There have recently been quite a few articles in the Estonian language pages of this paper about personal escapes from Estonia 60 years ago. They were all thought provoking, especially those where the participants came close to catastrophe and almost didn’t make it to freedom. Others involved interesting life stories about how the first generation coped in exile as refugees.

I grew up with the stories of what my parents and many of their friends went through. The ceremonies and church services in remembrance of these events have received excellent coverage and caused many of us to reflect on our roots and what our parents went through fleeing from the scourge of Stalinist communism and the Red Army.

Some comments made by speakers at these events, however, can be disturbing. For example, a senior member of a congregation speaking at an after church service social event sounded quite upset, reportedly because in his mind, nobody from the second or third generations had bothered to attend. He castigated the audience for not having instilled in their children and grandchildren sufficient Estonian background for them to know what it meant for the first generation to leave the fatherland. For good measure it was thrown in that had the first generation not managed to escape, their children (the ingrates who didn’t bother showing up) in all probability would have been born in Siberia! Unfortunately and perhaps given the emotion involved, it seemed to escape the speaker’s attention that the minister as well as the organist and possibly others in attendance, were in fact of the second generation, many of who are now approaching late middle age.

While a few might agree, other readers familiar with the numbers of people deported to Siberia would point out that only about 3% of the population of Estonia in fact was deported. About half of these were deported in 1941 prior to the mass refugee exodus towards the end of the Second World War. The chances of being born in Estonia rather than Siberia were at least 98.5% and probably higher if your parents were living in an urban centre, since the purpose of the second, post-war wave of deportations was to pave the way for collectivization of agriculture, not to terrorize and wipe out the highest levels of Estonian society as was done in the first wave. Also, unless a woman was pregnant at the time of deportation she was unlikely to bear children in Siberia since families were cruelly and deliberately separated immediately in order to render the victims more docile.

This is not to trivialize what happened but rather to put it into rational perspective. The population that was forced through circumstances to remain in Estonia during the second Soviet occupation was not deported wholesale, contrary to the impression some of the older generation tend to convey. Also, a seldom mentioned fact is that proportionately ten times more Estonian Jews than other citizens were deported by the Soviets based on their representation in the general population.

There has increasingly been a general lack of participation in events on the part of many, if not the majority of the second and third generation of Canadian Estonians, particularly noticeable in the outlying areas from the GTA, which continues to cause angst among some of the first generation for what it portends for the future.

One has to ask whether the fault is all one sided. Perhaps the first generation with its sometimes excessive zeal and emotion in the past and even presently bears some responsibility for sparse attendance by the younger generations. In any event, at this stage, exhorting the first generation, now well into their sunset years, to dictate to their adult children what to think and do about events that happened before they were even born, seems futile at best.

The fact that Estonia has been a vibrant free sovereign state for well over a decade perhaps has something to do with low attendance, since it’s so easy now to visit the fatherland or even read the papers or listen to the news “on line”. You don’t have to go to “Aktus” or church to hear Estonian and when you visit the fatherland it can be quite an initial shock to realize that even the young people (and there are lots of them everywhere!) all speak Estonian better than we can. Also one doesn’t have to put up with curmudgeons and ultra nationalists at these events who chide you for your rusty Estonian language skills and not having raised your children sufficiently “Estonian”. Granted that these tend to be a minority but they can be an irritation nevertheless.

Anyway, the 60th anniversary of the exodus from the fatherland has passed. Some have chosen to return to the fatherland they left so long ago. Life goes on and the cataclysmic events of 60 years ago will fade from living memory all too soon. We should not forget this chapter in our history, but perhaps some of the older generation still in leadership positions could be more judicious in their choice of words.

The world has changed much in the last six decades and Canadian Estonian society has changed even more. It would be better to dwell on the positive and focus on what can be done to stem the loss of even more of the younger generations. Perhaps a few of those many thousands lost over the decades could somehow even be enticed to return.

Märkmed: