Karl recounts 1941–45

The cottage, July 24, 1991. Karl Kronberg recounts his experiences during the war 1941–45.

It was 1941, on September 3 when we set off from Sheltozero, you were there, Albert, together with our parents when we parted at the big crossroads. We were 16 people who were loaded onto the car and driven off in the direction of Petrozavodsk. There we stayed for a while and then the journey continued towards Ladva. There artillery fire was already ongoing, at quite close range, but it was not close enough in the opinion of the commander on site and we were housed in a barn to sleep and rest. However, it was not possible to get a wink of sleep when the artillery fired at close range with both cannons and mortars.

During the night an officer rushed in and screamed at us and shouted:

– Don't sleep, you devils, the Finns have landed a troop and they may murder all of you with knives so that you don't even have time to wake up!

In the morning we were driven to Matrosovo. It was a place where in the 1930s quite a few Finnish-Canadian communists had come to work in the forest, but we were there no more than a few hours, soon we were chased further, about 20 km. We came to a village and already on the way there we were met by people coming towards us. Some younger women remained in the village – the older ones had disappeared already before the war and the rest, who were left, were those who had not yet been evacuated to the Vologda region. We had little in the way of both work clothes and work tools, but we were still divided into work teams and I suddenly became the team leader for the group – brigadir. Our team was lodged in a nearby house, the others in some houses a bit further into the village. When things calmed down I wanted to see where the other teams were and met a lieutenant colonel (with two parallel stripes on his collar) and I asked him a bit about our evacuation.

– No panic, he replied, but soon after we saw a crowd of women come running towards us from the work team that had earlier been sent for lodging further into the village. The women ran towards us with their belongings in their hands and shouted to us that everyone had to disappear within a few minutes.

We ran back. The women, who had some suitcases with them, could not manage them. They opened the suitcases, took out the most essential items and placed them in a cloth, kicked the suitcase, and began running back towards Matrosovo. We ended up not in the same village this time but just below it, about 0.5 km south of it, and were put to work building 'blindages' (dug-in defensive and accommodation spaces). There was a troop from a Siberian engineer regiment and all the younger men from our teams ended up there to help. The regiment later fell into a pincer movement, they were surrounded by the Finns and taken prisoner.

Below the village there was a lake and the shore was under heavy artillery fire. We had to work on the blindages a bit higher up the shore. At one point a projectile landed in the middle of the village, where there was an "istrebitelnyj" battalion (penal battalion) and a large cloud rose into the sky.

"Istrebitelnyi" (battalion) watched over both their own and the enemy's doings. If anyone tried to sneak back they made sure that person did not manage it. Their main task was of course to combat airborne landings, but as usual the surveillance of their own forces was an important secondary task. (Often perhaps even as a primary task)

When the projectile hit the village one saw how parts of the battalion took off, they left their weapons and everything behind and the dogs ran with them. After a while some order was restored, the battalion commander made sure that those who had not taken their weapons had to run back and get them, but we saw no one return. Either they had been captured or shot by their own command for the dishonorable behavior. We do not know where they went.

In Matrosovo we stayed about a week and one evening we were given the task to dig trenches, no one knew why, we were not soldiers after all. Our team consisted mainly of older Karelians, Izhorians and some German girls. Do you remember the German girls in Sheltozero? They were evacuated with us in 1941?

While we were digging in Matrosovo we saw quite a few small aircraft, they flew over the village and after a while a bomber came and dropped some bombs, most of them landed in the forest though.

When we had left Matrosovo the Finns came there (according to report). We ourselves returned to Ladva, I don't know how many days we stayed there. An acquaintance of Paaps Frida, an Ivan Patov, who had been a prisoner for long periods, was appointed company commander. Some officer from the pioneer battalion came forward and said that the Finns were about to attack. Ivan said we should get out of there and took us with him. We fled all night in the direction of Petrozavodsk along a road churned up by tanks and other vehicles. The commander of the engineer battalion, a guard captain, enforced very strict discipline, the men were not even allowed to smoke, but for some reason he was not with the soldiers when they returned after a skirmish.. A Tatar soldier said to us as we passed:

– He did not want to be with us anymore.

