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Mother took Father’s death very hard. All of us were overwhelmed with grief. We lived as if in a haze. The most terrible day in the history of Estonia came: the deportation starting on 14th June 1941. It changed the life of our family completely. It was not during the day, but on the night of 13th June. Somebody rang at the door, when everybody was asleep. A couple of men came in. I don’t remember if they were wearing NKVD [15] uniforms or not. We were apprised that our family would be deported. We were given two hours to pack our things. Those people had the lists. They found our family name on the list and started demanding that we should wake up our Father. Those lists must have been compiled in advance. At any rate, Father was included in the list. Father had died two months earlier, and those people came to our apartment, looked for him and didn’t want to believe that he had died. How come, he was in the list!
Three families – my mother and I, my sister and her husband and my brother and his wife – were exiled. If Father had been alive, he would have been sent to the Gulag [16] as exploiter and ‘enemy of the people’ [17], and we, the members of the family of an ‘enemy of the people,’ were not sent to the Gulag, but into exile. Then I understood how lucky Father was to have died before that day. He had heart trouble and most likely he would have died in the train. If he was to survive the trip, it would be hard to imagine what a tormenting solitary death was awaiting him in Gulag, and we would never have known where his grave was. Only grandmother and Aunt Breine stayed in Tallinn as they formally were not considered as members of our family, and remained untouched.
Three families – my mother and I, my sister and her husband and my brother and his wife – were exiled. If Father had been alive, he would have been sent to the Gulag [16] as exploiter and ‘enemy of the people’ [17], and we, the members of the family of an ‘enemy of the people,’ were not sent to the Gulag, but into exile. Then I understood how lucky Father was to have died before that day. He had heart trouble and most likely he would have died in the train. If he was to survive the trip, it would be hard to imagine what a tormenting solitary death was awaiting him in Gulag, and we would never have known where his grave was. Only grandmother and Aunt Breine stayed in Tallinn as they formally were not considered as members of our family, and remained untouched.
Period
Year
1941
Location
Talinn
Estonia
Interview
Mariasha Vasserman