The second commentary on the Estonian language version of this article is most interesting and I wish somebody with better translations skills than I would make it available to younger generations that have rusty language skills.
My father was a small boat refugee and what he told me is in accord with what padipogenik wrote, however, I was not aware of the special operation just off Karala which is close to where my father was from.
By the way, have any of you had difficulty explaining to your children what Estonians were doing abord a Nazi ship evacuating them to fairly comfortable houses requisitioned from German civilians? Have you heard of a ship headed to Germany evacuating a group known as the "kuld fasaanid"?
It may not be a good idea to dig too deeply in this bad time for Estonians.
Yes, the first 10 years or so were hard but nothing compared to what my relatives went through behind the iron curtain.

There is an interesting article in the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies
Volume 36,No.7,August 2010,pp, 1157-1174 on this topic.
Growing up I always thought that we "small boat people" were in the majority here given that all the pictures about the great exodus involved small boats. I notice even this article has this picture.
The actual numbers were as follows:
Nazi Germany "ship people" 40k of which 23 came to North America.
Sweden 27 k of which 2 k came to North America.
My group consists of less than 10 percent of the North American diaspora. I did not spend 4 or 5 years in Estonian run schools in Germany.
I am starting to realize why my outlook is somewhat different from the mainstream.
Something to think about.