The captain could have been shot by the Finns, but most likely it was his own men who killed him during the shooting. Overly zealous commanders usually do not survive very long under real conditions..

During the night we arrived in Petrozavodsk, we were several hundred people who walked into the city on a plank road. At one point there was a sudden bang from a well-hidden anti-aircraft gun right next to us, we neither heard nor saw any aircraft and no soldiers were visible nearby either. We were housed in really good houses, well-built and previously inhabited by Canada-Finns, who apparently had had to leave their homes in great haste; there were quite a lot of left-behind items. In one of the houses there were 5 suitcases mostly filled with women's clothing, most of the garments made of silk and similar expensive fabrics. These family fathers had been arrested already early in the 1930s and now the women had also left the homes. Besides clothes, which some of our women helped themselves to, there were both sewing machines and other household appliances as well as many tools. Our women helped themselves to underwear. I had a military jacket and Alida sewed a number of white collars to go with it.

I don't remember how many days we were allowed to stay there before we had to move again. This time we, together with a 1.5-ton bread truck, a couple of small staff cars, and a whole kindergarten, were loaded onto a barge. I thought that a couple of loaves of bread in my own backpack wouldn't hurt and "acquired" them from the truck. When we got out on the lake it started blowing hard and I couldn't stay below and began to feel sick. I went up on deck, there was nowhere to hide from the cold up there so I stepped into the skipper's wheelhouse and managed to get a place under the bench itself, there I lay like a dog, didn't feel nearly as sick because the swell wasn't as bothersome here. There was some noise during the night, but I felt sick and didn't bother to go out. When we came down level with Shokshu it was already morning and the swell had ceased, the sun shone from a clear sky and an airplane circled in the sky. Everything looked very peaceful and idyllic, but on deck there were neither cars nor kindergarten. The children and women were sleeping in the cars and these had gone overboard during the night in the strong wind. Ropes were always scarce in the Soviet Union and presumably the cars were not lashed down. We arrived at Voznesenye where we got 800 grams or 1.5 kg of bread and salted fish – "kiljka". I still felt bad from seasickness.

The bridge over the Svir River was still intact and many ran back to the northern bank. I met a girl, whom I had danced with a few times in Sheltozero, she had been a secretary in the Gorny kolkhoz and I asked her whether my parents had left Sheltozero.

– No, she replied. That village could not be evacuated because there was a lack of transport, there were neither carts nor horses left. I was overwhelmed by a strong feeling of well-being after receiving this message.

From Voznesenye we started our march towards Lodeynoye Pole – a distance of about 150 km along the Svir River. Together with us a lot of prisoners from Medvezhyegorsk were transported, many were in such poor condition that they were carried out on stretchers to a temporary hastily set up hospital, where they were distributed among the various buildings and a couple of days later the Finns took the area. We covered about 10 km that day, made a fire and all who had stuck together from Sheltozero: Alida, Maria and I, came together again. Maria had been a secretary in the Young Communists (Komsomol), Fride Paap, me, Maria and Alida as well as Ivan Popov stuck together. At night we slept outside by a campfire and Alida burned her skirt in the fire. I caught a cold from the dampness and cold and suffered some lasting effects from it, which later plagued me for a long time.

During the night we heard the prisoner transports passing. As a rule there was only one horse cart in the contingent and the prisoners who could not move under their own power were likely shot, one heard shots and screams in the night. No one was allowed to be left behind. The guard of the prisoners was strict, there was plenty of both guard personnel and dogs. The prisoners were moved in the direction of Lodeynoye Pole so that they would not fall into the hands of the Finns. We continued our journey and in 15 days we had covered the 150 km from Voznesenye to Lodeynoye Pole – 10 km per day. We did not get any notable food, at most it was maybe 800 – 1000 grams of bread per day and hardly anything else. As soon as there was a halt in the march we went out to the nearby potato fields. The potatoes were of course already harvested, but with a bit of luck one could always find some that had been left behind. There was also a lack of salt, Alida and Maria went out to the villages where there were still people and begged for salt. They could get a spoonful from one house and a couple from another. We used the salt to salt the potatoes with. The young boys, who were not inclined to beg, had a rather hard time. In the mornings they were yellow in complexion and weak from hunger.

