. The availability of suitable land was affected to the number of refugees each municipality could replace. That depended on the pre-war farm size distribution and the quantity of the state-owned land. The most important fact in it was that the Karelians were allocated by the location of their municipality back in Karelia. Those Karelians who were evacuated from Western parts of Karelia were settled along the southern coast and those refugees from eastern part of Karelia were settled north from the southern coast and most of the northern Karelians were settled even further north of Finland. Karelians, who were from the municipalities around Viaborg, the largest city in Karelia, were settled close to the capital of Finland, Helsinki. It was planned so that all the Karelians from the same villages were settled to the same municipality and all the people from neighbouring villages were supposed to be settled close to each other.
This group of people had always been called Karelians but in this study I will also refer to them as migrated people or refugees. Their stories and narratives belong to a part of Finnish history, which is very little investigated or is almost completely missing from academic research. Thou I found many written life time stories or biographies, the studies about this subject were very rare.
Methodology
I used biographies and narratives in this study. In this way I could let the voices of migrants be heard. In history books, you do not often hear the voice of the minority. History is mostly written by the winners. In biographies and life stories you can feel history in another way. The stories are authentic and when you hear those narratives you can feel how the history is living in them and through them. Narratives give you a small clue of history which can make you realize something very new about it.
Internationally this method is called oral history. It is said to be information which is not written. It exists only in the memories of those people who have experienced it. Confi dentiality is inspired if it is possible to fi nd out much same kind of stories about the happening in history. Peltonen (2002) describes this kind of knowledge as very rare and individual but says that it is infl uenced by collective memory.
In collective memory these stories are told through the centuries and they stay alive in peoples’ minds. It is possible that these stories are also affecting to narratives.
Fingerroos and Peltonen (2006, pp. 9-10) do not describe the oral history only as memory knowledge. They pronounce that in Finland this oral history means also written knowledge; for example written biographies. In other words it means that memories can be both the source and the target in research, as well as implementation
or a plot. This kind of “second knowledge” (Hänninen, Karjalainen
& Lahti, 2005, pp. 3-5) is very personnel knowledge. It is also very specifi c and surprising information about the history, as well as exposed history. Hänninen also calls this kind of knowledge silent information, which can be very diffi cult to analyse, but which infl uences peoples’
manners and their ways of living. This kind of knowledge is question-ing the written history and gives space for the forgotten and replaced impressions.