All posts by Andy V.

Estonian born; New York City raised; University of Rochester ('66), United States Marine Corps (1966–70), University of Michigan ('73), Uncle Sam, and US Naval Intelligence Reserve (1974–2001)—not to mention every day living—educated.

On Remembering “Lost Cause” Ancestors

I was asked recently by a member of my cohort of newly minted Marine officers in 1966 to comment on a pair of emails on the subject of bringing down Confederate monuments and memorials. One was a defense of the Confederate soldier and his memory, and by extension soldiers who take up the cause of the “countries” in which they live. The other strongly supported the removal of Confederate symbols. The suggestion included the kind observation of me as someone who might be able to comment “objectively” on the subject. Feeling a bit undeserving of the observation, I nevertheless offered the following to the email group.

———————————–

Thank you for thinking of me in this way—capable of offering an “objective” perspective– though I don’t think I am worthy of that judgment. But I will offer a couple of thoughts anyway, for what they may be worth to anyone.

First I am not sure that in this day and age “objectivity” has the straight forward  meaning one might expect, given that unspoken (even unrecognized) assumptions and predispositions underpin so many judgments we hear spoken and written. For those in the intelligence business, awareness of such predispositions or biases within themselves is essential and require frequent “sanity” checks. Unfortunately, these occur relatively rarely among those who must act on intelligence, the policymakers in the National Security Council or White House, where predispositions tend to drive everything.

In my mind, having worked these decades in the business of intelligence, “objectivity” is only approached  when one acknowledges the underlying assumptions or premises of one’s beliefs and looks equally critically at the quality of the evidence or information that then influence one’s judgments. In the following, I hope I am as clear.

So let me begin with a few such underpinnings related to this subject about myself:

I am the son of Luftwaffe fighter pilot (250 missions over the Eastern Front, shot down on the last in February 1945)—accordingly childhood in New York City required explanation of family roots and roles during WW II. So I have feelings and experience in explaining ancestors involved in “lost causes.”

Relatedly, as an immigrant (arrived with my mother on June 25th 1950), I have an enormous amount of empathy for those who took the following as a signal of hope:  “Give me your tired, your poor,

Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,

The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.

Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,

I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”

At the same time, I am married to a former member of the Daughters of the American Revolution, and I have always been amazed (and humbled) by the devotion of its members to ancestral heritage. (I hardly get past my grandparents!) I understand organizations like the Sons (or daughters) of the Confederacy hold the same  devotion, and I have read some of its material on this subject.

And, of course, like all of us, a veteran of Vietnam, a war I entered into fully supportive of what I believed were legitimate US objectives.

And, in total frankness—and this may totally rule me out of the realm of “objectivity,” I have never been more worried about the survival of the principles that I have held dear about my life and service in this country. And I will say up front, I do not believe the threat comes from anarchists, communists, or other leftist evils readily trotted out in US history as prime existential evils.

For those who care to read on, I offer the following, which includes at the end a recommended piece of reading that only the other day arrived in my email inbox—a reading about Germany’s reckoning with its Nazi past and how that experience relates to America’s reckoning with slavery and subsequent evils related to race.

Having now read both emails on this subject, I find things to agree with in each. At the same time, I think each is speaking from a different perspective or historical plane. In a sense, I guess I am saying that I see each talking about different, although overlapping things—perhaps because of the unstated assumptions each holds in these items.

First to the letter thinking of Confederate soldiers. I have empathy for the message, which I read as an homage  to those who take up arms and sacrifice their  lives and wellbeing  to serve when called upon by their “country”—whether it was the Union or the Confederacy or the United States generally.  I think we all must have some empathy, as we veterans of Vietnam all took up arms in what to many was and remains a wrong cause—and a lost cause. In this context, we have heard no end of stories of veterans of both sides from the war in the Pacific treating each other with respect and honoring each other’s bravery and dedication to their duty. We have seen it in the experience of many of our vets who returned to Vietnam to find warm welcomes. Certainly such feelings are not universal, but I sense that is a fundamental element of the letter—soldiers [including all of us in B Company] did their duty to the best of their ability at the command of what was to them proper authority. And I see this with empathy from the perspective of those whose family trees include Confederate fighters in the Civil War (as does my Louisiana born spousal unit’s). So, in a sense, from both of our perspectives, we have respected family members who fought for “lost causes.” I believe that mourning for those lost or respect for those who risked all is not an unreasonable sentiment.  