In the village of Alechovschina, about 130 km from Voznesenje, each of us got 60-70 grams of chocolate, there was no bread to be had this time either, but we had to continue another 22 km to a village called Vatjukins, which lies high up on a hill. There, the women were to work setting up tank obstacles along the riverbank while the men were to build "dzoter" (Derevänno-zemljanye tochki). Our work brigade consisted of several nationalities, mostly Ukrainians and Russians, and we stayed there for about a month (we left home on September 3, 1941) and started our journey towards Vologda on November 10. Here we stayed for almost a month. There was no proper supply here either, the bread supply point was about 4 kilometers away, but we still had it quite well, we were paid 300 rubles per month and could make some purchases. Twelve people pooled together and bought two cows. The cows cost about 1500 rubles per head. We slaughtered the cows, divided the meat into 12 piles, a man pointed at one of the piles and shouted,

- To whom?

and another standing with his back to the other participants shouted out:

- Ivanov!

- To whom?

- To Petrov! And so on. It was a fair division.

We boiled out the fat and stored it for later consumption, while the meat was eaten up in the following days. It began to get cold. In November we sometimes had close to -30 degrees of cold. Maria only had low shoes, Alida had boots like myself, but we were young and managed quite well anyway. In the villages where we spent the nights, the officers took care of the inner rooms while we had to lodge in the outer ones. There was always a shortage of space and some of the young people were housed in barns and some in the sauna. From Alchovschina we started on November 10 and were in the new destination on December 15. During these 25 days there was for the most part a persistent cold. The villages were quite far apart from each other and in most of them there were no people left, there was nothing to get in terms of food. We used to get bread and it fell to my lot to carry the bread sack. For a while Maria became very ill along the way, but somehow she recovered and survived. A cart with bread and fat accompanied the contingent, from which bread was distributed at intervals, but the driver sometimes lived it up, exchanged bread for vodka and thus drank up part of our rations. For a couple of days we had no bread to eat. Eventually a supply truck caught up with us and we received some food items. Lida and Maria managed to become cooks and they made semolina soup daily. Lida managed to smuggle out some semolina in her pockets and in that way we got by reasonably without starving too much.

We came to Anitski-bron, about 20-50 kilometers from Vytegra. There they were repairing and expanding the Marinsky railway system, but the war intervened. The construction had already been going on earlier but was interrupted by the war and the whole enterprise was a bit peculiar. In places they had laid rails and in some spots the station buildings were even completed. Most of it was done with convict labor. There were some finished dwellings, but as usual most was unfinished. In most of the houses both windows and doors were missing, which meant the houses were partially snowed in. We managed to find some doors and put them in place. In the evening we got inside and had to start lighting the stoves and drying our clothes. It was dripping from all sides, everything was wet, damp, cold and there was a shortage of food. We had 7 km from work to the houses in the village.

All these hardships took a heavy toll on health and many died. There were also some Canada Finns. They were communists who had been lured back to Europe by communist propaganda in the early 1930s, now they were hopelessly stuck in the swamp. They were men in their 60s-70s, the younger ones had already perished during Stalin's purges.

Many of these men could no longer manage the daily work. The advanced age, hard work in severe cold and the walk between the workplace and the camp meant that some were always missing in the evening, they froze to death on the way. One evening it was -41 degrees and fog, we had to run all the way to the village. A couple had been sent ahead to prepare the houses for the others. Some houses were somewhat heated, but the warmth didn't last long. Most of the Canada Finns died there. One day I frostbit a toe and couldn't put on my boot the next day. I lay there on the bunk and in the morning a major came in and asked why I wasn't at work outside.

- I can't get my shoes on, I replied.

