Ivar came up to me. “Busy, isn’t it?” he said. “We are about to begin.” He crossed over to the hall to close the drapes. A young man from Sweden opened them again, dust clouds whirling, and Ivar looked at me, shrugging ironically. Swedish TV was filming. A technician was testing the mike on the podium, saying, “One, two, three,” over and over. I was filming, too, with my little video camera. A man accidentally stumbled over the tripod. A Swedish boy of about nine standing next to me watched the camera shake. He looked at me impassively, and then reached out and kicked the tripod, quite casually. “Stop it!” I said sternly in English.
The choir, dressed in folk costumes, came onto the stage, and sang. A middle-aged Swede, probably the son of one of the refugees, tried to engage them in conversation afterwards. “So, do you speak Swedish? Did you learn some Swedish in school?” he asked cheerfully. The girls giggled, and one of them finally said, quite incorrectly, “No.” I overheard another Swede try to engage one of the men from the village in conversation, in Swedish. He smiled tersely in response, shrugged, and said one English word, “Sorry.” In the hall, former refugees were meeting again. Some of them were speaking Estonian, not Swedish: “So, how is life in Canada?” “Oh, it’s fine, fine.” “Is there a lot of work?” “Oh yes.” I was standing around, filming, listening casually to the trivial conversations.
After the singing, there was a show of Swedish ethnographic films about the Swedes in Estonia from the 1930s and 1940s. There were two films about the island of Runö, one of them dating from the 1930s, possibly when Gunnar Schantz, the agronomist and missionary, was still there, the other from 1944. Both of them were silent. They were remarkably alike. In the 1930s film the camera panned over scenes from life on the island, with captions like “The Life of the People,” “Traditional Games,” “Folk Costumes,” “The Boats,” “This Island Has Been Inhabited by Swedes since Time Immemorial,” “One of the Thatched Roofs in the Village Is Being Re-Laid,” “The Harvest of the Hay,” “The Harvest of the Rye,” “When the Wind Is Suitable the Mills in the Village Grind the Seed,” “No One Neglects the Sunday Service,” and “Sunday Evenings There Is Almost Always Dancing and Games.”
The 1944 film followed. “A Visit to the Swedish Descendants on Runö,” read the first caption. “Fishing Huts from the Beach, Several Hundred Years Old,” “The Population Is of Ancient Swedish Stock,” “Customs and Traditions Are Exceedingly Old-Fashioned,” “The Men Are Stately,” “The Inhabitants of Runö, Gathered Around the Swedish Flag, Which They Hold in Great Esteem,” and, archly, “The So-Called Harbour,” and “Butter Churn, Patent Runö.”
This 1944 film culminated in the evacuation of Runö, organised and carried out by the Nazis. Smiling SS officers mingled with representatives from the Red Cross. Families surrounded by bundles and boxes gathered on the sandy beach. The Estonian ship Juhan was adorned with a swastika. The film cut to the arrival in Sweden. Some people were carried off to waiting ambulances. The camera focused on a smiling blond child in a headscarf, a little knitted purse tied to her wrist. A woman behind me whispered to someone, maybe her sister: “Mummy’s knitted bag, do you see, hanging from the wrist? She had one of those.” And thus the moment of the SS evacuation passed almost imperceptibly. The film did not comment on it, and neither did the people around me.
I thought of the famous quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel The Leopard: “Se vogliamo che tutto rimanga com’è, bisogna che tutto cambi [If we want everything to stay the same, everything needs to change].” The two films were so alike that it seemed as though time had stood still. But in fact everything had changed. In the decade or so between them, Estonia had endured war and occupations so brutal that almost one-quarter of the population had disappeared. Thousands of people had been arrested and deported in the first Soviet occupation of 1940–41. Many others had been killed or incarcerated by the Nazis. Tens of thousands of young men had been conscripted by the Red Army and the Wehrmacht. Virtually all the Jews in Estonia had been murdered, and thousands of other people of Jewish origin had been brought to Estonia to be killed. By the time this film was recorded, all the Estonian Jews who had stayed in Estonia except twelve people, who had remained hidden, were dead. In the middle of this unprecedented human catastrophe, Swedish filmmakers were writing captions like “The So-Called Harbour” and “Butter Churn, Patent Runö.” It was incomprehensible. It was as though the history of the Estonian Swedes took place in a parallel universe.
Earlier, in Stockholm, I had interviewed a man from Runö, the writer Jakob Steffensson. “Everybody was equal there,” he said. “It was an authentically communist society. Nothing was paid for with money, and all the work was collective.” They fished and farmed and hunted seal. They sold seal blubber and skins, and smoked and ate the seal meat, except, he said, the old bulls, which were too salty. Steffensson had no memory or knowledge of Schantz, was barely born when he left the island, and had no conception of his modernising measures, or how much development had taken place through his activities. He did, however, remember the Soviet and Nazi occupations.
“We danced with the Russians and we danced with the Germans,” he said. Runö had its own SS officer, Oberleutnant Lienhardt. Steffenson took him shooting and seal hunting. Lienhardt, he said, had wanted to organise independence for the Runö people and be their führer. He also tried, unsuccessfully, to persuade people to come to Germany to train as Nazi local administrators. Why didn’t they go? Most people, Steffenson said, didn’t believe the Germans would win the war, despite their claims in 1944 that in another six weeks Leningrad would fall.
So there it was. Lienhardt’s colleagues were running the Estonian concentration camps on the mainland whilst he was hunting seals on Runö. The two histories never touch one another: people writing about the camps never mention the Swedes, and vice versa. But they were only a few miles apart.
Lienhardt organised the final evacuation of the islanders to Sweden, and other SS officers did the same for the other Swedish communities. The Swedish state paid them 50 Swedish crowns, about £5, per person. On Runö, all but 6 of the 350 or so inhabitants fled to Sweden. Lists were made of the size of their farms and their belongings. Some believed, on the basis of those lists, that they would get compensation in Sweden for the farms they had abandoned, but they never did. They were also told, by the authorities who received them in Sweden, to keep quiet about the evacuation.
Steffensson took part in an early 1990s Swedish documentary entitled Back to Runö. He gave me a video of it. Several old people, dressed in their folk costumes, stepped out of a helicopter, knelt down, and kissed the ground. One of the women who had stayed on the island was interviewed. Her husband had been deported soon after the exodus of the islanders, and she had temporarily moved to the mainland. When they eventually came back many years later, all the hazel and all the apple trees had been cut down. The island was resettled after the Swedes left, first by Russians, probably refugees—drifters, she said—who moved into the empty houses. Eventually they left, I don’t know why or where. Estonians from other islands started to take over the houses, one by one. By 1990 they were still there, alongside a handful of remaining Soviet troops.
Steffensson visits his old family farm, Isaksgården. “What a disaster,” he says, “everything is ruined, everything, everything. I am just, I am not upset, I can’t find words. It is so immensely sad. Now I pass away.”
And it was sad. The harbour was rebuilt in shabby concrete, and the local culture seemed hopeless and alcoholic.
As for Lienhardt, he bought a manor house in Sweden, was extradited to Germany after the war, and fled to South America. Eventually he made his way back to Germany. Steffensson went to see him there, he told me, in some small town, I can’t remember which. He was a bitter old man by then, living alone in a small flat. His dream, he told Steffensson, was to have become the lighthouse keeper of Runö.
I don’t think t
he Estonian Swedes, on the whole, were Nazi sympathisers. They were a minority, and their journals and cultural activism played a small part in the vibrant 1930s debate about minority rights in Europe. The Nazis, with their demented dreams of ethnic German supremacy, had no time for minorities: their worldview was based on the idea of majority power, of might is right. Articles in the Estonian Swedish journals often made explicit reference to the debate about the rights of minorities. The Swedes were a minority within another minority, the Estonians, stacked like Russian dolls, trapped between Russia and Germany. The Estonian Swedish debate mirrored the Estonian debate, which mirrored debates all over Europe. The Swedes were on the liberal side, therefore. But whether they approved of the Nazis or not, it is true that the Nazis approved of them. Approved of them enough, anyway, to accept a deal to evacuate them to Sweden, for a payment, to peace and neutrality. But the evacuation came at a price: the Nazis destroyed the reputations of their few favoured minorities. Everything they liked became suspect after the war: cornfields and blond children, women in folk costumes gathering hay, blond plaits swinging, soldiers marching in formation. Only the countries behind the iron curtain could—and did—promote those kinds of images after the end of the war. They were culturally immune to the Nazi taint. Indeed, as part of the effort to undermine and destroy “bourgeois nationalism,” the communists promoted their own brand of “folk nationalism,” an endless stream of folky kitsch—national festivals, traditional dress, folk dancing—almost indistinguishable from Nazi propaganda.
The war ended Swedishness in Estonia. Between the two World Wars the minority Swedes had been much written about in Sweden, often in highly sentimental terms. They had been visited, helped, photographed, interviewed, and filmed. Their primitive farmhouses, their poverty, and their quiet struggle to preserve their ethnic identity had been moving, then. People had wanted to help them. But after the war, everything changed. In Sweden there was shame about the perhaps overly collaborative neutrality. Iron ore, essential for the Nazi war effort, was sold and transported to Germany from the Swedish mines in the north, whilst German troops were transported north through Sweden to aid the Finnish army fighting the Red Army. Many Swedes were sympathetic to that battle: “Finland’s cause is ours!” ran the slogan. There was shame about the many Nazi sympathisers in parliament, in the universities, and in the press. There was shame about the restrictions on Jewish immigration before the war, when the writing was so clear on the wall.
The context was shifting. The story of the Estonian Swedes was becoming parochial. So many others, who had also made their way to Sweden, had suffered so much more than they had. Some fifteen thousand Jewish survivors were rescued from the concentration camps by Folke Bernadotte, Count of Wisborg and the Swedish Red Cross, in their rescue mission at the end of the war, and taken to Sweden to recover. There were other refugees, too: some seventy thousand Finnish children had been evacuated during the war. Many Swedish families, including mine, took responsibility for a Finnish “war child.” Most of the Jews in Denmark, more than seven thousand people, were secretly evacuated across the sound to Sweden before their final deportation to concentration camps, in October 1943. The German attaché Georg Ferdinand Duckwitz had leaked the deportation plan to Danish Social Democrat Hans Hedtoft, who in turn had contacted the Jewish community leaders. The underground, aided by sympathetic locals on both sides of the sound, carried out the evacuation.
In Europe there were displaced people everywhere, probably about eleven million people all in all. By the end of 1945 some six million European refugees, Jews and eastern Europeans fleeing communism, had been repatriated by the Allied forces and the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Authority (UNRRA, founded in 1943, when the term “United Nations” still referred to the Allied forces). There were, also, millions of ethnic German refugees, who were not part of the UNRRA remit. By 1947 relative order had been restored, but there were still some 850,000 traumatised and dispossessed people left in the limbo of displaced persons (DP) camps in Europe. The last DP camp, Föhrenwald, a former slave labour camp attached to the IG Farben workforce in Bavaria, closed in 1957. It was run by Henry Cohen from New York, whose parents had emigrated from Vilna in Lithuania. He had fought in the infantry, and was only twenty-three years old when he was assigned responsibility for Föhrenwald and its fifty-six hundred Jewish inmates. He did it well, it seems, working with a camp committee; seeing to sanitation and supplies; setting up schools; and encouraging Zionism, youth movements, vocational training, religious activities, music, theatre, and a weekly newspaper, while also bringing attention to anti-Semitism in the American armed forces. But that’s another story. The point is this: in the context of the Holocaust and the war, in the context of millions of displaced people, the evacuation of the Estonian Swedes eventually didn’t seem like a big story, even in Sweden. The world was becoming more international. The cold war, and the proxy wars, began, and came to dominate the second half of the twentieth century.