At the next level, honoring with monuments and statues symbols of causes for which these ancestors fought  brings me into complete alignment with the alternative perspective—for all the reasons offered and possibly more. I have read benign rationalizations of the Confederacy’s cause—e.g., the union was a great “experiment” and all its members were free to leave the experiment. So leaving the Union was not traitorous; it was just exercising an option to leave the experiment that always available to it. Maybe. But the defense of human bondage was reprehensible, even in the day to many with conscience and an environment to think of it in that way. And the way in which that commitment to bondage over the years evolved into so many other forms is equally so.

And here—returning to my observation about my father’s service in the Luftwaffe,  I offer another perspective on this whole subject, offered in  a book entitled  “Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil,” by the philosopher Susan Neiman (published last year). An interview of Neiman in the New Yorker landed in my inbox today. I offer a segment of it here because I think it is germane and speaks to the issues both Woody and Virgil address in their emails. The following excerpt, in italics, is long, but I think it speaks to Neiman’s historical research on this subject in a way that may be more compelling—at least better thought out–than anything I might have to say. The complete article can be reached (I hope) at: https://www.newyorker.com/news/q-and-a/how-to-confront-a-racist-national-history?utm_source=onsite-share&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=onsite-share&utm_brand=the-new-yorker

I don’t idealize the process that the Germans went through in facing up to their criminal past. It was long, it was reluctant, and they faced an enormous amount of backlash. Most people outside of Germany have come to think the Nazi times were so awful that, the minute the war was over, the German nation got down on its knees and begged for atonement. And that’s just not the case. In fact, the few people who did get down on their knees, like Willy Brandt, in 1970, were vilified by the majority of their compatriots.

Q: You are referring to the West German Chancellor who fell to his knees as a gesture of atonement, in Warsaw, in 1970.

Precisely. There is a very famous picture that went around the world, and I think that for most non-Germans it is the iconic picture of postwar Germany. But that’s not reliable. Think about Brandt himself, who, as a Social Democrat, went into exile as soon as the Nazis took power. So, personally, he had nothing to atone for. But he still felt that, as the leader of a nation, he ought to make a gesture. What we don’t know, or what most people don’t know, is that the majority of the country thought it was wrong for him to get on his knees and atone, and particularly to be submissive before Slavic people.

So the change was from seeing themselves as the war’s worst victims—and I’ve seen mouths drop open when I tell this to an American audience, but they really did see themselves as the war’s worst victims. It’s not something that Germans tend to talk about. They’ll tell you about their Nazi parents, or their Nazi teachers, but they won’t say that their parents not only went along with Nazis but thought of themselves as the worst victims of the war. And I realized it was the same trope that you hear among supporters of the Lost Cause. “Our cities were burned, our men were wounded or put in prisoner-of-war camps. Our women were violated, our children were hungry, and, on top of that, the damn Yankees blamed us for the war.” These are exactly the sentiments that you would hear in West Germany.

I think it is very natural for everyone to want to see their ancestors and their nation as heroic. And if you can’t do heroic, then the move is to see yourself and your nation as a victim. But the move from seeing oneself as a nation of victims to a nation of perpetrators is one that the Germans finally and with great difficulty made. And that’s a historical precedent.

So, there is my perspective. Offered in response to a fellow Marine’s suggestion. If it rises to a level all might think about, I will be gratified.

Good night, and Semper fidelis,

Andy V.

Has Anybody Seen Miss Cahill?

The facade of Junior High School 143, John Peter Tetard JHS.

From 1954 until 1966, home was in the Kingsbridge neighborhood of Bronx, New York. Elementary school was P.S. 122, Marble Hill Elementary. Junior High School (grades 7,8, and 9) were spent in Junior High School 143. For me, Tetard was about 3/4 mile walk from our apartment on Sedgwick Ave, across the street from the Kingsbridge Veterans Adminstration Hospital.

What draws me to this piece of my story is the note in my previous post about the Liberty Mutual Insurance company making the Statue of Liberty a background for its sales pitch. Then there are Progressive Insurance Company’s nonsensical ads, which seem to reflect no interest in today’s public health crisis.

The string of these ads call to mind my formidable “social studies” teacher, perhaps 8th grade, who taught her students the valuable lessons of New York City life. But these lessons had to break through — to be kind — the lesser developed brains of 12 and 13 year-olds. Yet memory of her as a powerful presence turned out to be ever lasting. And embedded in my memory is the ditty we used to sing about Miss Cahill:

“Six foot two, hair of blue, has any body seen Ms. Cahill?”

