Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories
    To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories
    To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories
    Ebook566 pages6 hours

    To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    Between 1939 and 1945, some 80,000 Finnish children were sent to Sweden, Denmark, and elsewhere, ostensibly to protect them from danger while their nation’s soldiers fought superior Soviet and German forces. This was the largest of all of World War II children’s transports, and although acknowledged today as “a great social-historical mistake,” it has received surprisingly little attention. This is the first English-language account of Finland’s war children and their experiences, told through the survivors’ own words. Supported by an extensive introduction, a bibliography of secondary sources, and over two dozen photographs, this book testifies to the often-lifelong traumas endured by youthful survivors of war.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBerghahn Books
    Release dateJun 1, 2015
    ISBN9781782386599
    To the Bomb and Back: Finnish War Children Tell Their World War II Stories

    Related to To the Bomb and Back

    Related ebooks

    Social Science For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Ready Or Not?

      Oct 20, 2021

      Ready Or Not?
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Apr 14, 2022

      As I was coming to the end of February’s issue, I was delighted to read Priya Atwal’s article about Ancient House Museum of Thetford Life (Explore, pictured below). I am always thrilled to find local museums in towns, usually hidden away and rarely w

      4 min read

    • Article

      Your Letters

      Oct 9, 2020

      Your Letters
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jun 28, 2022

      Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      Your LETTERS

      Mar 10, 2020

      Your LETTERS
      8 min read

    • Article

      Behind The Scenes Of We Work Together For The Benefit Of All

      Jun 15, 2023

      A Finnish immigrant at the turn of the last century, Matti Halminen became one of the few people to experience the establishment of the Malcolm Island settlement from its earliest stages to its ultimate ideological demise. He was a true believer in t

      2 min read

    • Article

      Postie’s Here!

      Dec 28, 2016

      Share your thoughts with the Inside History team. INSIDE HISTORYCONVERT I have followed you for ages on Facebook and, just this past Father’s Day, decided to order a year’s subscription to your magazine for my father. My father, who has been research

      2 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jun 2, 2020

      Letters
      6 min read

    • Article

      Books & gifts

      Dec 10, 2021

      Books & gifts
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Sep 22, 2020

      Reviews
      3 min read

    • Article

      ‘I Uncovered My Parents’ Second World War Secrets’

      Jun 2, 2020

      On the night of 11 December 1940, air-raid sirens blared out over the Essex town of Southend-on-Sea. Newlyweds Stan and Doris King had returned from the sweet factory that they owned to their home on Mount Avenue. But there was little time to head fo

      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Aug 6, 2020

      Reader Joseph Nicholas is correct when he writes (Letters, August) that the main focus of the Allies’ attempt to break the Soviet Union’s blockade of West Berlin in 1948–49 was an airlift, with planes full of food and other essential materials landin

      4 min read

    • Article

      Your LETTERS

      Jan 8, 2021

      Your LETTERS
      12 min read

    • Article

      BOOKS & co

      Jun 12, 2020

      By Mike Wood Dunkirk and D-Day are both iconic dates in history. And they’re also the bookend dates in Mike Wood’s new book – A Soldier’s Story – about his father’s war years. One of the last men to be evacuated from the beaches at Dunkirk, and a wit

      6 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jan 11, 2022

      Letters
      5 min read

    • Article

      Your Letters

      Oct 14, 2022

      Your Letters
      8 min read

    • Article

      Reviews

      Jan 11, 2022

      Reviews
      5 min read

    • Article

      New Zealand Books

      Jun 9, 2019

      Vincent O’Malley follows his magisterial survey of the war in the Waikato – The Great War for New Zealand – with a concise account of all those conflicts that come under this title. It aims to be, as the blurb elaborates, an “accessible introduction

      4 min read

    • Article

      Books With The Most Impact

      Dec 4, 2021

      Books With The Most Impact
      7 min read

    • Article

      Ans Westra (1936-2023)

      May 12, 2023

      Ans Westra (1936-2023)
      5 min read

    • Article

      Winter Reads!

      Dec 11, 2020

      Winter Reads!
      5 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jan 12, 2021

      WIN an AncestryDNA test kit from ancestry.co.uk WORTH £79 The writer of our star letter wins an AncestryDNA test worth £79 – so drop us a line and share your thoughts with us. If, like me, you know family members were too young to have enlisted or

      6 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Jul 27, 2021

      Letters
      8 min read

    • Article

      He Saved 669 Children From Nazis — A New Book Tells His Story To Kids

      Jan 27, 2021

      In Nicky & Vera, Peter Sís chronicles the work of Nicholas Winton, who helped hundreds kids escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia in 1938.

      4 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Apr 16, 2020

      If the interview with Simon Jenkins in your March issue (A Welsh Tragedy?) is anything to go by, I suspect his recent Radio 4 documentary – controversially entitled Wales: A Twentieth-Century Tragedy? – was largely based on flimsy anecdotal evidence.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Letters

      Apr 4, 2023

      Email wdytyaeditorial@ourmedia.co.uk Write to WDYTYA? Magazine, Eagle House, Bristol BS1 4ST WIN an AncestryDNA test kit from ancestry.co.uk WORTH £79 The writer of our star letter wins an AncestryDNA test worth £79-so drop us a line and share your t

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for To the Bomb and Back

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      To the Bomb and Back - Sue Saffle

      1

      The Work of Sorrow

      Marja Hultin Barron

      In the fall of 1939, when it looked like Russia was going to attack Finland, we lived in a large building in the center of Turku where my father, Heikki Hultin, worked as a superintendent or caretaker. I was four at this time, and I remember him letting me help him repair plumbing, elevators, and so forth. He would also take me to the top terrace of the building and show me the view all the way to the sea. He was my everything. He and mother were thirty, and my brother Jukka was born that summer.

