Back(Finnish War Children in Literature)
Web Reports No. 5, Migrationsinstitutet, Turku 2004.
Abstract
The Second World War (1939-1945) had a deep impact on the Finnish people. For exam-ple, 83,000 soldiers fell, 200,000 people became war invalids, 400,000 were evacuated from Karelia and 70,000 children were transferred to neighbouring countries. The Silence Speaks is a study of the Finnish war children in literature. Seventy works from the genres of fiction and autobiography were located, of which thirty were closely examined.
Silence surrounded the lives of the Finnish war children for a long time. The Finnish war censure, which censored the newspapers and letters and prohibited criticism regarding chil-dren transferred in 1942, was partly responsible. Consequently, academic research on war children started relatively late.
The Finnish war children are now past retirement age. They have broken the silence around their unique history in several ways: 1) by telling their stories to the younger generation; 2) by communicating and working out their painful memories by organising themselves na-tionally and internationally in war children associations; and 3) by publishing their autobi-ographies. Recently, the number of these publications has increased.
Anna Freud's reports on the reactions of English children 1943 (who were evacuated from London to the countryside during the Second World War), came too late and had no effect on the decision to transfer the Finnish children. In Nordic countries, the consequences of the children's separation from their mothers came up in discussion several years later.
According to many contemporary psychoanalysts, there is an important mirror stage in children's development, which is necessary to build a harmonious base from which to start the identity process. If children do not have positive reflections from their mothers during these early years, they will seek that mirror for the rest of their lives. When Finnish war children were removed during this important phase of life, they were subjected to this trauma. And all too often, the war itself brought additional trauma through experiences such as bombing, fear, loss of close relatives, evacuation, separation from brothers/sisters and so on.
The Finnish war children's literature describes children's sorrow after separation from their mothers/parents, and also the children's different ways to manage this sorrow. In these de-scriptions, the importance of transitional objects (A. Freud and D. W. Winnicott) is pre-sented in many variations. Later these objects are changed to more abstract ones in the cul-tural arena. Writing an autobiography could be compared to a transitional object, because the writer still structures his/her life with an object in relation to the environment and leaves it behind as soon as satisfaction is achieved.
Finally, the war children's search for their roots and identities was confronted with the re-ceiving country's opinions. Often, the war children were regarded as ethnic and cultural strangers. The many descriptions of conflict within foster families' inner relations can be seen as the war children's "mirroring" as they searched desperately for their identities.
Writing an autobiography is closely connected to memories. War children can remember details from the wartime very clearly. The life of war was an exceptional period when an unexplainable feeling of uncertainty filled the air. The people were awakened and lived strongly for the present. Therefore, people with war experiences clearly remember the de-tails of events from that time and can communicate them in their autobiographies.
Previously, the lifetime project of war children with traumatic memories was to try to for-get and cover up the trauma. However, the symptoms and signals can also motivate life long creativity and inspiration. To write an autobiography is to remember even the most traumatic moments - which is also the first step in the healing process. The literature by and about the Finnish war children shows an analytic capability to reflect and control their own lives. Furthermore, they have come through the trauma not only with an intense long-ing for world peace, but also with empathy to help today's refugees.
Summary
The Second World War (1939-1945) deeply affected the Finnish people: about 80,000 killed in action, 200,000 crippled, 400,000 evacuated from Karelia and 70,000 children sent to neighbouring countries. Karelia, Eastern Finland, Lapland and Helsinki were hit particu-larly hard, as they were subject to heavy bombardments. The war left the entire Finnish people deeply scarred. In many ways, the Finnish war trauma still marks even the younger generation that never directly participated in the war.
Children experienced the terrors of war: sirens, running for shelter, the shelling of their hometown, losing family members. The children evacuated during the war share these more or less painful memories. For children who on top of these traumatic events were sent to a foreign country, however, life was even more dramatic. Having to leave the safety of home, being surrounded by a foreign language and, most of all, being separated from their moth-ers or parents and then having to rapidly try to acclimatise to a strange language and culture - all these elements constitute clear risks for developing war trauma. Moreover, many of these children were sent back and forth and then finally, at the end of the war, were re-turned to their native country. From a child's perspective, each departure meant being re-moved from a safe environment and having to acclimatise to new conditions.