- Then you'll have to go and start making coffins, he said. The prisoners who had been in these places earlier were gone and we had to take over their dwellings and to some extent also their work. In a small shed I happened to find a large bale of wadding, gauze bandages and some other medical supplies, among other things a pack of linen cloth for bandaging wounds. I took care of it, handed the goods over to Alida and Maria who were to sew clothes from it. From the camp we got rubber shoes and stockings, and that way I got my foot sorted out again. At night some soldiers marched past, poorly equipped for the cold, wearing only their tunic and a cloth helmet on their head. You could only hear the tramp of boots on the hard-frozen ground. They were black in the face from the cold and walked listlessly like a flock of sheep. They were not given any opportunities for warmth, and many froze to death. The Finns were already nearby, the front ran along a ridge and there they had already built their defensive positions.

We stayed there about a month. Already in the evening, when I finished work out in the forest, I prepared the fire for the following day, so that we could quickly get the heat up when we arrived at the workplace in the morning. The younger boys, who were not used to hardships, came in the morning in their light clothes and suffered terribly. No real work was done either, the ground was so hard frozen that each strike with the crowbar didn't loosen a piece larger than a five-kopeck coin. We had to stay somewhere because we were not allowed to disperse by the soldiers, and then the fires became the natural gathering points.

After a while we were moved to a new place, to large camp barracks that held several hundred people and had bunks in two tiers. People from other parts of the Vologda region were also herded there with horse carts and sleds, and we had to stay there for a few days. Maria and Alida were occupied with cooking and could put aside quite a lot of bread, by the end we had about 10-15 loaves. These could not be left anywhere so I made a sled and pulled the loaves with me wherever we went. Later we got a wood-gas powered truck for transport between the workplace and the camp. Then it was quite nice to ride, you sat with your back to the wood-gas generator and didn't have to freeze so much. After a while we even got a tent to stay in and life became a bit easier.

We were moved to Vytegra, where we spent one night in a large house while the officers drank with some women, it was not a quiet night. Fortunately we didn't have to stay there long, already the next day there was a new transport and this time to Pudoz. Patov had disappeared somewhere, they appointed me as leader of the work team and requested me to go to the city authorities. I was accompanied by a GPU man. The authorities assigned a place where we were to make a foundation for a house. At the supposed workplace no further orders came, I don't know how many days I was there and suddenly we were transported again by car about 70 km into the forest. There were not many people working there, they had neither equipment nor clothes, but in the evening we got some provisions in the form of sawdust-mixed bread and elk meat, so we cooked soup in the evening. We stayed there a week after which the director of the logging camp put us in a car and we were driven another 280 km to a place called Nändyma, on the road between Obozerski and Belomorsk. The road was put into use in 1941, as was another newly built road towards Vorkuta. Halfway there was a large village called Kargapol. I remember that my father told about this village, where they had large timber floating operations in their time along the Belaja River. The village had 7 churches and many of the men had earned their living as barge haulers before the war.

The next stop was the village of Kargasovo, where we spent one night. Collectivization had taken its toll and there was almost no young people left, an old person in a dilapidated house was the only original inhabitant, she was probably 80-90 years old and had never seen either a locomotive or a car in her entire long life. Earlier there was no road there, it was several hundred kilometers to the nearest settlement and she had never been outside the village. After one night we were carted back to Nändum station. There were some people from both Scheltozero and Rybreka, both boys and girls. Together with a man from Rybreka (I met him after the war, he had managed quite well through all the difficulties, he said) we were in Matjukino on November 10 to buy meat. There was a newly slaughtered pig, the owner was busy repairing boots and in an unguarded moment the man snatched a piece of pork for himself and me, he was used to stealing and lying, that was probably why he survived.

With the provisioning it was as usual - bad or very bad - says Karl. I can't do anything when I'm hungry, so I went to the village's evacuation point. The head there was a Jewish man, and he said that they were in need of all kinds of craftsmen; mechanics, tailors and artisans. He needed people for a couple of factories in Belomorsk and Arkhangelsk. I went up to him and said that I was a mechanic and that my sister was a tailor, and then he asked:

- Where do you want to go, Belomorsk or Arkhangelsk?

I thought for a while. Belomorsk was a bit closer to home so I said I wanted to go there. When I returned, Alida informed me that during my absence an order had come that the entire contingent was to be transported back to the forest work site, but as usual, nobody said why. Alida and Maria were alone at home and had to stay waiting for me, everyone else had to go back to the forests. We were lucky to avoid going back. No one knows what became of them, whether they ended up on the front line or died in some other way, none of them returned to Scheltozero after the war.

We were a few days at the evacuation point, it was a harsh winter and although we were now in March, the cold stayed at about -20 degrees. The old woman in the village had a coffin ready and slept in it.

The situation had changed now because the others had had to leave, and I told Maria to run to the man who distributed work assignments and say that we were all willing to travel to Belomorsk. We were given some rusks, and they said that when the train stops we should go into the villages and ask the collective farm chairman for bread. That was a pious hope; most of the time we couldn't find the chairman at all, and when we did, he had nothing to give us. His supplies had been emptied long ago.

For two or three days we traveled practically without food. When we arrived at Belomorsk, they wanted us to take about fifty skins with us to make ski bindings at the factory. We could barely stand on our own feet, let alone take any skins with us. We reached the combine where they were supposed to manufacture skis and ski bindings, but we didn't get any work.

In our company we had a man from Petrozavodsk. Before the war he had worked as a baker, and now he went out on a reconnaissance tour of the surroundings to find the bakery and see if any familiar bakers were there. Sure enough. He met his comrades and came back with a whole bucket of kvass (small beer) and a loaf of bread for each of us. We ate and could sleep properly; you don't do that when hunger gnaws at your insides.

The next morning it was time to register at the combine, but we were not admitted there because we had been exiled (pereselentsy) and had "horse passports"; the manufacture of ski bindings was considered a war industry, and those who had been exiled could not work there. Instead, we were sent to a railway construction site. The commandant knew our father, but he was not from any of the nearby villages; they must have been acquaintances from the Pskov period. We were to begin work as wood loaders for locomotive fuel, and we worked at this from March until June or July. Every hour a train set from Murmansk passed by, transporting military supplies, and every hour we had to load 10–15 cubic meters of wood. The previous loading had taken place in Kemi, and they had raised the sides of the tender (wood storage) with extra planks to hold more than usual.

The wood had been floated along rivers and lakes to Belomorsk; it was wet, heavy, and my hands swelled to such an extent that I could not work. I could not move my hands, and my wrists were swollen and tingling. In the area there was an old, freed former "vidgades", a prisoner named Akula, who had been exiled here long before the war, had lived in the area for a long time, and had his own house. He told me to take black woolen thread and wrap it three times around my wrist. Whatever it was, it helped; I felt nothing after that in the morning, but the situation was still bad. We received 700 grams of bread and hot water (kipjatok) with it – that was about all. The locomotives consumed about 10 cubic meters of wood per 12 hours; we had to load 12 locomotives per shift; the traffic with American aid was intense, and about one train passed per hour. In the spring it became somewhat easier; then we got coal, and that loading was not as strenuous. I worked there until July or August and received orders to report for forest work. It was a troubled time, and we were sent here and there. I went for my bread ration, and there in the supply room sat a girl from Scheltozero.

"Don't go there, Karl," she said to me, "I come from there, and it is a death camp. No one has come back alive from there." What was I to do? I had nowhere to flee; there was surveillance everywhere. If you run from a logging site, it only gets worse when you are caught and punished. I went there, and I remember it was a beautiful day. I sat down on a tall stump and looked around. There were some American communists, a few of whom were still alive. They were a later contingent; the majority of them had been arrested already in 1937-38. In the fine weather, a nurse was trying to massage their feet, but they were so thin that they resembled hands more than feet. I had some misgivings and feared that this might be where my life's journey would end. With the girl's help I managed to arrange to get to a locomotive repair workshop and thus escape the forest work. I had good references and was a specialist in metalwork; that saved me from the forest. For a time I was foreman of a construction team of 5 people and got to build barracks. At first the barracks were built mainly of some kind of semi-finished product intended for assembling front-line barracks; later they became more regular log houses.

When a number of houses were finished, administrators, investigators, and all sorts of scrap were sent there. They came full of enthusiasm, brought musical instruments, the women were plastered and painted. But after a week it was different. They were not used to the hard work that was required of them and became apathetic. It took no more than a few weeks before all their enthusiasm was gone; after the meal in the dining barracks, most of them didn't even have the energy to undress. They just lay down on the bunks and slept with their clothes on. They didn't last very long; after a few months most of them were gone – many managed to escape.

It was 1942 and '43. I had studied to become a mining mechanic and was in charge of

A motor carriage and a locomotive; I became wagon master in the depot, and the mechanic who was there (Prijantzev Alexander) was a good fellow, and he was part of Amur's military labor brigade to adjust railway rails (a narrow-gauge one). It came to conflicts, and in the fight that followed he was killed. Where were they to find a new mechanic? The director came and tried to persuade someone, but no one wanted to take on the responsibility; it could have certain consequences in Russia. Someone had to, and the choice fell on me. I became chief mechanic, but under the conditions that prevailed I had no days off – it was work day and night. As soon as anything happened, I had to be there. I mainly repaired everything myself, from journal box seals to the slides for the locomotives when they started whistling too much due to steam leakage through the packings. The food was still miserable, and it was nerve-wracking to be in charge of both party members and members of the regional board, the whole old collection of has-beens. It affected my nerves more than the physical work itself. I developed an inflammation of the central nervous system.

Alida did not come to Belomorsk; she was sent to Jemtse, where there was a war depot with repair workshops for transport equipment and a tailor shop. The tailor shop mainly dealt with repairing clothes, a large part of which had come from fallen soldiers. All too often there was also blood on them, bullet and shrapnel holes; most of the garments were also unwashed. In the depot there also worked girls from Rybreka; they handled all the goods that came from America: bread, cheese, butter, sausage. The goods were sorted in the depot and sent on to various units around. The girls were acquaintances of Mari, and we became recipients of various items from the store. At the locomotives we got soup a couple of times a day on workdays, but on rest days only one portion a day.

Nearby there was a former Estonian revolutionary - Mesi - an older man who was part of our work brigade and in his "free time" helped out in various places in the depot. I did as he did and went to the bakery to chop wood; after a couple of cubic meters I sometimes got half a loaf, and most often a whole loaf of bread. When I became really familiar with the place, I discovered that in the corridor there were some sacks of flour; I filled the bread pans with this flour and carried it with me to the barracks so I could cook some porridge.

Mesi had fought against the English at the new road past Njukhtsa during the First World War. He said that the only time they saw anything of life was during the time of the English. The Estonian bandits were at the White Sea to keep order, and Mesi fell into English captivity together with some others. During the search, one of the prisoners had managed to smuggle a hand grenade in his trouser leg. They were locked in a bunker, and at night they asked the guard for water. When the guard opened the door, the hand grenade was thrown at him, and the prisoners were able to escape; otherwise they would all have been shot when the Soviet authorities would have gotten them back in a prisoner exchange.

The English disappeared, the Estonian regiment was disbanded, and Mesi remained in Far Karelia. I became acquainted with him because he was in charge of supervising the dining hall, and after work we would meet at his place and talk. He was indeed in our brigade, but he usually disappeared in the mornings. Before I met Mesi, I mostly walked alone.

Once I ended up near the officers' mess and saw a small dog eating a large piece of jellied meat. I crept closer to deprive the dog of its prey, but the mutt grabbed the jellied meat and ran off, and I stood there hungrier than before. I went into the kitchen and asked if they had any work for me. "Of course we have work; come tomorrow and start putting a roof on a bomb shelter for us." I went there, and they gave me soup. There was no bread; I would only get it at lunch. After finishing my work, I got more soup, but no bread this time either. I told Mesi about this and said that I had worked but got no bread with the soup. Mesi said: "Come with me, I'll keep you company there!" When I went with him, things happened; we got borscht in a washbasin-like vessel, almost as big as an ordinary washbasin, and a lot of bread; we could barely eat it all. Mesi said I should take a bag and a food container with me; from there we then got quite a lot of food, both soup, porridge, and bread. We had really gotten going in life, but then came a forest assignment, to chop wood for firing the locomotive boilers.

When I came to the forest sometime in the middle of August, I sat down on a stump and looked around. Here too there were former Canada-Finns, small, shrunken human-like figures with small, thin feet. A nurse massaged them now and then in the barracks, and I thought, if I stay here, it will surely be the end of my earthly journey.

I began working in the forest and the norm was two cubic meters per day. For this we received 900 grams of bread and soup morning and evening. A work brigade was assembled and we began working on building a narrow-gauge railway, about one kilometer in length. The railway was to be used to transport logs out of the forest. Later, soldiers were also ordered there and they built an additional 10-15 kilometers. I worked there from 1944 to 1946. Now peace had come and they began recruiting people for forest work. Donbass needed a lot of pit props for the mines. In 1944 when I arrived there, many people also came from Belomorsk, they began building a settlement and both the district chairman, secretary and the entire party apparatus arrived. There was more life at first, everyone was enthusiastic and filled with the pioneering spirit after the war. People played and sang, but the hard life soon took its toll, after a couple of weeks neither song nor playing was heard. After a few more weeks everyone had moved back to more civilized areas.

I reconstructed a relocated log house, the beams were marked and when the house was finished the vice-director moved in with his family. We also assembled many modular barracks. At first we only had a motor carriage for the railway, but after a while a locomotive also arrived and the party organizer Pridanzev took employment as chief mechanic while I became shift mechanic. Everything revolved around logging and it was quite large volumes, several thousand cubic meters per day. There were many people gathered in a fairly small area. 700 men were sent to us from the hospital in Kirovsk in May 1945 and later in the summer an additional approx. 700 men arrived from Finland, they were a contingent of repatriated prisoners. The prisoners told how well they had had it in Finland, there was no lack of food or drink and the treatment was also good. In the spring forest labor camp they began sorting the people, the Ukrainians ended up on the White Sea Canal while the Russians were kept here. Working with me was a Krasovski, who during Lenin's time had been editor of the newspaper "Izvestija". A very educated man who had excellent handwriting. He wrote out documents for wage payments which I had to submit and the director asked me if I had written this,

- No, I answered, that is Krasovski's handwriting, I cannot write so beautifully.

Krasovski worked as a lathe operator for a time. They had already begun releasing prisoners and since he had a son somewhere in the Caucasus he disappeared from us. I had to stay until the autumn of 1946, our chief mechanic received an assignment to Prussia to dismantle some machines, locomotives and other equipment that the Russians had taken as war booty. He traveled on the platform (there were no passenger cars on our lines) and during a water refill at a locomotive he got wet. In his wet state he caught a cold and was sick upon his return. His brother had a position as director of a fishing collective somewhere on the Black Sea and the brother transported him to various hospitals, but nothing helped. Eventually his health gave out, he was transferred to Belomorsk and there his wife buried him.

For me this meant that I was forced to stay for another three years. We deportees did not have permission to travel just anywhere and where there was a need for labor we could not get our passports out. In practice we were the state's serfs.