      When the bombardments began, women and children were evacuated into the countryside. Father’s elderly parents knew a farmer at Parainen on the coast, and mother, Jukka, and I went there to live in a spare room in the attic of a big red house. Earlier, father had completed his armed service in the navy and now had to be retrained for land fighting. Around Christmas and before being sent to the frontier, he took off from the barracks in Turku on a bicycle, as public transportation had stopped. It was extremely cold when in heavy snow he made his way more than twenty miles to see us. I woke up when he was lifting the baby in his arms towards the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. He was admiring Daddy’s little man, and I was told to go back to sleep. In the morning he was gone.

      In March my mother heard that he had been reported missing in action at Pienpero on the Karelian isthmus, and she was crushed. I remember her lying under a blanket with dark red flowers on it with her face turned to the wall, hoping that she could die to be next to Heikki. And, now, whenever I see that blanket, horrible sad thoughts come to me. Because father’s body was never found, a funeral service was arranged for him in Turku, and a white sheet was to be placed in the empty grave.¹ I wondered why, when we didn’t have much, a good sheet should be used. My relatives were crying, and I was given pansies, which I was told to throw into the grave. I protested, wanting to keep them, but finally I threw them in. My mother and the other women wore black veils, and to this day it still makes me shudder when I think of those times.

      During the interim peace from March 1940 to June 1941, my mother, brother, and I were transported by horse and sleigh to Turku. I thought it was an exciting adventure, but mother could only cry. When we tried to return to our home, we were forbidden by the proprietress, as father was no longer providing services for the building. So we went to live in mother’s childhood home. Many buildings and houses had been destroyed by Russian bombs, so mother felt her small family should be pleased to move into this house now shared by many. I remember that we chopped wood for the cooking stove and carried it up from the crawl space assigned to us by grandmother. From a well some hundred yards away, we winched water up in a bucket, then walked up steps that were icy from spills to bring it home. How unpleasant it was to live on rationed food and use the outhouse!

      Mother made sacrifices, feeding her children first, though she was terribly thin and anemic. We grew potatoes, vegetables, berries, and apples in the yard and rabbits in hutches. To feed the rabbits, we collected grass from the roadside and dried it in the attic. One Christmas, mother’s mother prepared a rabbit for dinner, and its fur was used in clothing. Most Christmases we spent at father’s parents where his memory was maintained as that of a hero, having given his life so that we could live in a free country. When I missed father, I would cry and be told to stop because he was in heaven with Jesus. Although mother had suitors she never married, always hoping for her Heikki to return.

      Father’s family knew people in the country, and his sister Judith would bring us goods that we needed. Grandmother’s sisters who lived in the United States also sent parcels with soap, candy, and clothing, which was taken apart and made into new garments. Through an organization in Helsinki, an older unmarried woman in Sweden got our address and sent us small sums of money as well.

      When Russian hostilities resumed in June 1941, I remember not wanting to undress when going to bed in case we’d have to run to the shelter if the alarm sounded to warn Russian airplanes were approaching. Mother taught us to pile all our clothes on a chair like firemen, so as to quickly get them on. When the alarm sounded, we would run into a neighbor’s cellar into which people crowded. Children slept on top of potatoes while people prayed and sang hymns in the dark or by candlelight. When we did not make it to the shelter and bombs were already falling, we sat at the bottom of the stairs with mother hugging us to her sides, and I asked, Mother, are we going to die now? She answered, I do not know, but the main thing is that we are together.

      Early in 1942, a Swedish women’s organization invited war widows to a Swedish resort called Kungshamn. Dozens of mothers with children traveled from Turku in the hold of a ship. I was happy with our top bunk and enjoyed the excitement as ice floes beat loudly on the side. From the Stockholm harbor, we continued on a bus and were welcomed by volunteers for the organization in a large white villa on a hill where we were given nourishing food and good used clothes. Swedes wishing to take Finnish children into foster care came to pick the ones they liked, and everybody wanted my two-year-old blonde, blue-eyed brother, but mother would not part with him. At this time I was six and was asked to stay with a smiling, childless, middle-aged couple. I looked them over and, whereas I did not want to be separated from mother and Jukka, I said I’d stay because they promised me clothes and much good food. When mother and Jukka left it was bittersweet, standing on the shore watching their boat passing through a channel in the ice made by an ice-breaker. I worried about them returning to our war-torn homeland, was unhappy for being left behind, and felt guilty but also relieved to be staying in a safe place. Staying at Kungshamn until the Swedish couple came for me, I remember trying to say farewell again to mother and Jukka whose boat from Stockholm to Finland would have to pass the resort. Seeing the ship, I went on to the ice and waved like mad. The big boys chuckled at me, saying, "They won’t see you from the

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1