The fate of the Finnish wartime child evacuees was recognised as late as the 1980s and 1990s. Research concerning war children also started relatively late; earlier works of his-tory barely mention the evacuation of children, although it was a remarkable enterprise (about 65,000 children were sent to Sweden, 4,000 to Denmark and 400 to Norway). The Finnish politics of caution during the war stifled the debate concerning the evacuation of children for decades by prohibiting all public criticism of them (1942) and by censoring newspapers and letters.
The silence around the fate of the wartime child evacuees has been broken mostly by the children themselves. They have founded national, Nordic and international organisations and published a number of works of fiction about what they have experienced. The theme has also inspired other authors and artists.
The three most important academic theses on the subject have focused on different groups: Finnish wartime child evacuees who were adopted in the county of Västerbotten, Sweden, Finnish child evacuees who were returned to Eastern Finland, and the organisation of the evacuation of children to Sweden.
Subsequently, several smaller reports and academic theses have described the child evacu-ees' life from various perspectives, but a comprehensive history is lacking. There are sev-eral academic projects underway but, nevertheless, there are several aspects of the chil-dren's conditions still unstudied.
The material analysed in this study covers works of fiction written by and about the Finnish wartime child evacuees (70 works, of which 30 are given a closer analysis). During the past decades, the number of works about being a child evacuee has increased both in fiction and (auto)biographies. Since it is almost impossible to draw a line between fiction and (auto)biographies, this study includes material from both genres. Works of fiction about wartime child evacuees may be based on biographical events, whereas autobiographies may use fictive scenes or the experiences of others. Nevertheless, they constitute a thematic unity. It is possible to sift out the most frequent themes out of this material. Themes which emerge time and again are registered. Based on these instances, it is possible to discern a possible "standard story" of a wartime child evacuee, a sum of all the fictional and autobiographical narrations, which faces the most salient questions. These help to incorporate the fictional research material into a more general cultural and social dialogue.
Anna Freud's reports on British children's separation anxiety at being evacuated from Lon-don during the Second World War came too late to benefit the Finnish wartime child evacuees. In Scandinavia, the discussion on the separation of children occurred much later, in conjunction with the WHO report Maternal care and mental health (1951). Anna Freud's accounts of how children overcome the grief of being separated from mothers and D.W. Winnicott's later concepts of transitional objects and transitional phenomena have been adapted in countless ways in fictional stories by and about Finnish child evacuees.
The first Finnish fictional account of the evacuation of children was published during the war (Schoultz 1942). Solveig von Schoultz observed her own children and other child evacuees during the train journey through Haparanda to Sweden. Her short notes already focus on the importance of transitional objects. A few biographical and fictional works on the subject were published before Markku Lahtela, himself a wartime child evacuee, in 1976 presented his life trauma in fiction: the separation from his mother, his separation anxiety, the grief of a child after the separation and, finally, a grown-up man's life-long struggle for a complete identity.
After this, reflections on the separation from the birth parents became a theme filling innu-merable pages in the literature on wartime child evacuees (Ortmark-Almgren, Nyström, Sandelin, Helenoro, Seppä, Bolinder, Eklöf, Hietamies, Tyni, Erving-Odelberg, Vesterberg Kahakorpi, Paaso). Apart from grief, the separation could also cause feelings of guilt in the child (Ortmark-Almgren), hatred towards the mother (Wahlberg) or idealisation of the birth parents (Andersson). The parental care of these children had been disrupted; their basic sense of security was fragile before the approaching identity process. Children employ a number of methods, however, in order to overcome grief after separation.
Various psychoanalytical schools emphasise the importance of the mirror stage and the early role of the mother for the development of the "self". Mirroring one's identity contin-ues more or less throughout life, but it is most important in the early stages of a child's life, in order to guarantee a solid and stable foundation for the development of identity. A child who does not receive a positive image will look for one for the rest of its life. Losing an ob-ject, the fear of losing the love of the object or disruptions in parental care can lead to anxieties and trauma during childhood. Many of the Finnish child evacuees were separated from their parents in this critical phase of a child's development of identity. Therefore, the insufficient relation between child and birth mother constitutes a fundamental motive in the fictional works.