We were not, of course, capable of fairness at that age, but the lessons she offered were also memorable: One must, out of courtesy to other subway riders, properly fold the New York Times as one reads the pages (fold each broad sheet in half length-wise, turn them against each other vertically, and then fold the length in half. There must be a You Tube video showing that somewhere); stock market listings in the business section must be read carefully, but all should remember that investments are long-term things, and one should not run one way or the other based on a day’s worth of trading; advertising serves a purpose, i.e., to inform readers about products so they can make informed decisions about purchases.

Am thinking Miss Cahill is spinning in her grave.

Reposting Thoughts of the Day 70 Years Ago that My Mother and I Arrived in New York City

Two years ago I offered thoughts on this momentous day in my life and the life of my mother as the US Naval Ship General Stuart Heintzelman arrived in New York City with some 800 WW II refugees from Eastern Europe. For my mother it marked the conclusion of an ordeal in survival begun with escape from Estonia in October 1944 as Soviet troops were closing in on Estonia. ( https://www.fanande.net?p=602 ) For me, about to be six, it was the arrival in a new world to be explored.

In that post of July 2018, I reflected on the state of the Trump administration’s thinking about immigration. Two years later, Covid-19 has given the administration opportunity to harden its position even more. It is deeply, deeply saddening to one who was a beneficiary of America’s generosity.

In rereading that post, I am reminded of the ideals that were espoused about the US immigrant community at the time and the welcoming tradition then said to have made new, prosperous lives possible. Of course, we learned long since that the welcome did not apply to everyone, and the values the welcome was said to have represented did not even apply to all who lived in this nation.

I would learn the limits of those values as I grew up and began to “see the world” as an NROTC midshipman in college during a summer spent on a US warship, the destroyer USS Beatty, DD 756. The eye-opener, as I believe I have noted here earlier, was the ship’s port call in Gulfport, Mississippi, in the summer of 1963. There, having lived in New York City since our arrival, I saw for the first time Jim Crow at work.

Today, I will admit to being disheartened in seeing how much remains to be done in that realm. I am also disheartened by the administration’s approach to migrants.

And, finally, I am disheartened by the way New York’s symbol of welcome has become a prop in an insurance company’s inane commercials, commercials that have the Statue of Liberty in the background but that have nothing to do with “liberty,” the company’s name. What immigrant who sailed past the statue can’t weep at the trivialization of the scene?

I should be (as I always am in other moments) happy about the opportunities that my mother and I had since June 25, 1950. We were blessed indeed. But today, sadness at the steady “passing” of those ideals we then both imagined embraced us and we in turn embraced feels overwhelming.

Next post on a better day.

Readers and friends, stay well.

andy

A Memory from 1993—Parents’ Weekend in Cornell

Cleaning out a vintage purse, Tracy happened on the program of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity’s weekend in the spring of 1993 for parents of newly joined freshmen of the fraternity, my son Ryan being among them.

A pleasant weekend it was, with dinner cooked by an executive chef and wines served by a sommelier—both with III’s following their surnames. Only in Cornell?

Perusing the program, I found it contained a short essay entitled “The True Gentleman.” It is attributed to a John Walter Wayland (Virginia, 1899), according to a bit on the web from the North Dakota Chapter of SAE, which claims that it is the product of an essay contest held in Baltimore, Md., on the topic of defining the qualities of a gentleman–these are qualities that, naturally, can and should define gentle people of any gender.

I repeat the essay here as it lists qualities that I wish we saw more of in this day and age in our nation, especially in its leadership. Here is the essay:

The True Gentleman is the man whose conduct proceeds from good will and an acute sense of propriety, and whose self-control is equal to all emergencies; who does not make the poor man conscious of his poverty, the obscure man of his obscurity, or any man of his inferiority or deformity; who is himself humbled if necessity compels him to humble another; who does not flatter wealth, cringe before power, or boast of his own possessions or achievements; who speaks with frankness but always with sincerity and sympathy; whose deed follows his word; who thinks of the rights and feelings of others, rather than his own; and who appears well in any company, a man with whom honor is sacred and virtue safe.

– John Walter Wayland (Virginia 1899)

I’m glad that my son was associated as a young man with an organization that embraced them, and I believe he has come to embody them. From a proud father as Father’s Day approaches.

When is Son’s Day anyway?

av

May 25, 2020: A Heavy Duty Memorial Day

Most Memorial Days I manage a visit to Arlington National Cemetery. That will not happen on this Monday. I don’t guess, given the state of the Covid-19 pandemic, that I will even venture into the District of Columbia to visit the Vietnam War Memorial. Unless things change shortly, I will stay home and think about the fallen, those I knew and those I did not.

Memorial Day Weekend at home in Reston, VA

I’ve posted on Memorial Days past:

“Memorial Day 2017–Paying Homage to Marine Classmates of 50 Years Ago” https://www.fanande.net?p=508

“Memorial Day 2017-Remembering a Solemn Duty” https://www.fanande.net?p=523

“Memorial Day 2018-Some Scenes, Some Thoughts” https://www.fanande.net?p=579

In those posts I thought of comrades who gave there lives believing they were defending the liberties of Americans. I think of them today. But I also must think of those who have died and are dying during this pandemic. And as I think of them, I can’t help but ask again, as those of us who put on uniforms of US military services have asked of themselves when taking our oaths, “What have I sworn myself to? What will be my solemn obligations? What will I be giving up to carry out those obligations?”

The members of my Marine cohort of 1966 knew their obligations included going to war in Vietnam. We also knew that our personal preferences stood low in the priorities of our service obligations. We knew our faces would be shaven daily, our hair cut weekly, our uniform standards and civilian clothing expectations non-negotiable—not subject to our whims or any sense that we had a “Constitutional” right to those choices while we were in service of the country and others (underline “service to others”). Invoking the Constitution to object to wearing a tie or getting a haircut under such circumstances was simply unimaginable.

Most Americans understood that sacrifices were in order during a crisis on the scale of World War II, at least I am not aware of any law suits objecting to rationing on Constitutional (or any other) grounds. Not having researched this, I can only guess, but in that emergency, it is hard to imagine a suit, if filed, could have succeeded.

All of this speaks, of course, to the anger, sometimes violent, over requirements or requests to wear face masks to reduce the risk that people will unwittingly spread the coronavirus to others. Perhaps this is a reflection of the fact that since World War II ordinary citizens have not been obliged to sacrifice even small freedoms to help advance a national cause. The chief obligation seems to have been to stand at sporting events and applaud men and women in uniform or first responders of one kind or another—all deserving to be sure, if somewhat tiresome to those for which it is intended.

Now, in this “war,” all Americans should think of themselves as combatants. How then is being asked to suffer the discomfort of facemasks to protect others too much to ask? How can such a small matter be such a grave infringement? I would ask those whose names appear below, “What is too much to ask in the service of fellow citizens?”

In memory of those many who have given their all in other wars. av

Postscript: Today (May 25) I received and read an emailed essay Maya Lin had written about her thinking behind the design and her experience in the competition and the completion of the memorial in 1982. She was only a senior at Yale when she entered her drawing into a design competition her architecture class fortuitously learned about. It was a competition that would draw more than 1300 entries. She wrote the essay soon after she designed the memorial, but it wasn’t published until the year 2000, when it appeared in the New York Review of Books. The above image, with B Company classmate Matthew O. McKnight’s name at the center, demonstrates precisely what Ms. Lin hoped to achieve. Read “Making the Memorial,” Maya Lin, November 2000.”

Stuck at Home: Catching Up on Images of Childhood

While I am doing work at home during the current crisis, the limits of the possible permit me to spend time doing other things. There is yardwork–a war of its own perhaps to be mentioned in another time.

For now, I have countless 35mm slides in our basement. So, I thought it might be fun to bring them into the digital world. I will try to do this mostly chronologically, but expect diversions.

I don’t know that I will have any deep thoughts here. Just reflections on memorable moments, moments illuminated by this long idle slide collection.

Part One: Father and Mother (Isa ja Ema) in the 1950s.

The collection, so far the earliest I have identified, contain a few images of my father and mother at times and places I remained home–an early latch key kid–another story I have toyed with.

The story I have told up to now has been of Ema’s devotion to me and to our mutual survival. As well, I have talked of Isa’s later arrival and his reunion with Ema and his pursuit of higher education and professional work in the United States. The image below shows the two together, with other Estonians at a small celebration of some kind–a marriage, a birthday, an anniversary? I’d bet on the former: flowers, champagne, a corsage of two.

Isa and Ema at a party
Isa and Ema at the far end of the table (in the right corner).
Another view of the party, Isa looking to be deep in some other thought.

For Isa, the early years in the United States involved work–eventually leading to a profession he had not been interested before the war. Music would have been his profession in Estonia. In the United States it turned elsewhere, work as a draftsman, schooling toward advanced degrees in civil engineering, and eventually computer programming early in the IT revolution. Below are two images that I can only speculate suggest an interest in the 50s in Columbia University, which had a major architecture program. Instead, he would eventually enter an eight-year night program at Cooper Union leading to a degree in engineering. It was a tuition-free program; Columbia’s would not have been. (Columbia rejected my application in 1961.)

Isa standing on the grounds of Columbia University.
Isa standing on the campus of Columbia University. Date unknown, probably mid-1950s. I would find myself there at commencement 2019, giving a presentation to the commissioning ceremony of the Columbia NROTC class in the Lowe Library, the building behind Isa.

Visible in the image above to the right of the Lowe Library is St. John the Divine Episcopal Church, a magnificent edifice that I would visit in 2019 when I participated in that event. Below during a lovely spring, Isa.

Isa t St. John the Divine Cathedral
A most impressive cathedral near Columbia University is St. John the Divine, by which Isa here stands.

Another view of Isa is in a visit to Battery Park. I imagine the view of the Statue of Liberty from there would have held great meaning in those early days of his life in New York. Fortunately, he did not live to see the television advertisements of the insurance company, Liberty Mutual, that have trivialized the great monument.

Battery Park
Isa and colleague and/or friend at Battery Park in New York City.

And finally, in this portion, I offer an image of Isa in front of the under-construction New York Coliseum at Columbus Circle in New York. The highly controversial project went up during 1954–56. I can only guess that at that point Isa was working for a drafting firm that had some share of responsibility for the project. One can’t say it would be lasting monument to anything. By 1986 it was gone. I remember it from the its years of existence as a destination for a pair of adolescent friends from the Bronx out to see the latest at the annual automobile show. The coliseum was also a feature of our journeys to New York Ranger hockey games at Madison Square Garden, just ten blocks down the street from the Columbus Circle subway station. That, too, would evaporate later, its name moved to a structure at Penn Station a mile south.

columbus circle
Isa and a colleague at Columbus Circle in NYC, in front of construction site of the New York Coliseum, most likely in 1955.

To be continued.

About the Displaced Children

During the past month, numerous stories appeared at about the same time in the New York Times. One Times front-page story, January, 31st, had the headline, “29 Syrian Children Die During Freezing Escape from the Islamic State.” A month later, February 26, came this: “Syrian Children Freeze to Death. Bombs Rain Down. And ‘Nobody Cares.’” The week before, on February 19th, The Times’s “At War” newsletter, weekly commentaries on war from veterans, scholars, and others, appeared with this headline: “Beyond The World War II WE Know: When Jim Crow Reigned Amid the Rubble of Nazi Germany,” by Alexis Clark (adjunct professor at Columbia Journalism School and author of “Enemies in Love: A German POW, a Black Nurse and an Unlikely Romance”).

What connects today’s Syrian stories to Professor Clark’s contribution about a segregated US Army occupying Germany after Berlin’s surrender in 1945? In a word, “children.”

With the sad story of Syria’s displaced children already on my mind, Professor Clark’s story led me back to an image in my mother’s small photo album of our time in Europe, the one from which I drew the image in my last post. One photo in that album that I had never displayed before came to mind. Shown here is this mixed-race toddler taken in the late 40s at the orphanage at which my mother worked.

The attached image is just one of several reminders of our time as displaced persons, a pair of the millions looking for peace and homes at that time; it is haunting and thought-provoking, even after these many years.

I scanned it, when I began my “rummaging,” but I didn’t include it in the images I used here because I didn’t understand why it was taken and why my mother kept it or what it might have meant in the scheme of things. In all, questions I could not hope to answer. I wrote to Professor Clark and asked her if the image spoke to her in some way? Did it point to anyone she might have discovered in her research?

She said it did not, but she sent me a link to an obituary she had written a year ago for the New York Times series, “Overlooked No More” obituaries of people who, for whatever reason (race, gender, controversial achievement, etc.), had not receive obituaries in The Times that they might have earned today. The one she sent was entitled: “Overlooked No More: Mabel Grammer, Whose Brown Baby Plan Found Homes for Hundreds.” Professor Clark wrote that Grammar “would run an adoption agency that made it possible for unwanted mixed-race children in Germany to find homes after World War II.”

Continuing:

“They were called “brown babies,” or “mischlingskinder,” a derogatory German term for mixed-race children. And sometimes they were just referred to as mutts.

“They were born during the occupation years in Germany after World War II, the offspring of German women and African-American soldiers. Their fathers were usually transferred elsewhere and their mothers risked social repercussions by keeping them, so the babies were placed in orphanages.

“But when Mabel Grammer, an African-American journalist, became aware of the orphaned children, she stepped in. She and her husband, an army chief warrant officer stationed in Mannheim, and later Karlsruhe, adopted 12 of them, and Grammer found homes for 500 others.”

Perhaps this little child was among them. I can only hope so. And we can only hope for better fortunes for the children in Syria.

A 40th Anniversary

Friday’s Washington Post Sports section featured a story about the “Miracle on Ice,” the victory of the US Olympic hockey team over the much-favored Soviet team during the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York.

It was a stirring victory, and I did get to see it, but see I did with my father and young family between visits to a hospital room in the Bergen County, New Jersey, Hospital room in which my mother lay in a stroke-induced coma. She would die a day or two after that game on February 22nd 1980.

We had hustled up to New Jersey, having heard from my father in a 3 am call that he had found Ema unconscious in their house on his late return from work in New York City. It had been a routine day until then. My mother had retired a short time before and generally appeared to be in reasonable health. She spent her days quietly reading or puttering around the yard of the modest RiverVale house–the first home they ever owned, a home they couldn’t afford until I had graduated from college and entered the Marine Corps. My father worked on Park Avenue, near the Grand Central Station, and his commute, by bus, was a long one. Home was near the last stop, and the driver, by then having known my father for a long time, would often discharge other passengers and detour down Aster Lane and drop my father off at the mailbox. It was the peaceful life they had dreamed of and earned. Would they have had more time together.

Ema’s funeral was attended by a number of friends, including my father’s best friend, a prominent Estonian singer, who bid Ema farewell with an Estonian ballad.

Coupled with the now-continuous recollections of 75th anniversaries related to the end of World War II, it is impossible to let this day pass without some thought to the heroine who risked everything to haul this infant out of the way of advancing Soviet armies, first from Estonia in the “great” migration of 1944 noted in my most recent post and then from Germany in the Spring of 1945. Another 75th.

And then there is a more modest 70th anniversary forthcoming, Ema’s and my arrival in the United States in June 1950 (written of in a very early post here). Stayed tuned, as I hope to reconstruct, with the help of others, some outcomes in the lives of fellow passengers on that US Navy personnel carrier, the USNS Heintzelman. I have made contact with one fellow passenger–he as amazed as I that we were able to connect (with the help of stellar spousal unit and researcher Tracy). I hope with more help from Tracy and others to build the story and stories out in a time when “refugees” — so sadly still being created by the hundreds of thousands — are seen as such burdens in the land that was so welcoming in 1950.

Thanks for bearing with me, and here’s a toast to the memory of Hedvig Marie Rohtla Vaart, (January 1913–February 1980).

No words to capture this feeling from some time in the late 1940s.

Ago Ambre’s “Goodbye Estonia,” presented on September 22, 2019, at the Commemoration of 75th Anniversary of Escapes from Estonia

Ago’s presentation on the 22nd, as I’d mentioned in my previous post, gave me a perspective my mother experienced but never shared in such detail. With Ago’s permission, I am placing it here. — av

The Great flight from Estonia 
by Ago Ambre

Shared September 22, 2019 – 75th Anniversary of the Great Refugee Flight of 1944

Persecutions, arrests, executions, deportations and the scorched earth policy carried out by destruction battalions of Communist party members and the Red Army were fresh memories that spurred a massive flight from the oncoming Soviet hell back in 1944.

How massive was it? Here it would be like 25 million people getting on the road at once to head for Canada or Mexico, and twice as many sought safety within the country.

The Great Flight was a disjointed journey. It was not a direct flight. There was flight within Estonia, and for many the flight continued in Germany, too. If you were not from Tallinn you had to come there from the south or the east. Coastal areas offered for some a chance for a perilous voyage in mostly small open boats, hundreds of them, across the stormy Baltic sea to Sweden. In Tallinn there was chance to escape to Germany.

I would place the beginning of the Great Flight in early 1944 when the Leningrad front collapsed and refugees from the East reached my hometown, Tartu. Little did we know that half a year later we would be walking in their shoes.

By June, the situation was painfully clear, the Russians were coming. There was a glimmer of hope that Finland would accept Estonian refugees. An office was supposed to open in Tartu to register teachers who would resettle in Finland. Well, my mother was a teacher, she discussed the matter with us, my grandmother and me. My father was arrested during the first Soviet occupation. He died in a Soviet prison. A second Soviet occupation would be as good as a death sentence for us. But nothing came of the Finnish solution. In any event, Finland was no safe haven. After making peace with the Soviet Union on September 3, Finland agreed to repatriate all Soviet citizens.

The picture of Soviet advances in Estonia as reported by the New York Times on 22 September 1944.

The Soviet Union also demanded that Allies carry out forceful repatriation of USSR citizens. That is something we found out when were in Germany. Thanks to the efforts of many good men and women the Americans and Brits agreed that we were citizens of Estonia, that Soviet occupation did not make us Soviet citizens.

All those who left then have their own stories. They all deserve to be told. I was asked to tell mine today,  on the 75th anniversary of that tragic event. The hero of my story is my mother. And her support was her mother. When they had to leave Tartu they made sure that I would leave with them.

I had been badly hurt in July doing obligatory farm work as a fourteen-year-old boy. I was hospitalized in Tartu but as air raids became a daily affair, patients were evacuated to Ulila, a place about 20 kilometers from Tartu. I was sedated most of the time, because my pains were simply intolerable. Then in August the patients were brought back to Tartu because the Soviet tanks had broken through and were about to overrun the area. See on left the map from the New York Times on September 22. For the full September 22 account, click here. (once the image appears, click again to enlarge.)

I was transported on a hospital bed in a cargo truck.

I remember the view of Viljandi highway—it was like a twisting living organism, made up of farm families with horse-drawn carriages loaded with furniture and such, with cows and horses in tow. People were fleeing on bicycles, and on foot. It was a sight I never forgot.

Back in Tartu panic broke out as the Soviet tanks were now rumored to be only twenty-five kilometers away. It was night already when mother came to the hospital and demanded I be released. She had secured places for us three on a truck. Dr. Linkberg, the hospital head, one of the best surgeons in Estonia, was adamant. I was in no condition to travel. I had very high fever, and needed daily procedures to withdraw quantities of pus from my injured knee. But mother prevailed.

My memory is blurry how I was placed on a stretcher and placed on the truck. But I remember well when the truck crawled up a hilly street toward the Tallinn highway, how people swarmed the truck, threw off the baggage. Desperation filled up every inch of the truck bed. My memory is even clearer of that trip in the night when a Soviet plane dropped flares on that crowded highway. All vehicles stopped. People sought shelter in ditches. I remember lying in the truck, watching the flares floating slowly toward the ground. And I waited for the attack. It came in the form of three bombs. Not much damage, but it surely was annoying.

Early morning the truck broke down at a school house, in a place called Äksi. By that time I was delirious. A man who no longer could stand my cries, forced a bottle of vodka down my throat. By morning I felt nothing, I was stone cold. Mother managed to get transport to a nearby rail station, Voldi. The small station was crowded with soldiers. A military physician came by, looked at me, and declared me unfit for travel. As he had just set up an aid station nearby, at Saadjärve, he offered to treat me. He put me in his ambulance, took me to the aid station which at the time had no other patients. He drained my knee, and did his best to stabilize me for two days.

All that time my mother and grandmother stayed in that crowded, dirty station. They had no idea where I was. But the good doctor brought me back to the Voldi station, and made sure we were placed on a train carrying wounded soldiers to Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia. The wounded were in box cars, on stretchers on the floor. And the doors were open.

It was a rail journey like no other. I watched passing freight trains carrying heavy artillery tubes away from the front, toward the Port of Tallinn. Nearing Tallinn I had a view of ruins, only chimneys standing, reminders of the air raids on March 9.

A view of Tallinn after 9 March air raid. Provenance unknown.

