I interviewed ten persons for my study. Their stories were very authentic and sensitive. Actually, it was not easy to sit and listen when they were telling their stories. I felt to be as their psychotherapist. As a researcher I was surprised how clearly they remembered the wartime and the evacuation.
When the war broke out, they had to leave their homes quickly.
They were told that they could take with them only as much they could bear to carry. Most of the refugees had to travel to the West by railway. In their narratives they were describing the journey very clearly. They could still remember the chaos which there was in the station. Some of the children lost their families, because it was so crowded there. War time child is telling:
“I tried to keep my sorrows from others and many ti mes it felt overwhelming to me. I learn to keep it inside of me and never told about my sorrows to anyone. I could not have added to my mother’s sorrows. She had so many of them already.”
I will now tell a story of a wartime child who is describing her evacua tion and the war time and about her life afterwards in Finland.
“I remember the warm atmosphere at my home in Karelia. I had two brothers and a mother and father. I was about seven years old and we were living in a small Village in Karelia. Mother was oft en baking and cooking. We used to have a litt le farm and my father knew how to do everything with his own bare hands. We got help from neighbours if we needed, because everyone in the village knew each other very well. We had many relati ves also living near by. One evening one old granny game to visit, she was known to be the one who knows everything about everything... The rumours and so on. She told my parents something awful, I could see it from their faces. Aft erwards the atmosphere at the house changed and we were not allowed to go out or keep the light on anymore or mother was not able to bake during day ti me. Even the food had to be done at night. We had to shut the windows and cover them with the sheets. At nights we could hear the bombing from far away. Someti mes the planes fl ew so close by that the windows broke. It happened in school yard, when we were playing. Suddenly
many aeroplanes fl ew over the school and they were fl ying very down and the noise was awful. And we ran to the nearest fi eld to see them and our teacher was screaming and calling us to come indoors. When we were inside, we could hear the bombing from far. And our teacher asked us to pack our things and to go home straight away. And we did go, but that was it, we did not go to school anymore in that year.” (Amanda)
Amanda told me in her lifetime story how they moved to Satakunda with her mother and two brothers. Her father went to serve in the army and he was in the frontlines near the border with Russia. Just before leaving their home, they had received the sad message about her father. He had died in the battle. She said she could not remember much about it, but that her mother was devastated. They were evacuated quickly after that sad message. She remembered the journey by railway to west Finland. In between travelling, the train stopped and they were offered some food. It was cold in the train and people tried to stay beside their loved ones in order to feel safe. When they arrived at their destination, everything was unclear and they had to settle in the beginning in one house belonging to the church. They stayed there for some days, before someone came to take them to their farm house. She said that they got one bedroom from that house, but because the family did not have more place to give them, soon they had to change the place to another house nearby in the same village. This is the way how they were forced to move from house to house. Who ever needed help from her mother, because she used to be a good cook and knew also very well to care the household, liked to have them in their house.
Once it happened that her family settled to a house, where the room was very cold. There was one young man living in the neighbour-hood who was interested in her mother. One evening he came to the room were they stayed and took her in his arms and said to her mother that now he will take this girl to live in a warmer house and
he will be more than happy if her mother will come after with the rest of the family to live there too. Afterwards her mother and that man got married and she got other brothers.
In Amanda’s story you could fi nd the hardship in her life when she was very young. She lost her father and felt how those people behaved when they came to west Finland. She said that she often felt that she was different and that others did not want to play with her at school. They called her names, but she did not care. Afterwards when her mother got married the situation was different because they got a new family and new relatives in their lives. It was easier to adapt themselves to West Finland and it `s culture.
There was a story of a man, whom I call here Tauno. He had many brothers and sisters. They were evacuated to one small town. In that town they were treated badly and they were given an old house to live in. They were all together nine sleeping in the small bedroom, when his father happened to be at home. Then mother heard about the change to be able to send her children to Sweden if she was not able to take care of them by herself. In that time there was a lack of food and life was a big struggle. She decided to give up her children for the sake of the war and because of her bad economical situation.
Her husband was a sailor, and he was a lot away. First she sent two of the children to Sweden, one of them was a man whom I interviewed.
And in the end she sent there also her youngest son. Tauno was telling me a very creepy story about the journey to Sweden with his sister.
First they went by train to Turku and from there to Vaasa. From there their journey continued by ship to Sweden. He and his sister were not very lucky, because they did not get a warm and kind family over there. First they felt like strangers, because they did not know the language and because all the people around were strangers. Of course they felt also homesick and very unsafe. The only thing that they had was that they had each other and their home language. Tauno said in the interview that he and his sister were very sad children over there
in Sweden. They had to work hard as if they would have been adults and their foster parents were not nice to them.
“My foster parents told us that we should not eat so much, because children don’t need so much to eat as adults and we should work hard to get something to eat. And we were forced to go to fi elds or to woods to cut the trees for heati ng. Mostly I had to work hard work, because I was older and I was a boy. In a few years I managed to earn some pocket money by working also for the neighbours.
With that money I managed to buy for myself some clothes, because my foster parents did not want to give me any clothes, except those that they had got from the government offi ce.”(Tauno)
They did not get any love and care from their new parents. But soon they picked up the language and got used to their situation.
When Tauno heard about the change to go back home, he forced the foster parents to make contact with his parents and let him go home.
He told me also about his little brother who was sent to live in the neighbourhood. He insisted to take his brother with him and to go home to Finland. Their sister had been adopted by the foster parents and she stayed there in Sweden. After coming home life was not easy.
He was put in school in Finland even though he had forgotten the Finnish language. At school they called him names and there was no one to understand his situation. Adding to that his mother had got divorced and moved to a small village. In that time it was very rare to be a single mother taking care of the children alone.
“It did not matt er for me, even if they called me with names at school. I used to it in Sweden, that I was there diff erent. There I did not know the language very well and here in Finland I had forgot the Finnish language. They called me and my brother as Swedish Guy’s.
The diffi culti es at school were caused also because my mother was a single mother and because we were Karelians.” (Tauno)
But Tauno managed these hard times and the war was ending. He got a job in Turku in a factory. He got married and decided to move back to Sweden because he had heard that it is easy for Finnish men to get a job over there. He did not have any problem anymore with the language either.
“Even though we (me and my wife) did know the language already well, they noti ced that we were Finnish workers at that factory in Sweden. We were good workers, but even that, we were always called lazy. If we said something against the boss, they started to call us second hand Finnish people. Someti mes I felt so angry inside me, but tried to keep it all inside and to behave myself and tried to be just as normal a person as I ever could be.” (Tauno)
From Tauno`s narrative it is possible to realize that he did not feel at home anywhere after loosing his trust in life in those hard years in Sweden and in Finland. He told me that he felt homeless, even now that he had come back to Finland with his wife. Just before some time of the interview, his wife died and he felt lonely. He didn’t feel to be at home in Finland and that is the reason why he was thinking of moving outside of Finland again and to live the rest of his life somewhere else.