In the summers there were no hauling operations out of the forest and I could get time off. I had no fixed working hours, but when necessary I sometimes had to work almost around the clock. If something happened to the little train I had to be present myself; those who had worked all day did not have the energy to keep at it that long. I usually got a couple of months' leave from Belomorsk and I spent those months of leave with my parents in Scheltozero. In 1947 I went to Estonia to visit the Jürgensons. Karl Jürgenson worked near Tallinn at Risti station. He lived in a house owned by a Swede, but the Swede had left when the war broke out. Sass was already working in Tapa, where they had come already during the war. He worked at the militia, and his daughters are also in the same profession. I made the visit to Estonia to see what it was like there. The price of milk in Karelia was 20 rubles, here you could get by with 10. The rubles were not worth much then either, but there were quite a lot of goods to buy and the prices were not frightening by our standards. I returned to Norrland and since mother had about 7-8 goats by then, I took a couple with me. In the summer they could go in the forest and graze; goats are hardy creatures and manage quite well on their own. In the autumn they could be gone in the forest for several days but when the snow came they returned. During the summer I harvested hay and collected leaf twigs for their winter fodder.

The regulations regarding passports had been somewhat relaxed and when I returned from Estonia I said to the chief mechanic within the trust - Jaan Parvenko - (he wanted to send me for a couple of years to a mechanic course in Leningrad) that I am not going anywhere, he will have to try to find a replacement because now I want to get back to Estonia. I did not get away as quickly as I wanted, but had to stay another whole year up there. Maria handed over one of the goats to the chief mechanic and he then began looking for a replacement. In Viborg there had once been a technical school and in the chaos that arose in connection with the outbreak of war, some forms for diploma certificates had gone astray and my new replacement had acquired an "engineering education" in this way. He was supposed to be a civil engineer. An older man was a locomotive driver and this new man teamed up with him.

The locomotives had to be kept in a certain order, but luckily I had already formally handed over the locomotive to the construction department. They took the locomotive apart into small pieces and when this was done the new man received a letter from the Urals that his mother had died so he would go off to the funeral. He even got money from the director for the journey - he disappeared and remained gone.

What was to be done with the locomotive now? I was assigned to reassemble it and I loaded all the disassembled parts into the tender, handed over the locomotive to the locomotive depot and there it stood. An older man was supposed to come and take care of the equipment. It was getting urgent to leave because Maria was about to give birth to Albert. I wrote a letter to the director and told him that since I had formally handed over the locomotive, I had nothing more to do with it; we set off southward and in the month of April I was back in Estonia.

In 1947 I visited Estonia and discovered that life there was relatively normal, the food was also better. In Karelia a sack of potatoes cost about 200 rubles while in Estonia you got the same sack of potatoes for 20 rubles, the same was true for milk - 60 rubles in Karelia and only 10 in Estonia. I returned from Estonia and then spoke with my superior, Jaan Parmet, an Estonian from Kaliningrad, but he no longer spoke Estonian. When I returned I said to him:

- Now you will have to look for a good mechanic, I do not intend to stay here. In 1945, on November 7, we also got a (if only temporary) passport, but we already had it in our pockets. I am going to get out of here.

Eventually they found a mechanic. When the war ended, it had been written in my passport that I should stay in Far Karelia for an additional 3 years after the war. Now that time had elapsed and in 1948 I traveled to Estonia, became a locomotive fireman and my wife came after a couple of three months to Estonia and now we live here in Estonia; we are doing quite well considering the circumstances.

We came to Tapa and settled with mother; she lived together with Elvys Fride (a cousin child). The girl was only a couple of years old and ran around there with a runny nose, dirty and hard to keep clean. It was a small shed, put together from boards and with an earthen floor. I lived there together with mother until I got work at the locomotive depot. There were, of course, problems with housing. The personnel manager at the locomotive station said I should listen out for if any housing became available, then he would help me get it. Some Ingrian Finns who had lived in Estonia were deported to near Kohtla-Järve, to "km 101", they were not allowed to live near Tallinn. Now a house became vacant (for a while we had also lived with Alida). It was an older Ingrian Finn who came to me and said that his house would become vacant; he and his family were to be deported.

- -- You can take our house, he said to me, and I paid him 150 rubles for it, whereupon we had a shot together before the farewell. Now Maria also arrived; she had to spend some time on cleaning because there was a terrible amount of fleas in the house. Many people had lived there, but no one had had the energy to do a major cleaning; it doesn't get done when you don't know if you'll be allowed to stay or not.