At arrival at the Baltic Station in Tallinn, the wounded on their stretchers were lined up on the platform. The chief of a military hospital conducted a cursory inspection, and all men on stretchers were moved to a military hospital that was set up in a building in the suburb of Hiiu that once was a home for orphaned babies. And I wound up in that hospital. I was treated well. The operating room had three tables. I was treated there while wounded soldiers were also being operated on. I remember gory scenes when very young men were lying on their backs, with surgeons picking shrapnel from their intestines that were piled on their stomachs. They had been wounded on September 15 when a landing on a key Finnish island of Suursaari was repelled by the Finns, as required by the peace treaty with the Soviet Union. That failure opened the Baltic sea for the Red Fleet that had been bottled up for most of the war.

Purportedly scene of bombing attack just outside of Tallinn in August 1944. Date and provenance of photo unknown. As Ema told me I was born during an air raid on August 2nd, I can only wonder. –AV

Soon our time was up again. The Russians were coming. The military hospital was made ready for evacuation to Germany. I was given a choice, go to a civilian hospital in Tallinn, or be evacuated to Germany to meet an uncertain fate. My mother told me that the choice was up to me. I added up the score: hospitals in Tallinn were bereft of doctors and nurses, and there was no mercy to expect from the Communists. We agreed that the uncertainty awaiting us in Germany was preferable to the certainty that would await us in the Soviet Socialist Republic of Estonia. By then the Red Fleet had access to the Baltic sea. Soviet submarines and airplanes attacked even hospital ships.

For the New York Times account of that exodus and the Soviet attacks on the ships, click here to link to New York Times, 23 September 1944 report.

We traveled in a cargo ship that had a rather mixed cargo: munitions, gasoline, hospital equipment, and even cabbages. Plus the hospital’s nurses, few civilians, lots of Russian POWs, and and a couple hundred soldiers.

When we arrived in the Danzig port of Neufahrwasser, everybody left. We stayed in the cargo hold and waited for the morning. Suddenly flashlights beamed. Military police demanded, who are you. Refugees. Soon six Russians POWs were summoned, four carried my stretcher, and two carried my mother’s and grandmother’s suitcases. We were led into a camp behind barbed wire, put in a barracks, with me on the stretcher on the floor watching lice crawling up the support poles of three-tiered bunks where mother and grandmother were resting on bare boards in the top bunk.

Next morning a physician took a look at me, and hung a ticket on me. The ambulance driver was a good Samaritan. He knew the destination well. He tore up the ticket and instead drove us to neighboring Gotenhafen, and put me in a municipal hospital.The flight continued within Germany for another seven months. Because the Russians kept coming.

The horrors of communism were news to most Americans back in 1949. After all, Uncle Joe had been an ally. As a new arrival, I was asked about what went on in Europe before and after WWII. A lot of people said, it surely could not happen here. I believed it then. Today, I am not so sure.

Thank you, Ago. –Andres

Remembered: The 75th Anniversary of the Great Emigration of 1944 from Estonia

WES leadership introduces the event.

A group of members and friends of the Washington Estonian Society met on the afternoon of September 22nd 2019 at the Monument to Victims of Communism to mark the passage of 75 years since Estonians, along with German troops fled the country by ships to escape on-rushing Soviet Army.

Ago Ambre remembers September 1944, when he was fourteen years old.

A handful of speakers addressed the twenty or so who braved unseasonable 90+ degree heat in the nation’s capitol at the intersection of two of the city’s busiest avenues. The principal guests were Triinu Rajasalu of the Estonian Embassy, who spoke of her experiences with Estonian emigres of WWII in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the UK. Her remarks were touching, as it was clear she was moved by those in all the above countries who survived the 1944 experience.

The other most important speaker was Ago Ambre, who told his story of escape as a 14-year-old, severely injured in an accident and cared for by his mother and grandmother, who had to weigh the risks of further injury in the escape against the risks of being taken by the Soviets.

Monument to Victims of Communism, Washington, DC

Ago’s was a powerful and moving story that brought into sharp relief the experiences of all those who survived. They were especially meaningful to me, who, as a two-month-old, could hardly be expected to remember the trials of the period. Knowledge of these experiences depended on my mother’s stories, as I have described in other posts in this blog under the category “Memories-Parents“. I took the opportunity to offer my perspective on the experience, thinking, as he did, of the heroism of my mother as I have here–and adding that the monument can as easily speak to victims of tyranny anywhere, at anytime, and under whatever name it may have.

Touching and welcome too, were the comments of a second generation Estonian-American and a millennial third-generation Estonian. The event closed with the placement of a bouquet of flowers at the base of the monument.

Given that I was born in August of the year of the emigration, this remembrance was a kind of solemn birthday event.