Anna Freud noted that the British children who were evacuated developed various methods in order to overcome the grief after leaving their mothers or parents. In the fictional ac-counts by Finnish children evacuated, there is endless variation in the transitional objects used (doll, scraps, piece of wood, friendship with a squirrel, Finnish magazines, swimming in the Gulf of Bothnia towards home, secret hut as their home in Finland, nature sites like a cave or a brook etc.).
After the period of grief, a child evacuee, whose life was marked by the discontinuity of pa-rental care and possible traumatic memories, gradually began to mirror its identity in the new foster family. Younger children soon forgot their birth parents and began to rely on the foster parents.
The relations within the foster families had not been researched until the past few decades. Research has, however, discovered one distinctly problematic area. The arrival of a foster or adoptive child in a family always affects many parties. It might cause new tensions: ri-valry, jealousy, status, lack of affection, mental dominance. The child evacuee, who was often seen as ethnically and culturally "other" in the foster family, had poorer chances for a secure development of identity. The racial-political theories of the time did not make the situation easier.
In the literature on wartime child evacuees, the problematic relationships are most com-monly depicted between foster daughter and foster mother. Most of the material consists of texts written by women. Women's literary texts traditionally deal with relationship prob-lems. Within psychoanalysis, the object relations school in particular has noted the conflict-ridden relations between women.
Problems in family relations are a recurring theme in the literature on wartime child evacu-ees. With the arrival of an evacuee, the family pattern was altered. New tensions emerged within the family. The literature focuses mainly on the conflicts between foster daughter and foster mother. The child spent the days with the foster mother and was therefore in-volved in everyday situations where irritation could arise. The child soon learnt that there was a ranking order within the family, and that the evacuee came last.
Many describe how they got a positive image of their identity through the recognition of the foster father. The idealised foster father is in many accounts by child evacuees depicted as a link to the Swedish culture who supported the child's identity. This is warmly acclaimed in the literature (Erving-Odelberg).
Creating an identity as an evacuee in a foreign country is a salient theme especially among the children who stayed in Sweden. Typically, an evacuee does everything in order to re-press and forget his or her background as a Finnish child evacuee in order to become ac-cepted in the Swedish community. The foster parents often encouraged this repression or, in some cases, concealed the child's background during his or her young years and only disclosed it later. The absence of many other expressions of culture, such as having no civil rights or name day, emphasised the child's feeling of otherness. The tendencies towards a more complete identity came through reviving memories, historical documents, reunion with relatives and meeting others with the same fate.
Writing an autobiography is an effective way for a person to reflect on one's life and, through the writing process, to find a life pattern that tends to repeat itself. Autobiography in all its forms is intimately related to memory. The functions of memory play a key role in the narration.
War was an abnormal stage of life, characterised by constant fear and anxiety. One had to be so completely present in life that even detailed events became imprinted in the children's minds and are there for the taking.
When the memories are traumatic, however, subconscious repression takes over. It grips the individual and in one way or another manipulates his or her choices and actions. Symptoms and signals from the dormant memories may become a lifelong motive that needs to be in-terpreted or overcome, but it may also constitute a lifelong source of inspiration.
Writing an autobiography has also been compared to a transitional object. The teddy bear, comfort rag or blanket has just been replaced by a more abstract object, but still it is a question of defining oneself in relation to the world, to proceed with the help of an external object.
Some Finnish child evacuees have fortunately been able to reconcile themselves with their life trauma by writing an autobiography, which seems to have been important for them. Their fate has not been documented in works of history. Today, they are old-age pensioners and urgently want to transmit their unique experiences. The autobiographies have an obvi-ous therapeutic function. How they are received by other child evacuees also plays a major role.
The Finnish wartime child evacuees make a fruitful literary theme for analysis because of the theme of empathy. They have been able to transfer their hardships during war into liter-ary art where the humane values are appreciated.
Finally, it can be noted that their experiences in their fictional representation give proof of a refined analytic ability. What they have been through has taught them valuable lessons: they see the importance of relationships; they reflect on their lives; and have even given some of their spare empathy to today's refugee children by organising concrete aid.
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