There was silence about the Swedes in Estonia, too, after the war. People with relatives abroad—and there was not a single Swede left in Estonia without relatives abroad—were generally suspect in the Soviet Union. Most of the few remaining Swedes assimilated quietly. Any family history other than of the most proletarian kind could be dangerous, and most people didn’t talk about the past, or challenge what their children learnt in the Soviet history lessons in the schools. It was not safe. History, in the sense of a shared national narrative, a dynamic and evolving conversation, was lost to ideology and political repression. And many, perhaps most, of the people conducting that cultural conversation—historians, journalists, writers, archivists, museum curators, reporters, teachers, editors, publishers, documentary filmmakers and producers, and many others—were gone: they had fled, or been deported, or killed.
Weeks after I left Estonia, in September 1994, the Stockholm-bound ferry Estonia was shipwrecked in a storm. More than eight hundred people drowned—the precise figure was never known because the Tallinn ticket office didn’t keep proper records. I had arrived on that ship, and left on it, too. It was garish and cheerful, ordinary to the Swedes, luxurious to the Estonians.
The long heatwave of the summer had broken, and the night of the disaster was stormy. Water somehow got into the hold, and started slushing around, exaggerating the movement from the waves, rocking the ship from side to side, until it finally tipped over. Many people were trapped in their cabins, or in the public rooms. Others had prepared themselves, gathering on deck in life vests. There were lifeboats, but not enough. Some people fought, in panic, to get into them, others helped each other. Hypothermia in the cold water was lethal, and people struggled to keep each other awake. It was hours before the first helicopters arrived from Finland, the ferry long since disappeared, sinking like a stone, hundreds of meters, to the bottom of the deep sea. Timo was on the Estonia the night of the disaster, and survived. The new Swedish teacher, Katarina’s replacement, was too. She did not survive.
Years later, I watched a Swedish documentary about the disaster. I wrote about this in my academic book, and I am repeating it here. The Swedish survivors had obviously told their story many times before: they were fluent, confident, even dramatic. The Estonian survivors, by contrast, were hesitant and awkward. There were long silences and stumbling sentences. The Swedes had probably had trauma counselling, helping them to form their experiences into narratives. The Estonians, on the other hand, seemed never to have told anyone what happened to them on that night. Even allowing for different reactions to the TV cameras in their living rooms, and a less empowered relationship with the outside world, it was still as if the very culture of routinely creating stories from memories had been ruptured. The memories remained fragmented; an incoherent flotsam of odd details.
Watching it I was reminded of George Orwell’s 1984. Winston, asking some “proles” in a pub whether life was better or worse before the revolution, couldn’t get
a coherent answer: “They remembered a million useless things, a quarrel with a work-mate, a hunt for a lost bicycle pump, the expression on a long-dead sister’s face, the swirls of dust on a windy morning seventy years ago: but all the relevant facts were outside the range of their vision.” The memories of the older people I met on the peninsula were similarly fragile and incoherent. We underestimate, I think, how much our individual stories are supported by a mutual understanding of shared history. We refer to the zeitgeist of the decades in coded shorthand. Each decade eventually gains a dominant symbolic narrative—think of the 1920s, or the 1960s—within which our individual memories and stories are contextualised. In the West there is an easy relationship between individual lives and national culture and history. If that relationship, however, becomes fraught with danger, if that scaffolding of history and culture, and all the countless and various investigations into it, which is one of the defining activities of liberal democracies, ceases to exist, then your understanding of who you are in the world, who your family is, and what your town and country is, becomes fragmented. The stories (the history) of the people I met were not shored up by official and public versions of events, nor told sufficiently often to have created fluency and certainty. They just about knew what had happened, but they had no proper context for the story yet. Like Winston’s “proles,” they couldn’t give coherent answers.
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